To make way for the new

Some things you understand
Like the harvest every hiyangei
The toiling in the fields
To celebrate the bounty of the earth
With Lai haraoba, to appease Ema Lairembi
Your daughter is getting married
You have little to give her for her awunpot
You search the till for the little savings
But found nothing but despair
All you have is the house of mud,
And the black earth sustaining lives
The ways of Epa-Epu of living by the land
are but ancient relics found in phuga wari
The old ways are dying
Last evening you looked like a woman
 who lost something she can't quite remember
You gave your grateful daughter
Lik, khuji,lei made of pure gold
You had given up the old ways
To make way for the new.

You are always counting

You are always counting days left to go back to him,
counting the distance from the room in which
 you are hugging yourself wrapped in a red cardigan
to the street where he sits on a platform
 smoking a cigarette, perhaps 2696km give or take.
You count the two languages that set you apart,
 the one language you both share even though
 you both know how to say that one line
 in each other's language. You count the dishes
you eat which he might be alien to, nga for instance,
 not to mention eromba and soibum even though
 you are quite familiar what what he eats.
You stop counting because it's tiring to count so much,
and you need to tell him you can't wait to see him.

A Machine of Grief

You should have realized that the faces of your childhood

which you romantise conceal so much madness, so much

pain. And that you only had to go back in your mind to see

the signs. When you were five the man who used to drive

the van to ferry you and other neighbourhood children

committed suicide. Your mother told you he is driving

a truck now. You didn’t question her. You didn’t know what

death meant or what caused it. You heard whispers

of how your much older cousin which you have met but once,

had married a man whose parents didn’t accept her

because she wasn’t their kind, not from their community.

But you didn’t know because this was the limit of your

world and you knew no other.You didn’t really know what

different was and that you would be different once you

step out. Now you know that laughter is rare,pain more

frequent. You see the violet hills with a sadness in your guts.

and the morning mist intensifies the loneliness of your

existence. And when you walk the walk you have been 

taking as long as you had learnt to walk, you walk briskly 

as though you are trying to escape from some kind of
absence, the echo of decay. While your life is disintegrating, 

even that assumes a rhythm. Melancholy becomes a 

habit the mind exercises. You have become a machine of grief.

When he told me I was full of contradictions,that I say one thing about being this strong independent woman who doesn't care about how people perceive me, I didn't know what to say apart from being slightly hurt. Someone had once told me I was very gullible, too weak to face the world. I was twelve years old then and I vowed to shield myself. I would not be gullible, I would not give in. To whatever that she thought I usually gave in to. I was young and foolish. I am still young and foolish both. I daresay I would be old and foolish too.
I am not clear about many things, be it about myself or others or even poetry. I am constantly adding and subtracting emotions and thoughts. How can I be expected not to change and remain the same, constituting the same thoughts and feelings? Sometimes I think as a woman or to-be-woman, certain things are expected of me. On on hand, I am expected to be the quintessential feminist, disdaining frivolous activities such as fashion and maybe even men altogether. On the other hand my mother wants me to be fairly balanced about things, observe the traditions, sometimes even reject some progressive things because they don't fit in with social norms and so on and so forth as most of you might already know. And in these many ways,I am being confronted with options forced down my throat. Clearly, I am not being given the choice the make up my own option. I am constantly being told this and that. Do's and Don'ts.
Sometimes I think I would love to have a place of my own but then again I wouldn't want to stay too long either. Yes, I am a living walking breathing contradiction and yes, I don't think of substantial reasons for doing the things I do because if I spent my time finding reasons, I would probably have starved to death by now. And then there is poetry, I have my books and my poetry to protect me, I am shielded in my armour.  But you broke that armour for me and now that I need it, I can't find it anymore.

How can you eat so slow?

I am getting my money's worth,

each rupee's worth.

You are so immersed,

Like a three year old

Hanging onto the summer's last

Ice-cream, until next year.

A sign of assurance

You joined it and that surprised you
because that's not what you would
 have done if you knew what it was
you wandered into it and you stayed
because it gave you slogans to
channel the anguish you have
borne ever since you took your first
breath, the first time you were
told you couldn't do this and that
 because that's not what girls do, the
first time you picked up a book in
 which the woman author wrote
with a man pseudonym, or the time
the first slave was separated from
 his family in America, saw the bullet
ridden eight year old girl's body
tossed into the swamp, hear him
 telling me "Why are you so desperate
 to go back?"" Why do you do this
to me?" and you don't seem to know
 enough, because you are a fool
 and you want to please everyone,
you are scared of ending up
a total failure or knee-deep in mediocrity,
 but then again you don't
want to lose out on him and that's
why you ask him for a sign of assurance.

Because you don't know why you are the way you are

You tell yourself it will be alright,
Sometimes
Most times
It weighs you down
It leaves claw marks
And you don't know how it came,
 Like an avalanche of frustration
And you.just.don't.want.to.go.on.anymore.
Because you have lost so much
 And gained what?
Nothing to show.
Just shadows.
And the dark.
The screaming silence.
Because this is all that is left of you.
Words. Tears. A mind tearing itself apart.
A descend to quiet madness.
Because you don't know why you are the way you are.