And you looked for me all the way to Kanglatombi

I am beginning to realize how small Imphal is
How I can probably go from one end to the other
for a nice long walk and not even get very tired
When I was younger I thought you lived so far away in Singjamei
Back when we were younger
and when I was in love with you
In that crazy way only fiveteen year olds love
You know that pure unadulterated amplified kind?
And laughed about crossing Konungmang a few minutes before you did
Or when you saw me at Sekmai and I didn't.
At twenty two I am revisiting that time five years ago
When you promised me we would spent more time together
when we get to Delhi
By then I had so many other people in my life
And you marked my life with your stubborn absence
Borne of hurt and hate
Now we have settled into some kind of friendship
Not as close as we once were
But still holding on to each other
Dull ache of a love
Our names reveberating from Kongba to Nambol
The places we sought each other
Caught glimpses of
Wrote fervent letters to
The kind of love that went unfulfilled
and then dulled into something akin to friendship
Sometimes I can feel the connection return
when we talk but you were never the kind to confess
All those years I spent trying to unravel you
and you never said a word.
We parted ways at Chingmeirong
And you looked for me all the way to Kanglatombi.

By a cruel joke of history

I am not knee-deep in grief
Except once in a while
When personal tragedies occur
The kind which makes you question
If you will ever amount to anything
Existentialism, solipsism, you name it
Been reading too much
Fardeen got a friend who I kind of stole from him
We get depressed together sometimes
and she says things like-
"Life? Two stars. Wouldn't recommend it".
So even sadness is still kind of funny
It sounds really sad only in poems.
Though getting dengue got me pretty paranoid
About mosquitoes and other buggers
So much so that I plan to become a climate change refugee
Suddenly I have realised that I live in an inhospitable
live-threatening tropical country
Though I am mostly genuinely sad
When I read about nations
And the atrocities committed in its name
(Deeply suspicious of words like nationalism)
And about all the refugees who have no place to call home
and the people like the Kurds  who got divided into
four countries by a cruel joke of history.

And they can't reach you

It's back again
That dreaded dark feeling
Which has wound itself around your heart
And in this dark cold winter night
It has found you
What else can you say?
That you crave words to sustain you
Clutching at stories which are not yours
Your hunger so vast, so deep
And the people who appear again in your life
And then fade away
What is yours? you ask yourself
No place to call your own
Just this page.
And some jumble of words
A language not yours by birth
But the only one you know enough to write in.
Because you have begun to wonder
How this goes
How you return to this dark place intermittently
Because there are people you love
But they seem far away tonight
You are stranded in another planet
And they can't reach you.

Albeit a stranger who writes divine

You waltzed into my life
with your poetry and your joy
Making me wish I had known you
all my life
And I know this is not love
But it has been a while since I felt
This camaraderie with a stranger
Albeit a stranger who writes divine.

And what good is that?

There is nothing left to do
except crawl into bed
 and never wake up again.
So this is grief, you find yourself thinking
With your heart gauged out
Your eyes heavy lidded,
Unwilling to open and see the world again.
So this is how life marks us
With our first failures.
The crying hasn't started yet,
maybe it will, maybe it won't
Maybe this time it will wander off on its own
and not bother you except maybe
when you hear your mother's voice
and only when you are reading your own poem
years later, wishing to save you from yourself.
Newly twenty two and a failure already
Newly twenty two and love is no longer enough
Newly something, already a nothing
A non-entity, a non-person
And then nothin, noone.
A one-time someone
Now no longer anyone.
A has-been.
A writer who cannot write.
And what good is that?

I don't know if I was meant to read what you wrote
But you don't mean that
You are not heartless
Whatever you are going through
I hope you work it out
Remember to love and take care of yourself
The rest will fall into place.
The world is better than you think it is
Don't stop believing.
Always wishing the best for you.

I try to kill Poetry in my heart

I try to kill Poetry in my heart
I tell it to stop growing
It has too long been associated with a single person
And that person has gone
So I tell poetry to go too
I dont know how to write about anything else anyone else
Just becoming her makes me feel frail
But Poetry is stubborn
It smiles wryly at me
As I sit listlessly, my legs
dangling over the railing
It is there holding me
That night when I succumbed to crying
My heart hasn't been spent yet, it points
To the flames erupting outside
My world besieged by history
And I am to be a marker of it,
The observer, the writer, the participator
The person who breeds poems in her heart.