Suicide Note From The Dead

I tried, I tried, every single day
I lived, I wished I wanted to live
but I also wished to live a little less,
for despite my life was very recent,
it had unexpectedly darkened
by a cloud of thunderstorm that refused
to condense and rain.
So I watched, I watched in fear,
I watched as thunder shook
my fragile little heart of a house,
and darkened my house by noon;
the wind wolfed outside
and blew the candles I lit
inside, the lantern outside.
I wept, I wept, as days passed by,
I wept as the wind blew off my roof-
the little warmth left abandoned me-
first drops of the corralling clouds
drowsed my home thoroughly;
hours later, when the raindrops faded,
frost nestled in crevices of my heart.
I felt, I felt the numbness creep,
I felt it slither across the floor,
and it climbed over onto the walls,
and drape it across the high ceiling,
shutting me in, and everything else
out. The dark and the cold
never abandoned me.
I fell, I fell, as the they collapsed,
I fell as the darkness and cold
crushed over me, crushed my hopes;
I could never stand; their weight
crushed my bones, and yet,
I willed myself to walk, for I
should be fine- but I was wrong.
I jump, I jump, for one last time,
I jump to escape from my life.

A Night In The City

The sun has almost set in the sultry winter sky
And to every poets consternation,
Each nook of the city smells like cigarette smoke;
They wonder what they should write today,
A pint down with a burning throat
They walk through the city, to capture life.
The night is piercing, even the hookers have put on modest clothes
And somewhere in a multi-storey building
A girl sings in the dark,
Her drunken voice bewitching the entire city in its merry spirit;
And further down the lane,
An old man collapses, and with a wheezing breath
Denounces his possessions to his son
And he breathes his last in the snow clad streets,
The stars bearing witness to this commemoration;
And a girl stands over the bridge,
Whose coat flips carelessly in the icy wind,
As she readies to jump into the freezing waters,
Thinking desperately of last words that’ll hopefully
Last longer than she herself did.
And somewhere an artist’s fingers roll the joint
After he’s fucked the same guy he did last week,
And the one before that and the one before that,
Wondering if this is what love feels like:
No late night conversations, no meals,
Just two hot naked bodies writhing in passion
And the familiar smell of smoke and sweat.
They all wonder, they’re all living,
And thus the city lives on-
They all wonder, they’re all looking for something,
Or finding something or making something,
Or just being.
The city breathes through their breath,
And the world feels alive, thriving,
Even though nothing is similar and nothing is different
Because it has all happened, it is all happening,
It will always happen
And yet is is never the same- the girl’s voice
Has never sung of that one morning, ever again
And the old man’s son will never know how proud
His father was of him.
And the artist has woken up to a realization
That what he loves has, and can never love him back,
So the next morning, when the moon descends
And the first shy rays of the eager sun wake them all up,
The poets, well, they’ll already be wide awake, with cheeks blued, and hands gritty,
Forgetting to see the sunrise, forgetting to breathe
As they write about the cities they’ve never left,
The cities they’ve never seen,
The cities they’ve never been,
The cities they’ve never owned.

My Diary

You appear inflated, the pages that
I have browsed through repeatedly
are dog-eared, stained, and smeared;
the remnants of the pages I tore,
with secrets spattered like spilled ink
haunt me like ghosts, for they remind me
of a time when love was forbidden;
and the different ink that I started
to use, halfway through, brings alive
the pen that wrote of my first kiss;
running my hand across my own scrawny
print, smudged slightly in the corners,
ignites in my fingertips the same urgency
I had felt, twelve years ago, to release
the anger I felt towards my friend,
the night of my eighteenth birthday;
and the movie stub I stuck on your
last page, fell out today, immediately
transporting me to the last movie
I watched with my mother, ever-
You hold memories that photographs
can never do for me, for I chose to capture
these moments, they are mine; you ignite in me
a desire to inhale you, to take every word
in, to back in time, to live again the words
I diligently wrote, and which you never
told; you have held my life in leaves, sewn
so delicately-

Take me, fly me away, be my time machine
when it gets too much.

An Instruction Manual for a Gravedigger.

Step 1: You turn off your emotions,
that constriction in your chest just might
make it difficult for you to dig, when the snow
has covered every inch of the equally marked landscape;
identifiable by names, relationships- by how people saw them.

Step 2: Don’t let the seed of gloom
plant itself in your heart, you don’t need
a growth that cannot be weeded out; the silence
interrupted by the rhythmic thawing of the land need
not be layered with an unhappiness that is not yours to begin with.

Step 3: Along with every clump of soil
that your spade collects from the ground,
say a little prayer; what you are digging it for
will soon melt- the skin will integrate with the soil,
and the evidence of any wrongs the body had done to
anyone else, will cease to exist. Say a prayer that the hurt
are delivered their justice, so that one end doesn’t bring others.

Step 4: Know that each body will return
to haunt you one day, when you are tossing
in bed, late at night, unable to separate yourself
from the fingernails that are scratching your back, hurting
you; their frozen masks of fears, hatred, happiness, forever
etched in your mind like stone, will surround you, try to overcome
you. At that time, close your eyes and hope for forgiveness, from whatever
haunting them; maybe the next night, you’ll sleep tight, having put their demons to rest.

Step5: Remember this, for I know, what
you do is never who you are- don’t let the freshly
covered grave enchant you with its heavy barrenness;
there is nothing immoral of what you do; don’t distance
yourself from the living, or you might as well, dig a grave for your
own self. Plant flowers near the headstone, wait for them to bloom,
learn that no ending is beautiful; it is merely the start of something new.

Aleppo.

My mother is a history teacher,
and I was a sixth grader when
she first told me about the World Wars.
Now, as a twelve year old,
blissfully unaware of the crises of the world,
this was a revelation because
I could not understand, however hard I tried,
how anyone could watch and simply see people
killing other people.

Six years later,
desensitized to terrorism
and having learnt the ways of the world,
I realize how wrong I was,
believing that I would never ever be
one of those who could stand see war
tear apart countries.

I have been witnessing a genocide
in Syria for most of my adult life,
and reading the final goodbyes of people
in Aleppo over Twitter today,
never have I been more ashamed
of my own existence.

The Starry Night

“Through the iron barred window, I can see an enclosed square of wheat… above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory,” – Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother. 

The condescending darkness
echoes through the cosmos
the descending doom,
the sky sways with the wind
the lit sky numbs progressively
the candle flickers dangerously
the wheat winnows itself
the bars of my windows break free.

I sit over the crescent moon
and watch the world burn
and watch the sun rise
and I burn as the sun
fills me with light
like the lit up sky,
the stars eddying
hypnotize mankind
will them all to hope
as hope is in the stars
and the planet is a star
ignited with souls like me
and today, I paint just for me.

About Venus.

I wear my hair in a bun, curls cascading down my face,
my bun, prim and perfect like the Manali mountain
rooftop where visitors (tourists and local alike) throng
for the picturesque view they can post on their timelines
as a reminder of the majesty of the place, all the while
paying homage to what I can humbly call my creation;
the gentle curls around my lush pink cheeks hover like the
floating clouds that threaten to hide the wide valleys
nestled behind the crevices of my collarbones and the
steep, winding heights , that are my perky breast,
making experienced conquerors dizzy with their unyielding
climb; my abdomen is the valleys unexplored, some huge
with their unconquerable landscape and some so narrow,
only a stream can run through; into the mystery that is
between my legs, secrets unrevealed, ever gathering moss,
places that my deft fingers- like the animals in the forests-
have been to and been lost in; thighs like tree trunks, strong
and sturdy, developed well enough to carry my own weight
and well as to nurse life (on my lap, children have slept
as the nursed and they sat as they played until they grew)
but dare you seek my wrath and I will uproot and destroy
everything, everything, everything you have ever known to rubble.
So the next time you call me weak, remember that clouds
do rain, mountains do collapse and trees tremble and fall
but it all comes with your destruction.

Let Me Tell You Something About Depression.

(This is a poem that I had originally written with the intention of performing)

They say you feel sad all the time, I beg to differ
I do not feel sad, always. There are times when I laugh so much
that I think I just overreact on the days I suffer,
but the thing that remains true is that that only happens
once in a blue moon, when I do, in fact, manage to get
out of my bed, choose a pair of jeans over a pajama instead
and join my friends to watch a movie they had planned
we would, but from which I had withdrew, as late as I could.
They seem to think that I talk and laugh among them
so it is so absurd an idea that I may even have a reason to feel
differently, when in fact, the truth is that the times
I am with them, is when I am truly different, for they haven’t seen
me in my natural habitat. The days, the low days, as I call them
are stretches of days when all my troubles stem
from a single root, I sleep too much, but that I something I cannot help.
These days I do not wake before noon, when the world has done
half its chores, I cannot but wake up from my snores, and
even then, I lie in bed, till my stomach has growled some angry words.
But I beg it to keep quiet as I try to go about my business,
to attend the classes that I have left and not think about the ones I did not,
but then, the cursed bed pulls me its way, and wills me to sleep again and again
till the ancient moon rises and all the trouble of classes, I almost forgot.
These days the world feels weird as if I am eating sand,
road trips, movies, going out, bathing, eating food, all feels like a scam.
The days are long and the ceiling fan seems amusing, there is emptiness
around me, the world seems like a hole, a void in the dark that nothing can complete.
There is silence, the phone does ring and the doorbell too,
the silence screams louder, emptiness fills the room and there is emptiness still.  
These days, I hardly talk to anyone, and Solitude is my friend
and these are day when I don’t get out of my bed, for days on at end.
These are days that I don’t get out of bed, so I have no reason to look in a mirror
that reminds of my bruised, broken self, and I turn the lights dimmer.
Darkness feels bliss as the blackness reminds me I am alone
and I smile a little to myself, and think about every soul I know.
The Darkness and Solitude, my two dear friends, find for me great reasons,
why my friends who I took years to trust might not like me anymore
and thus begins the cycle of self-attack as my words carve scars in my esteem
 and on and on and on it goes, until my veins are clean.
And when the entire cycle happens three four times and again,
the sun finally rises, but I am a desolate survivor, there is no one to help,
and so my critical self tries again to build walls so I don’t hurt,
not realizing that I am the victim and I, myself, the killer.
And thus begins the healing, till I feel my feel my veins fuller.
On days like these, I talk selectively, and my voice feels kind of sick
and they ask me so and I wish I could tell them, I am mentally unfit
but all I say is I am fine, and there is some stress in my life,
and in this time I smile, I make it my façade, it hides my real self
and all the misery and the sadness that I had just felt.
And days later, just as I feel something close to being happy (that is when I laugh)
 it all start again, the laughter fades, my ears ring, I feel myself receding
unwillingly into that haunted land, where few have ventured, separately
and made friends with Solitude and Darkness and their friends: Loathe and Despair;
Finger nails scratching, dragging my own self as I am pleading,
crying in vain, hoping someone stops to listen, but it is an empty wail
as it all starts again, it all starts again, it all starts again and yet again.

 

So Put Down Your Knife And Live Your Life.

Art Work from One Tree Hill

I look outside of my window,
and everyone seems to be just like me,
And entirely different.
They too have one nose,
two legs, two arms,
hair on their head,
two eyes, a mouth.
But do they have
the mole on my hip,
the curve of my lip.
do they have the
memory of my lisp?
Do they have the
clothes that I wear,
the things that bring me to tears,
the voice that I get when I cheer?
Do they have the nights
I spent in love,
the noons when songs
from years ago, made me realize
how living has never changed,
and that the pain that
I felt has been felt before
and the happiness
with my friends, has made
hearts grow more giving, before?
DO they have my life,
m y  m e m o r i e s
the blood that runs
in my veins, the thoughts
that I think,
the essence of me,
t h e  p o e t r y
in me, my grace, my stance?

No. They don’t.

They why should I feel replaceable?

Children Of War

I wish I could pack my bags and leave;
to hug every sobbing child out there,
the thousands of Omrans’ who sit in rescue cars and ambulances
too shocked to know from where the blood
gushes down their face, too terrified, stunned
to even cry; , two, five, seven, nine year olds,
rescued from under the rubble
of five storied buildings, silently
wiping their hands on the seat of the vehicles.

I wish I could reassure them all
that there are people who love them,
that there is a world in which buildings don’t
topple like house of cards, and where
the sounds of winds and clouds are heard,
more often that the sounds of bombs and bullets;
that trees are not always coated with dust and dirt;
that you can watch  movie, you can take a walk
and return, return to your house, not vanish on the way.

I wish I could tell them that the skies,
they are blue, not black from the smoke
the bombs create; that sometimes,
the earth moves and you can see the sunrise;
that at night, it’s not always light
from the rescue operations; and no, not
everyone who looks at you will point a gun at you;
that sometimes, the house will shake
because the earth shakes and not because
something is going up in flames, yet again.

But who am I to say that to them-
to the children of war- who’ve-not trained-
but rather, learnt to shake like a leaf when the skies rumble
day and night, and not a single drop of rain falls;
who’ve learnt that death will always be accompanied
by a broken limb, and  blowed-out brains, and
coated in red, the color of the sun at a sunset
they’ve never seen? Who am I to break their
perfect view of the world in which cancer is
unheard of and AIDS does not exist?

Who am I to tell them that they can dream of a world
without war, a world like one in which I live, where the
problem is the rise in the price of potatoes and not
that my father won’t return for the potato curry dinner,
where the problem is the termite in my house
or the lack of drinking water and not that my house
might get bombarded, and my loved ones killed,
where the problem is the in living and not in surviving-
but who am I to tell them that, to the children of war-
when I was the one who created it?