Shuteye

Every other day, I would like to shut my eyes for a bit. A teeny-weeny shuteye. And view life from a distance. To assess our collective tininess. To bask in our inconsequential failure at being. And to nevertheless, extract joy in syringes and save it for the lifetime of winter. Or harsh summer.

You wouldn't get it, probably. But I feel loved when a gust of cool breeze grazes me on a hot afternoon of May. I wait through exhausting and unending days at work because in the end, I get to slurp noodles from my huge purple bowl. I love the onset of the night, despite our complex issues, convoluted emotions and unfinished businesses, it's an excuse to  call it a day. It's over. Or, soon, it will anyway be. I love the way, the wind blows in my city. I appreciate how invisible I can be, if I want to. I love how being far-far from home, gives me wings of freedom. I lust for how a longish faltering stare from a man, can make my heart go up in bubbles, even if it's gonna lead us nowhere. No one, nowhere.

Despite the propaganda otherwise, I think I am kind of getting it. Shuteye. Night Night.

Moving

One of those things that dims the daylights of my mind is nostalgia. Rotten nostalgia.

So, we lived in this house, with cracked walls and sickening noise. All that, for years. Over and over again. The peel off paint was life. The poker face neighbors were mundane routine. Their screams and fights and their failed attempts at life submerged our failures too, in a way. So, we were happy-sad. In a way, equally un-confusingly both. Crammed parkings and scribbled love letters in scooters. Dimly lit garages and longish uncomfortable stares from known strangers, was a concoction we called home.

Anyway, we moved. In truckloads. Carrying faint half formed memories. Tears in jewelry boxes. Decades old school uniforms in trunks and our ancient cursive writing notebooks. Piles of utensils. Torn albums. Broken photo frames. Tilted fridges. And all this, with a mother that abandons nothing. Her only hope is that holding on to things, will literally cease the process of letting go. Only, it won't. We took as much breath as our lungs could contain and moved. But we left our diaries behind. And some other artifacts from the dingy-old-good-old-past.

Now, this new place has whiter walls and wall size windows. And it overlooks a huge green field. Yet, we feel so homesick. And we count nights. We fiddle for keys of that old home and clutch it tight, might that get us some sleep. We are collectively yearning for a place and time, that is slowly vanishing. Or much, already has, by now, may be. And we can do nothing.

30 - On Never Being Icarus

I am too scared to look within.
Don't know what I might see,
I am too scared to be
Alone with myself, tonight.
There's no confetti
Or rose petals and chocolate
Just a crumpled bed-sheet
And half read books strewn
I am imploding, as we speak

Haven't we had too much?
Haven't we had too little?
I am thirty
When will my love of irony,  die?
My drama. My scarcity
My appalling dearth of guts
My fear of myself
And my pointless distractions,
Lined up one after another

So I ne'er haveta think
Where I'm headed
If I am getting ahead, or stuck
Or simply regressing, guess I am
My whole entire idea was to,
Just stay afloat
Merely nostrils above water
Exactly this way,
I'll float out into the sea
With least possible effort.

And life treats me right back,
The same way.
Quid pro quo
With minimal reward.
And hence my implosion
There's this logic
That I don't want to see.
But now see.
I know why I fall
Probably, I'd be no other way

My love for oblivion
Goes a long way
Transcends all ambition
My diminished self worth
Digs up nadir after nadir
Tied in my own tongue
I am succumbing to
Self inflicted asphyxia,
You know

As I child, I stumbled on Icarus
Icarus who, flew too close to the sun
Melted his wax wings
Fell into the ocean and died
I can't recognize who I've become
But certainly far apart from the child
Who was fascinated with Icarus
I've probably made my choice
I've set my heart on
Never Being Icarus.

What we will not do

Sometimes my heart goes up in hot flames wondering about the things we will not do. Never do. The essays we will never write. The books we will never read. The films we will never watch. The wandering awefuckinsome artists we will never come across. The dresses we will never buy. The colors we will never paint nails with. The markets we will never walk through. The beaches we will never lie on. The secrets we will never share. The TV shows we will never watch. The wall hangings we will never buy. The time we will never have. The foods we will never taste. The wines we will never slurp. The cities we will never ever travel to. The bougainvillea we will never stand under. The breads, the views, the pens, the shoes, the smokes, the bracelets, the stories, the poems, the secrets. So much is lost in not doing. 

Also the bygone singers that we will never listen to. Sometimes, I am so afraid to read something because I know reading it is going to make me realize there are twenty dozen more beautiful stories like that which I am never going to flip through. So much of time we have lost, and there's a serpentine future ahead of us. And we are never going to be in those times. Except wallow in suffering in this moment at present that how absolutely hopeless we are. 

Kaput Again

Living days in perfunctory anxiety
Missing the bus, most of the times
Building worlds within worlds
Pointing all furniture toward the TV

Waiting for that day of the week
When you can say, that
My day has been bad enough
To deserve a smoke

Cooking, chopping vegetables
Peeling vegetables
The same condiments, in every meal
Yellow mildly disgusting food

Walking, looking at your toes
Stealing eye contact
Being mum, containing poetry
Caging prose

Coating hours with abandoned love
Soaking minutes in sunlight
Chasing cabs, chasing autos
Wading through knee deep flood waters

Fiddling for change
Running out of money
Thinking you're poor
What have you done, nothing

Except watch TV and shirk
Watch TV and shirk
And live in this perfunctory anxiety
Waiting to go kaput

Prequel here

The Dissappearing Act

Your classic disappearing act. Post facto, I now know that it was an orchestrated act. But in that moment, in those moments, in those bygone years, they felt like accidents. Probably, you were just busy. Too much work. Too many presentations. Too pushy a boss, may be. Or could be that you went out for a beer after work with your buddies and forgot to call. That night. The night after that. And dozens of such nights afterward. Or were you just tired, didn't want me to see your fallible self? No, that couldn't be. I was a delicately forgiving girl. The answer was simple, you just forgot. About me. 

As I turned myself inside out. You know, and such.

How could you? 

It was my fault. I never asked. I let you off easy. 

But can I now, travel back in time and sue you? For negligence. For apathy. For pulling off your treacherous disappearing act. And not once or twice. Several times, if I may. 

You held out a mirage of niceness when you appeared back again. It made me forget. But that shouldn't have been that way. 

I should've held some ground. I didn't. 

But now, when I don't even bother to think about you, I learned somewhere that disappearing on your near ones is typical drug addict behavior. You pulled it off with such panache, were you one of those?

And your drug of choice, was by no chance me, was I.

Still can't believe, you outsmarted me, so well. Man.

So much poetry for zilch.