Every time my name escapes your mouth, I am reminded of moments I almost lived. Every time I hear the syllables of my name slightly tease the edges of your lips, I slip into a frenzy. You talk and you talk, and you talk of people you’ve met over the years and how it’s always good to jump into windows. I can see your face through the glass vase that tries its best to obstruct my view of your nose. Ah, you know, probably a sharper and a slimmer one would have looked better. Or if it didn’t curl every time you smiled, I would have fallen in love right after you told me about the banality of proper behavior. With every sentence that you put on the table, I open one more door for you. The thought of walking away has just struck me twice, surprisingly. Somewhere, right next to your left hand, I can see your phone light up. I am curious, I know I can use this as an excuse. I can read into it too much and blame the sinking of this Titanic on your call. But you turn out to be insistent, you let go of the call. I know I am in trouble! I know this will only end with at least three scribbled poems in the margins of my journal. The worst bit is, I will remember everything you said even after three weeks and four days. I will obsessively try to write about you and bump into fifty-two failures. I will frantically skim through my older works to find words to capture you, to capture this, so that I can live it when you’re gone just a couple months after. But I can’t. I won’t be able to rescue my thoughts from the storms which your eye in the center, with your face in the middle. The occasional touch of your hand will subsume me, will make me want to be a bird and fly off the miles that draw the wedge between us. In my head, I will be glorifying your sweetness and brushing your arrogance under the carpet. I promised I will take the stairs in just ten minutes of rapping on the table to know it was you, but turns out I was not to become great with promises with this anyway. Every time you touch the back of my head, my words fail and they slither away from my mind and remain unrecognizable till you get your hand out of my hair. I find your favorite instrument creep into my preferences unconsciously, I see your favorite word rewrite my entire vocabulary. The bits of me that I know should be blown away find a footing in your hands. But at least, like always, probably Hozier means the same to you, and the flowers still seem pretty to you.
Hurt.
Sometimes, even during summers, I can feel the cold creep up and freeze the warmth of your touch. The warm comfort of your space transforms into a gloomy and dreadful space. I know you mean well and I know the twisted faces are a part of my imagination and not yours. I know your hand is still as warm as it was yesterday, and it’s the coldness from my insecurities that leaps out. But I know it well, that I will walk away remembering the chilly touch and frozen hugs instead of the fondness with which your lips curl to pronounce my name. Sometimes, even when its sweet as honey, I can feel the bitterness rise in my spine and lunge through my stomach. I can feel it slither upwards and slyly slip into my mouth. It overpowers the taste of your lips and fools me into believing that you bring the bitterness. For a minute, I do want to assign these debilitating emotions to your name and wash my hands of the responsibility of blowing my life away. But my mother raised me to own up to things, to be a woman and admit my faults. And in between her words and your efforts, I decided to call out the bully. I know your face well enough to dream about it but soon it bleeds into a ghoulish figure. Your eyes, your nose, your skin, and your mouth drown into the tumultuous storm that rakes my city of dreams. For once and for all, I brave myself to follow the storm and see where it takes back its pieces. This is one of those answers you are better off not knowing. This is one of those riddles that will kill a piece of you before it unravels itself. I know the answer. I knew the path. I recognized the familiar rage and the overpowering contempt. I could almost touch the shattered pieces of self-belief and bruised silhouettes of fading self-esteem. I knew it wasn’t you who injected destructive tendencies. I knew it wasn’t your hand that built toxic castles. It would have been easier if it were you. It would have been easier to shut you out and run along. But I am stuck with an enemy who manoeuvres from within. I am stuck inside my own head. I am trapped within a box built of baseless anxieties and false self-accusations. It would have been much simpler if you were the one with the horns and the tail, and not me.
Drowning
We are made of water. You and I are similar in so many ways. Both of us drown in the gushing waves of what constructs us. Little by little, I can see you dissolve into the fluid that keeps you together, like a melting paper. I can see you dismember piece by piece and become one with that kept us alive. You’re drowning in your thoughts faster than they consumed me. The part of you that kept the water from pouring into the cracks, lies there debased and fractured to the minuscule. Both of us thought we could swim back to the surface but we couldn’t have been more wrong. I see you struggling for my hand, struggling for anything that doesn’t hammer your perception anymore. But all you can reach for is thin air, the thin air that’s devoid of oxygen that kept you breathing. You’re desperately kicking and gasping for air and shouting your lungs out for help. But its water, and we both know sound travels here through muffled screams. But both of us are used to muffled sobs even on the surface, aren’t we? I can’t see you clearly now, the pressure of the stream is clouding my vision. I see the widening distance, I can feel the gaping wide that will soon consume me too. You’re slowly being sucked to the bottom, I’m not far behind you, yet I can’t see anything but dark waters. We are made of water, yet both of us are being unarmed by what built our reality. The touch of the cold volumes of water on my hand doesn’t arouse different sensations anymore. It has become a part of my skin, I believe. The coldness doesn’t hit me, like it did when we first hit the stream. I feel comfortable now. Even with you, drowning in this abyss, I can somehow sense the familiarity that brought us here in the first place. We weren’t very different to begin with. You built my perception and I lived it for you. You gave me the route map to the stream and I drove us here. You told me it was safe to take the plunge and I followed you right till the dive. You told me we were safe and I, in spite of my better judgement, believed you. We are nearly at the bottom of this never-ending chasm. In this darkness, without your hands to model out what I see, I can’t navigate my way through. With the fall of your sense of judgment, came my uninvited ruin. I let you sit behind the wheel when I knew you were under influence. We’re drowning deeper and deeper and I can’t breathe even with effort anymore. You’ve struggled and now I can see you on the ground, defeated. At least, we know this grey gulf has its share of bedrocks. Both of us drowned into the blocks that you used to build the horrid roads that got us here. We were made of water, and it swallowed us whole.
Dust.
All of us will fade into circles of dust. You, me, your hair, my nose, your laugh, and my car. One by one, we will become a part of the dust that covers the pathway from my house to yours. I might not have walked your stoned driveway when you were alive, but I will touch it when I am nothing but few grains of just dust. Even before the century has turned, your name will fade into nothingness, you will fade into a memory and nothing more. Even before it’s time for us to travel to Mars, I would turn into an old rusty name, the one with distant memories and forgotten phone numbers. It’s not about you and me, we won’t eternalize love like they taught us to. How can we? When we are just structures of bones and flesh that corrode with slightest of acid. Oh, we would never become the epithets of evening lovers, that slowly transforms into a night sky of shining eternal love. We will love, consume each other, and walk through fire. But we’re only humans and we still don’t know how to walk on water. Don’t depend on loving me till the judgment day, we won’t make it that far. But hold onto me until the fire in my living room dies out, love me till the color of the sky shifts from a pale hue of blue to a warm tinge of yellow. Don’t wrap forevers for me, don’t engrave immortality on my heart. Instead, come back with tomorrows, come back with a promise of loving me till my 21st year. It’s just you and me, just a pair of haggard mortals with borrowed time, with the sand slowing slipping to the other side. Don’t promise me words that have lost their meaning twice.
Obsessive.
I take a breath. I take his name. His words go over in my head like a catchy limerick, the one that goes on vaguely. I know this is wishful thinking, I know he’s a bubble that’ll burst as soon as I touch its form. But aren’t we wired to dream, to hope? Oh please don’t remind me about my obsessive tendencies. I know them well. But aren’t all of us obsessive? Aren’t all of us hooked on a feeling, a sense that builds the bits of reality for us? Well, he reminds me of my actuality. It’s crazy how I am just a burnt cigarette butt, forgotten and lost amongst the others in a lonely ashtray. While he continues to preach about the perils of nicotine. I know he won’t ever taste me. I know he won’t ever bring me close to his lips, those are too sacred to brush past the charcoals of slow poison. I could become the healthy avocado juice that’ his favorite, but I know he will still pick another flavor that morning. Why do I still want to alter my fiber for a man who won’t even shed a tear when I’m being buried, you ask. I get the concern, I’m touched. But a couple of years back I got addicted to the kind of love that never finds it’s solace. I fell in love with the touch of longing that always remains in its initial form. I didn’t fall in love with an unattainable man, I fell in love with the desire of always hanging by the thread. I fell in love, not with flesh and blood. My arrogant, self-doubting I, found its peace in the corners of ‘love from afar’
Slip.
I took myself to be a warrior with arms of Athena and strength of Mars. I mistook myself as a fighter with an unwavering determination of making it out alive, undefeated. I overestimated my capacity to contain the venoms that seemed mild and subdued. I lost track of not only time, but my sense of direction and purpose. With one severe blow, or maybe a set of blows, I can’t quite say, I found myself in an amorphous state, one with incomplete sentences and ambitions. The perpetual anxiety of purposelessness got to me, got to the insides of my head only to own it. The unnoticed and slithering serpent of self-doubt and self loathe crept up my arm in my sleep to infect my dreams and poisoned the residual bits of passion. Like a blunt dagger that will not kill me even after a hundred strikes but only leave me profusely bleeding, squirming on the floor, the constant sense of failure struck me, became the largest chink in my armour. With growing incidents of cracking up, I fought harder to hold it together, stretched my arms to prevent the pieces from hitting the ground. But they slipped through my fingers and crashed onto the ground, splitting into even smaller bits with irrecoverable damage. I was tempted by the sin of self-criticism whilst I was walking the Eden of glorious achievements and a promising future. In a hilarious turn of events, I became the folly that caused the Black Hole of worthlessness. I sowed the seeds of harsh self-judgment only to find the sky touching tree in my yard the following morning. Its canopy shaded whatever other fruits of self-appreciation survived the long drought of self-criticality, left them foul-smelling and rotten. This venom, it grew within me, it festered on my days of passive self-correction only to take the form of a ghoulish nightmare that surpassed the eerie existence of all the skeletons in my closet. Every time I tried to outrun the ever-growing, ever consuming monster of negativity, it found me. It found me amidst a crowded room of people I loved. It latched onto me while I was building a skyscraper from the mirrors of my aspirations. It pounced on me while I was driving through the alley of confidence. It found me everywhere and every goddamn time. And slowly, it became the baggage that I carried everywhere, it became my shadow. From being just an unnoticeable bit of my shadow, it became the entire form that finds its way at twelve noon on a pavement. It became a choice of tattoo that I knew I would regret in the morning. I mistook it as oxygen and inhaled chunks of “healthy” air, only to fuse sulphur in my veins. I cracked up, you know, I fell apart without even realising when I slipped the ground. I became a version of myself that constantly treads on the ground of uncertainty with an illogical belief that even the light at the end of the tunnel is an illusion. With a sickening belief that there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Though, there are days I fight back and I hold onto the warm feeling of optimism. And on days like those you would definitely find me singing the chorus of the hopeful thing we call life, but then there are days like these, when you will find me wallowing in self-pity and constant abhorrence of self. But the trick is, can you identify which day is what? The best part about this feeling is that it lingers, lingers till I am completely absorbed in the silks of bliss and then it takes a fiendish form that insinuates my screams. It’s like an after taste that leaves a burnt relish at the back of my tongue, the taste that even the best of gums wouldn’t take away. It stays with me, it resides within me.
Lethal.
I, for once, want to give you up. Before I go to sleep, I want to believe that I won’t wake up to your calls anymore, and accept that I’m borderline obsessive. I, for once, want to peel off this farce of being in love with the idea of your presence. I am physically exhausted from running after you, calling out your name when the curtains at dark feel like bloodsucking apparitions. I have run out of ways to distract myself from your absence, absence of your pale fingers on the skin of my hands. I have run out of breath from writing words and words about your “mistaken love”. I am sweaty from trying to get back my ‘I’ from our ‘We’. I want to go back to listening to Sam Hunt without your thought crossing my mind. I would happily pass the time I introduced you to his songs, hold them back from getting destroyed. I would happily trade my soul in exchange of skipping that fateful afternoon, when I took you to my favorite coffee place, at the corner of the street. I would do whatever it takes to extract your name from my favorite things, favorite places, favorite pieces of stories, favorite dawns, and even favorite parts of the songs. I can feel my legs go numb from treading on the mine prone field, you call love. I, for once want to stop writing about you, give you up once, and for all. I am an ardent believer of the fact that you never really get over someone, you just replace them, push them under a pile of new heartbreaks. You take a pen and try to write someone else’s name, trying to perfectly align their letters with yours. But I failed, I dropped my pen, and my eyes dropped saline droplets. The temperature dropped to sub-zero, when you finally walked off, I felt the cold freezing the end of my toes. The sky turned to colors of grey I had never known, the clouds scattered to places I had never envisaged. You slammed the door on my face, I didn’t break my nose, but I broke my spirit and my idea of love, and I did leave my shattered self on the threshold of inferno we found in our quest for meadows. I lost my rationale to your eyes, I forgo my sanity to your blue shirt, I drowned my inhibitions to your name, and yet I somehow managed to find my fears smiling right back at me when I let your voice past my ear drums . Your words defeated me, you tricked my guards down, and forced a spear right through the left side of my body, in broad day light. You finally taught me the lethality of almosts, you taught the perils of unfinished sentences to a literature student, outside a language class. You screamed right to my face the consequences of leaving my heart unarmored. You walked into the front door and locked me in, sealed off the windows, and did all of this so seamlessly. Dear another lesson, accept my gracious gratitude for teaching me that wolves will always howl under the full moon, cats will always purr on seeing a bowl of milk, and fickle will always remain assigned to your name.
Run
And, I set myself free from your absence. I finally decided to put an end to my hurting, like a dead star rising from the ashes; I resurrected the old bits of my shattered self. I decided to choke the pores of my bleeding heart with the words you wrote on the tissue, scribbled with my tears and smeared by her favorite hue of red. Left behind every bit of your handwriting at home, the one I wish I could set fire to. Dropped every locket you gave me on the way to my new beginning, and heard them crack wide open. I could see the edges of the gold moon scattered, the round sun broken right in the middle. I drank down your taste with water, not because your existence meant my survival, no, because there’s nothing more ordinary than water that I know of. But I can still smell you; breathe in the perfume you gave me. It stays spilled on the blue dress that I can’t somehow get myself to throw away. How do I run from all of these things when they still enunciate your name? How do I get myself to run from this sky, when it has the stars placed just like they were on your birthday? We were supposed to make a memory out of it, and you took out all the colors and painted me, my worst nightmare. And, there I see you walk out as easily as you walked into my actuality, straightened the creases of my reality, only to rip it all apart once more. It was walking on quicksand with you, hoping to make it a little farther with every step, only to sink deeper. You didn’t need to promise me stars and throw rocks at my trust. You didn’t have to promise me the sun, and push me into an abyss of shadows. How I can turn the page, when I know the next one’s going to be about you too? How I can skip the melody of your being, when I know the next set of beats will spell your name again? I can hear the pitter patter of the rain drops on my window, I can see the drops slowly slipping down my window. They lose their trail as effortlessly as you poofed outta my life. I need to stop this borderline obsession with your absence and try to gather myself. I won’t lie, I have tried my best. Somehow, I can’t pick up my various selves and bind them together like you did. To be quite honest, I can’t do anything well, now that I see your car parked in someone else’s driveway. Forgive me, for I have ranted for hours that turned into days and slowly into months. Forgive me, for I can’t seem to write about anything else but you. Forgive me, for I don’t know what to write about with my reason lost, and my purpose gone. I can’t even remember why I started writing in the first place. I can’t get my mind to make sense and put together words that fit perfectly within a sound sentence. I can’t drive straight, or text without missing a couple of words. Oh no, I have not given myself to drinking, and I’m pretty certain I don’t plan to. It’s just that something doesn’t feel right, now that I don’t have to drive to your house or text you about a trashy day at work. It has dawned upon me that I don’t need these mechanics if I don’t have to get back to you. For the sake of the stars you promised, come back; come back with my sense of direction. Come back and leave at my doorstep, an inspiration for me to become acquaintances with words again.
I fell for your silence
Hi lovelies, I started experimenting with slam poetry. Since i cant upload a video, I decided to post the write up here. Do tell me what you think of it?
love!
Its quiet, Its without words
I can hear you breathe, I can hear your mind scream
The silent thoughts, the ones long forgotten,
I can feel them gush to your mouth
But they STOP!
They stop before even arousing your tongue
They stop long before they caress your teeth.
My dear, I can hear your silence scream
I can feel it pierce right through my skin
Without the phonetics, I can still feel your words brush against my ears
Your silence right now, in this moment,
weaves the poetry I long to hear.
You are silent, devoid of words
Your silence overpowers my knowledge of words.
Oh love, why do I hear the cacophony of your quiet mouth?
Do not let me sway you to speak,
Do not let me move you to forget the serene.
Let your silence write letters to me,
that your hands couldn’t.
Let your silence pull me closer to your heart,
When your eyes couldn’t.
Love, let this absence of periods and commas and words
not disrupt you from singing to my heart.
Your silence, can blow away blocks of concrete,
and towers of cement
oh how, I’m just a slave to your presence.
Its alright, my lover, if the world around us, the nature robbed you of a palatable voice
For you still sing like Adele to me.
Its okay if your mouth stays away, far far away from the vague words i know
For me, you’re still the best poet i know.
The inflections, the punctuation you add to your silence
gets me weak in my knees again and again.
Smile, my silent beloved, I crave for one more silent dialogue of yours,
For speaking, shouting of words is passé anyway.
Let your silence, your absence of words ,
create a chatter of love in my heart again.
My words,
Oh my words and sentences are completed when they are in conjunction with your silence.
This moment of quiet right here, right now
puts my throbbing heart to rest.
This silence, your silence,
soothes the aching nerves beneath my flesh.
I found my great escape in your silence,
I found my haven in your non wordy conversations.
Stay darling, I wish to scream once more.
.
2am
Hi, I know I’ve been dormant for a longtime and I apologise for being so disconnected. I know I haven’t been accepting any awards lately, so sorry for that too.
Here’s something I wrote recently. I would love feedback from you guys because i am writing after almost six months. I am genuinely looking forward to hearing suggestions or anything you wanna tell me about my writing. Thanks a ton 🙂 STAY BLESSED!
Its midnight and we’re talking about your favourite country. I melt into your brown eyes. The smoke from your cigarette comes close to my nose. I breathe it in, it smells like you. You tell me about your day and how you’re sick of the monotony. Secretly, I wish I am a chaos in your mundane Mondays. The end of your cigarette turns into a shade of orange when you take a drag. The smoke rings encircle my thoughts. It’s your second stick and my 20th time asking you to stop. You laugh it off and pull some corny dialogue, like always. Like always, I smile. Now I see you looking at me. Your lips slide into a soft grin. Between your two fingers, you take that cigarette stick and leave it on the side table. Its dark and we struggle to see each other’s face well. But I have memorised your curves and the crinkle by your eyes. Under the moonlight, though it’s faint, I can see your upper lip shadowed under your moustache. Your moustache, it annoys me sometimes when I can’t taste your lips. I can see the smoke from the cigarette infuse into the air, like a serpent it moves. You ask me what keeps me so silent today. I almost let your words pass, too distracted by your presence. Somewhere in the middle of staring at your face and dissolving into your embrace, I smell the traces of Old Spice. It feels like home. It feels like my terrain. I see you’ve resumed talking about why Mini Cooper is a good choice. I know you can’t stand that car but pretend to love it. I know you remember it being my favourite from a casual conversation. It’s almost 2 and we’ve got work tomorrow. But, this is better than sleep. I can stay up infinite nights to hear you fuss over the broken coffee machine, the absence of good country music and working Saturdays. Suddenly, you decide to tell me that “crisp” is your favourite word. It makes no sense at all. It’s too trivial. But I don’t know why I find it important. At this point, I can’t hear anything at all. I’m too busy looking at your face. It’s one of the prettiest and most welcoming faces I’ve seen after my mothers’. You’re oblivious to my gaze, or are you pretending? I can’t tell. But your mouth shifts into a slight smile once in a while. So, I’ll take this as a cue to your chosen ignorance. I see you yawn, your eyes getting droopy now. Your yawn interrupts your attempt to crack a joke. The punch line gets lost somewhere, mixes with the soft breeze. I still laugh because, well, I know the joke you were about to crack for the seventh time. You finally stop talking and place your head on my shoulder. It’s not heavy, it’s not uncomfortable. Somehow, it feels like a balm to all my pains. I hear you singing the broken lyrics of ‘Say you won’t let go’ and I chime in. its 3 and we’re singing James Arthur like idiots. Oh, it’s so out of tune, but probably my favourite song. You’ve almost dozed off. I can see your face loosen and a calm engulfing you. It’s so quiet and serene. I look at you one last time before looking at the stars. Isn’t this surreal? Aren’t you everything I asked for from a million shooting stars? This is where I belong, this is what I call home.
rashimb 