I have lost the ability to write poems long before I could ever write a real one. It feels manufactured now, I feel bitter if anyone comes up with a poem, a real one. If you have ever written a real poem. I HATE YOU
.
“Writer’s Block”
I think too much to write down a sentence, I fear it will go to waste, The weather forecasts of a stormy week ahead, The office cubicle remains lit. I wonder if my boss cried to his sleep last night, Or anyone in this office did. Prashiddha shed tears on a corner of a restaurant yesterday, I listened to his muffles as I ate my lunch, The patters on the roof start drumming right then, I realized I had forgotten my umbrella again . If I tell you about my job, I write speeches for a five-foot-three-inch millionaire, I still think too much to write down a sentence. This week also marks Simran’s one-year death anniversary I remember it being as rainy as today. I sighed with relief this morning, when J’s STD report came back negative one good news to this gloomy day the weather reported a 60 percent chance of rain I swear I didn’t forget my umbrella today, I just must have left it on the shoe rack while I was slipping out of the house.
.
A good poem is Amla Fruit (SO FUCKING BITTER)
A good poem is
not a pebble, not a marble,
But very planet-like, even though tiny
The surface isn’t tough, glassy, cold,
If you bite on it soft enough
like a hickey
it seeps green fluid, a bitter spill
the tongue’s floor rises and then falls
like tide, like disgust
stuck out of the mouth
flipped off
like a finger to a face
.
More fucking angst (MFA)
The snap, crack of an ankle
You are then out to a crowd clapping for you
In the last few months, I have figured out that I write extremely long sentences without correct grammar punctuations fuck balls shit and dare I correctly use commas,,,,,,,,,,
Now you’re in one of the book launches
Your jaws are tired of holding a smile or an accent
You are hugging a white girl
Four times in the same conversation
Because you’re glad that she shit on some canvas again
.
You lie to people that you have a job
You say things like, “Money isn’t an issue”
You’re hiding something –
.
You giggle mindlessly in a conversation
You congratulate people sounding like an orgasm
You correctly pronounce sky-fi as sci-fi
.
It’s been a while since you last said sorry
.
My writing voice is a scared one.
Whenever I read something good
the writing voice lead me
smooth and gliding, deeply affectionate
letters of scrambled ink, the steely towers of Telecom
clank a sound so daft that it rises and falls like curtains on a windy day
if it had a face, it would look like someone who can play the flute,
not too wryly
trustworthy like a confidant and kind like a lover
.
the writing voice is a bright circle
from a throat, purging out beautifully
a shoal of migrating fish
flourishing like a burst of cloud,
a paintbrush dipped into water.
.
i wonder if this is a disease
and i am looking for a cure
in books, in between the little triangles of A’s and the flat surface of L’s
my half-written sentences
a half-born child,
there is no voice but only cries
scared and wet
like a mouse in a drain pipe
.
poem and nosebleed
(nosebleed isn’t a skill to be acquired. Doesn’t come to you often, even with practice)
An hour before evening,
The day was left to simmer aside
like a hot bowl of soup.
neck stretch, a long day
Something deep in my bones grunts back
With spontaneity
A red trail of blood trickled
from my nostrils
red polka dots of medium red,
drop, drop, to the page on the table
.
I face upwards the blazing slate roof,
I am unsure what happens to the blood
If it ushers back to the trail, flooding my skull
but what I’m sure of is-
If The Noseblood was a poem
I would wait for a humid day, head down
with a measuring cup in my hand
.
A good poem is Amla Fruit (Reprise- anecdote of sweetness)
A good poem coats my taste buds, bitter and sour. I’m jealous I’m jealous. The bitter coating awaits for a washout, some water/saliva. My tongue shriveled and colorless longing to feel the presence of not-bitter taste, now flimsy, grainy, ghostly, and translucent.
.
When the water washes out this bitterness, I’ll feel it right there, not the wetness of the water, but the aftermath of it, an intrinsic warmth from the alcove of the tongue’s pores. Not the stark foreign taste but a feeble built-in sweetness, like coming home in a dark night, and not missing a step of stairs.
If I had to count back, I know you had total of four jackets in your closet. A navy blue thick and pocket-y one with golden buttons like rusted coins for chilly, blowy, wintry days. A mildly less dark blue with a logo of nautica miles sewn on the right side of chest were for the days when the sun adamantly gleamed over shriveled lone leaves fluttering on naked trees. If it was foggy in the morning of your errands, you would prolly opt with a puffer jacket with a bright red hood. A ripened fruit hanging on-
If these were the winter jackets then on monsoon’s dark clouded days. You would pair your recent purchase, a silly, notoriously thin silver one with an umbrella after reading the weather news. Then on more relaxed summer evenings you would throw in your puma jumper, sliding through your neck, one arm in the air at a time. If I had borrowed your jumper for the weekend and you had either washed or forgotten to wash the rest, you would always find your way to the grey sweatshirt with matte red strips on it, your cuticles clenching the edge of bottom sleeves, subtle and shy.
After all these years, these jackets must have both grown and worn out. Some must reside pickled on your closet, while some must be serving as your kitchen mop, some you might still hold dearly, some must have been forgotten for good. If you ask me about it, I think it’s very seventeen and calculated of me to remember all these. You can call the cops if you are scared.
Postcard
One thousand seven hundred ninty one miles
away from home,
I woke up in Cochin,
Almost drooling from the flight,
Passing by drooping palm trees,
Swaying next to rigid, churchly rise
The steeple, a scratch on the sky,
towered over melting gravels and graveyards
under the heat of eighty five.
.
my unbuttoned flannel, useless and drenched
out of habit, out of its usual milieu-
fluttered around peter celli street,
a red-white striped candy house
on its melt from the menacing heat
.
I stood across its slinging white picket gate
Clutching the sweat in my palms,
I wet the writing in the back of the postcard,
Just like the taste of your lip balm.
The stamps changed everyday,
But the writings of the postcard remained the same
Just like the ajar mouth of the red cylindrical postbox
Asking me to tell-
.
I’ve been thinking of you tirelessly
Recurring in- (song)
Third week of june
Wish of monsoon
To resume the falling
.
Blue grey sky
Thaws a malice sight
A broken arm recurring
.
And all the healing is reversed
On a treadmill it’s backwards
Limpid, pealing muffle sobs
.
it will retain
love is stain
recurring in-
.
On a laundry day
Shed you’re clothes away
On a back pocket sits a writing
.
A stroke through crease
Of a crumbling piece
reminds you of time passing
.
Oh! the familiar curves,
how the pen squats on the palm,
With every turning, every turf
.
What a stabbing pain
The ink leaves stain
Recurring in-
.
When your parents call
Tell them they are wrong
Rather you’ve been astounding
.
On a dinner invite,
Your mom adjusts your tie
It’s all friends for life and you’re humming
.
Now there is glisten in the night
Screaming cheers to the sky
Then on a mirror on some hallway
You catch vacant in your eyes
.
In my defense
this feels replayed
blame it on the rain
Recurring in-
One that got away (Ted Bundy POV)
Salt-lake city
Sweet summer air
High forehead, solemn and sincere
Untrustworthy latch, I drag you off from shore
Smoking in car. Shut, passenger doors
.
The windows are up, Latches are loose
I care for you babe. Can I cuff you?
Furious refusal, a tantrum show
Sways head in disobedience
Prodded child’s howl
One hand on the steering
One hand collecting elbows
.
thrown around, widened mouth,
a swell of jagular veins.
A fair and square hit in between the ears
Spin of a wheel, short cries of help
.
It’s just
me and my crooked crowbar babe
notorious amongst lullabies
a quickfix that clocks you to rest
in a sigh
.
But just before that,
A heel pierced through my toes
bloody nose, smeared dashboard.
Flung open the loose latched passenger door
inconsistent horns of a piano outro
.
When I thought I was a punisher-
I wasn’t.
Bloody gums, a salt smile
left behind on bay
right where you got away
Shantinagar gate
I remember the days when we used to take the same bus as to stretch time to spend. I used to get off the bus stop on a sloped down evening lane that led to Shantinagar gate; a burrow of sort, a hollow cavity that led to familiar lanes and pavements to home. Window side, second last seat, a puma jumper; you watched out of the spectacle keenly, maybe with a frown, maybe without one, wondering about me or the sway of my blue adidas back pack as I marched off down the slope as a whisper, shy giggle, beating as fast as your palpating, aching heart that dreads of farewells. Perhaps, you must have been on the phone, google boards, setopati.com, cracked webbed screen on the top corner, over-lapping front camera, dewy pictures, unbothered. However,
On days like these,
I get off on the same bus stop
and look up at the formerly raining clouds,
the sun underneath, gleaming translucently
I soak in the shy sunrays
barely leaving a golden so feeble,
as faint as the sweetness
of a glass full of water
with a pinch of powdered tang juice,
colorless and occasionally sour.
On recent days It makes me immensely sad I can’t hold the thought of you for long enough. It comes to me often but shortly.
Why don’t I remember things from future? (Zeeshan’s lullaby)
Exactly two days from now I’ll have a trek way up to the hills away from the city. I don’t remember the name anymore, it has been so many years since. All I remember is the windy road takes about an hour to reach somewhere biting cold, and muddy, its alluvial back soil and dew storing leaflets leaving cool aftermath on the traces of my palm. Right now, I am in a hotel room, a huge canopy bed hugely lit warm lamps and clean linen sheets warm and dry in contrast to the roaring aggressive skyline that marks of a flashing thunder leaving a photographic imprint of fiber roots.
It’s your city of lakes, and I have made a thousand wishes upon it, every coin wrapped in a shred of paper with ‘thank you’ written on it; for letting you exist on its land like cultivated sprouts of greens swaying with the wind and at times bending towards my feet brushing my claves into a tickle. When I and my friends went out to the boat, I kept plopping one by one when no one was looking, the lake’s water thick, dense and sticky its droplets clinging to me reminding your name. I bet I would have remembered it if I had met you by then. When I found out the lake to be artificial, thousands of men pouring buckets of fish to stream on it. It makes me wonder you must perhaps be artificial too.
If my foot happens to slip from the trek, a wrong step on a breaking land, like the spoon does to a cake, then I would have fallen right back, right back to the city, right back to the hotel room, right back to the lake, right back to your arms.
Instead, I woke up in the middle of the night, pouring and chilly, the wind running past the creak of the window, the stench of cheap alcohol and cigarettes clung to me. The curtains looked like a breathing chest, to and fro a sudden blow of wind-like breath blown into a drowning man’s chest.
Travelling down the outskirts of bhaktapur, The wind was blowing with music muse, Then the bus came across duwakot streets, My heart pumped and skipped its beats, Pictures came through like a hot flash, Of a moonlight kiss on a steady Lance, Then came the joy, after that rain, It felt like pleasure but more like pain.
lalahang 