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Of Hands, Ants and More

hands_by_anthonysarts

Picture courtesy: Anthonysarts on Deviant Art

Hands make me sad,
More often than they make me happy.
Because I think the only thing
Understands loss better than hands
Are your lungs.
Hands document the coming and going
Of lovers, friends, parents and pets.
Because hands touch you,
hands hold you by your waist,
Shake hands, touch feet, run themselves over warm fur,
And often, that’s all you end up remembering.

I thought suicide notes
And especially their last sentences would
Make me want to collapse under the weight
of the fact that I had no choice,
But to be born.
But instead, they just want to make me go to sleep
And wake up only when
I am ready,
or to be fucking honest,
Five minutes after that.

I think of ants and how
They can carry hundred times their body weights
and I wonder,
If I am one of them.
Because whatever is inside
is so goddamned dense and clogged.
Just like the drains outside my home. .
And when it’s monsoon outside windows,
and inside rib-cages,
I think the water that spills out,
is pretty much the same.

Diluted childhoods,
like jars of diluted suplhuric acid
sitting inside chemistry labs during summer vacations; forgotten.
Conveniently.
Children growing up smarter, but more scared
Not of jumping down cliffs at the mercy of bungee cords
Manufactured in assembly lines;
But of giving their everything to be kinder to people,
More tender, more free and more loving
than it is socially acceptable to be.

Poems, not understood;
Rather forgotten to be read by people they got written for in the first place.
Homes, not built, because dowry had to be paid.
Songs, lost, because there was no one you could sing them to.
A friend, who’s not here anymore.
Who’s not anywhere, anymore.
Gone, just like motivation.
Silent like mornings after storms.

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Her

This got written for The Great Indian Poetry challenge #12. The thing I was told to write about was ‘I couldn’t stop looking at her’.

She reminds me of postcards
and of the feeling I had when
I held on to my first set of crayons.
She’s like the first bicycle ride without a fall.
She looked at me from across the hall,
and I, couldn’t stop looking at her.

Supernova smile. Jupiter jawline.
Neptune neck and her earthly eyes.
She takes me along on cosmic walks
and bends me, the way light bends
near a black hole; she is all the gravity that there is
in the Universe, and I, have no choice but to fall.
Oh Boy, I couldn’t stop looking at her.

There are times when she tap-taps Morse code
onto my shoulders with her lips,
and I respond with profane gospels
mumbled into her ears.
It was 4 AM and we had just got done making love,
and I, couldn’t stop looking at her.

We fight. She has tornadoes
at the tip of her tongue.
She throws around her wood-chunk words
and I crumble them with my hacksaw haughtiness.
She looked at me like a bell jar
about to implode,
and I, couldn’t stop looking at her.

She now reminds me of songs
I will never be able to write.
and also of the feeling you get
when you lose your favorite action figure.
She looked at me from the photograph,
and from the deafening silence she’s now become.
Hollow, like eaten-up wood.
Winters did come; winters did leave.
Yet I, couldn’t stop looking at her.