Look how you are breaking my heart

Look how you are
breaking my heart,
Look how you have got me
all muddled up inside.
And what coincidence to have
"Lovers in Paris" start
playing from my playlist;
a sign from the universe
to let you go or to keep you?
I have to give it to you
for doing it in the most
delicious way.

What is a girl to do?

A sickness pervades my being,
I can feel your absence spreading
through my blood, slowly, pain-
stakingly meandering its way
to my heart, even the air that I
breathe hangs heavy and contorted,
suspended in its wake because
you are not around, this sickness
wounds its way to my wrist which
you last held, your touch is
imprinted in my bones.
I can trace the onset of this illness
from my lips which you last kissed,
its aftertaste still strong in my mouth.
My heart is full of you,
what is a girl to do?

Look how we have disassembled each other

I don't want to love you
if I can't be with you.
It's as simple and complicated
as that, because I don't want to
carry this ache around with me;
this irrational illogical desire
for you, I don't want you
just as forbidden fruit,
I want you accessible, real.
You say you love me,
and I am in love with you
but is that the same thing?
But to say it would be
sending it out to the universe,
to say it would be making
a promise and I don't want to
make promises I can't keep.
How did we get here, you and I,
so soon so fast, would it last?
Look how we have utterly
disassembled each other.

Look what you have done.

How did we get here,
you and I?
You, with your infectious laughter,
carrying an air of being at home
anywhere in the world.
And I, who smiled for the first
time when we met after
 a year of sulking around.
You, with your terrible jokes
that make my stomach ache,
the easiness with which you
hold my attention, my hand, my mouth
And I, with my acute awkwardness
at anything to do with feelings,
and my obsessive desire to kiss you,
as persistant as a toothache.
So there I was
being perfectly miserable but now
you have changed everything.
Because here I am,
missing you and longing for you;
not even a bearable once-in-a-while
thing, but this awful reminder
of your absence, like a sickness.
Look what you have done.

A thing of wonder

It feels strange to be so utterly
happy and contended when I am
with you, as though the world has
been set right somehow, stranger still
because we both know it isn't so, not
in this place we call home shimmering
with discontent and misgivings.
But I forget that when I am with you,
I can only think of your hands
holding mine and how it falls
perfectly into place, and that I want
to kiss you everytime I look at you,
sometimes I don't even care if
people are looking or judging.
When I am with you, I could
sit for hours and we don't even have
to be talking and I would still
be smiling to myself counting the
black dots on your hands, and suddenly
the most mundane matters of existence
would become a thing of wonder.

Is this the life you wanted?

Always this reticent heart

trying to retreat into itself,

Always this doubt when it comes

to loving, being loved.

Life is happening too fast,

too soon, how do you get a

grip on it? You are accustomed

to life moving slowly, all you

wanted was to write and have

a house by the sea; but what 

I have now holding in the palm

of my hands, this terrible beauty

you and I, this bewildering

 transition in my life and 

here I am asking myself-

Is this the life you wanted?

Light- headedness

You are getting to me, I can tell

 because I can barely stop thinking 

about kissing you, barely contain

this light-headedness I feel around 

you, and I am thinking when

 will I get to see you next, 

and I am thinking even though

 I burnt my tongue drinking coffee

 due to sheer giddiness the last time

I was with you, it is as though 

I am back to being a sixteen 

year old and this is happening

for the first time.

Semiotics

Our goodbyes aren't punctuated

 by hugs, but with an awkward 

detachment hanging midair;

You, with caution,

I, with propriety in mind.

because the air between us feels

so tense that I am conscious

of even the slightest of movements.

I laughed so much last night

when you mentioned that

I might be averse to hugs

because you don't know the half of it

and I am not sure I am willing 

to tell you; and if I sent you a poem

would it confuse you further?

Poems as prayers

Halfway through the year

and how you have changed since,

here you are now
offering poems as prayers.

All I want

All I want is to make it
till the end of this year
without breaking down.
A year in this place is getting to me
it's turning my blood toxic and
my heart all twisted up.
How awful it would be to die
not having lived much,
it makes me sick just thinking of it
I long so much for freedom,
after all these years still struggling
for it, after all these years dreaming
the same dream.
What a dread life is without
the freedom to love, to feel,
to make mistakes.
What a relief it would be
to be holding a cup of coffee
while sitting across from you.

Meeting at the coffeeshop

Our laughter lingers in the coffeeshop;
I hardly went to one before you,
Our voices mingling with so many others;
Strangers who are now
serving slices of themselves
to the human warmth of living
before death gets us all.
How absurd, how insignificant
this day might seem in retrospect
that you would drive down all
the way just to see me for the few minutes
that I could give you.
And how our lives have been rearranging
 themselves this whole time
based on random chances;
a word, a message, a smile.

Hoping that writing would hold me

My swollen heart is aching again,

it loves too easily, it sinks all too often

Sometimes life feels like a minefield

of anxieties and I think I stepped on one day.

I am always waiting for my life to start 

Today it felt like its a long time coming

And anxiety, my old friend, came back again

to sit beside me, shaking me out of

the lull of everyday life. 

Old fears came to haunt me again,

what if life is but endless hours

of dreadful mediocre conversations,

and fullfillment of duties,

mechanical loving and working?
Whatever happened to great passion?

And am I truly living life on my own terms?

Weaknesses stepped out,

looking to hold me hostage,

So here I am,

asking for small miracles,

Hoping that writing would hold me

so that I won't break into

tiny little pieces I can't glue back.

So here I am,

hoping for the strength to return

and keep me company

while I wait for the despair to subside.

Time doesn't stop for us

Time doesn't stop for us,
it accelerates and swirls
We maintain an unbearable distance
between us, for propriety's sake.
We still catch each other's glances
and smile from across the room,
always heavily aware of each other's presence
even when we aren't in each other's
line of sight; the secrets that lovers keep
And whenever evening draws to a close
my heart sinks like that time in school
when Sunday outings used to end
and there was the unmistakable
dread of the drudgery of Monday.
Our hearts sink in perfect congruity.
And you ask me if I am alright,
like you always do.
I leave with a whispered goodbye,
my heart breaking as I turn away from you;
no goodbye hugs and kisses
 for lovers like you and I.

Toothache

The first flush of desire

is akin to a toothache,

you are constantly running

your tongue over it,

fixated on the acute pain.

Humming of your heart

What we want from lovers
is their stories, all the details
that make up the person we yearn for
We want to know the first time
you scalded your knee, the first
girl you fell in love with,
even that distance you keep with
your father, and were you loved?
We want to know
how you appeared in my life
and changed everything even by
the most mundane of encounters.

We want to know the feel of your skin,
already our hands lying in proximity on the table
before us seem to shoot electric currents,
we want to know how it feels like
to sink into your world and then swim up again,
we want so much all at once,
it's as though we set ourselves
up for disappointment,
Sometimes we think the whole damn world
is contained in a person,
in lovers who aren't yet lovers,
What we want is as incoherent as this
poem, full of fits and starts,
of restless waiting and longing,
the whole world suspended in the wake of
the whirlwind of whatever-this-insanity-is.
And what I wouldn't give to be beside you again,
on the road to somewhere, nowhere,
leaning against you, listening to
the humming of your heart.

Grief is intimate

Grief is intimate in a way
joy can never be,
It chokes you out of breath,
It carves rivulets of hollow-nothings
in the cavity of your chest
By now you know one can
grieve for oneself, selfishly, childishly.
Grief lurks in waits for you
when you are hanging onto\a mugful
of tea one uneventful afternoon
to take possession of you,
to make you realise the gravity
of your loss.
Even that rage you carried
with you all of last year,
it dissipated like everything else,
lost, irretrievably lost,
shedding parts of you
that you thought you couldn't
possibly live without.
It's as though the world has finally
opened its gates for you
and you are hurtling
in a pace and direction
you can't quite control.
And those mental images that
you still hold on to somehow,
Childhood relics that haunt you,
asking you if you really found
the great adventure you were looking for?













you 

Stay

We started with awkward smiles

now we are asking about dream houses,

City or countryside?

Collecting intimate details

as lovers do(but we aren't lovers,

not yet)

In this little town, admidst rumblings

of history and misfortunes,

we have somehow found 

in each other

a reason to stay.

I could love you

But you are settled in your ways,

I am still forming myself

And haven't really decided on

the life I want.

So I tell myself

not to be swept away

by the storm of your arrival.

I could love you

but these are years of my life

when I will always put myself first.

You tell me that you haven't felt such

desperation to come home as you do now,

But home is not where

I imagined I would be in my twenties.

I still let myself have an alternate 

storyline though,

one in which we could have ended up 

together and I wouldn't be so worried

about rushing into a storm

I can't control.

the one in which

you asked me to stay
and I did.

and I did.

Oh it does

Maybe that is how life chooses you,

when you are reading a book

wondering how to turn your life around

And it does,

Oh it does.

Desire

You are always going away

Somewhere, inhabiting a life

I know so little of,

And I am always retreating a little 

into myself.

I could say a number of things

For instance, I have often wondered 

how it would be like to kiss you,

but there is so much at stake.

We are always surrounded by friends,

a precaution you have made a point to take

at a place like ours;

small-town stifling atmosphere

where people talk

and anything can be a fodder for scandals.

I long for you even as I sit next 

to you in the car,

the air tense with our mutual desire;

I wonder if other people can sense it too.

Some days you give me hints,

But for all your years, you seem

As bewildered and confused

On where we stand.

By now it has grown into a fever,

consuming me like cancer,

By now you send me notes,

all along your travels,

probably missing me a little.

What remains of us

What remains of us?
Not the unaccounted-for-love,
Not the devastating fights
Just plain wonder
at how it had overwhelmed us,
Struck us like a disease in the beginning
and left us so drained in the end.
I am no longer searching for you
in other people
and that is something.
What remains of us;
a worn-out pair of shoes,
a few drops of perfume,
and something that could pass for kindness.

Claim on a story

You've been thinking of claims that people make
The love for a land which is not even theirs
You wonder how that came about
this righteousness, this strong emotional
rumbling you hear everyday,
You claim nothing, not even your dreams
You've been thinking of love
and home, that after all these years
of being scared out of your wits
to come back, you are really back
and it hasn't scared the hell out of you,
not yet; a part of you wants to stay here,
be a part of a story the way you would never
truly be a part of anywhere else,

What love is this that feels like breathing

Because I should have written on the day
you left, now I am already used to your departure,
a dull ache has settled by now, the rawness
has lost its edge.
I can see our lives stretched out till where
 the ends of the earth meet the sky.
We are little more than children still,
finding happiness in propinquity to each other.
What love is this that feels like breathing?

The change of language

Somewhere between last month and now

You are grappling with a change of language

and with it the attendant feelings

of how could you have ever loved

in any other language, and how sweet

and melancholic everything seems now,

And how easily you love

the old which is now new

and how when he asked you

to come for the thabal, you had

smiled and said you would. 

You need to get out of here

You need to get out of here
before you get too comfortable,
already you have reverted to your
old tongue and it has embraced
you with open arms,
the prodigal daughter that you are.
Already you are drowning in
the sweet dullness of this
place which keeps no time,
It will engulf you whole
if you stay too long, you will forget
the days, the months and years,
Do not give your heart to this
place because it doesn't keep
its promises, it will offer you
so much and take it all away.
Already you have begun to love
the rhythm, already lulled into
a love as ancient as the hills.

Not even a little

Yabane Adum you say,
That's how you learn languages,
I think, from lovers.
Though you aren't mine
but another's.
Hayengdi emannabagi luhogba ama lei
Anything mundane inflected with your voice
registers as though a poem
over which I could weep.
You are not mine to claim,
I tell myself
You do not see me
 the way I see you,
Manakta leiragasu henna thapchaba
But we are singing songs over coffee and tea
Koina paiba chekla ni
This is madness, I know,
this soaring and sinking of the heart,
this licking of wounds, this thwarted affection,
this lingering sensation that I cannot get rid of
and the unfairness of it
that you don't think of me at all,
not even a little.

Atleast let me forget you

Don't show up like this
with the smile in your eyes,
and your big heart that envelops all.
Don't ask me for anything,
because I would inevitably say yes
to the words rolling off your tongue
and I suddenly see how it works,
how our language is supposed to be used.
I know I am not the one for you,
your eyes look for someone else,
your poems dripping with love for her,
But suddenly after all these years,
I have found you, a reason for staying.
Wouldn't you one day wake up
from a dream and see me in a new light?
Wouldn't you one day long for me
and write me a love poem?
I write this partly as a spell,
partly to exorcise you,
Because if you are never mine,
atleast let me forget you.

How you brush past these lives,

none of which you fully owned,

just watched longingly from afar,

and at times like today you feel it so close

you could reach out and touch it,

and love like a cancer running its course,

Maybe not even love, just a boy

and his smile, and because you don't 

know him at all, he is everything

you never had, and how would

 you hold this life if you got it?

Lets never go back

Looking at you I think maybe I could
even have a life here, finally stop running,
Because I see you now with that
smile in your eyes, and I think we
could have the whole world.
All these years we lived across the road
from each other and never met;
even then we were lost in other people.
I read your poems and I think I missed
out so much, would you catch me up?
What life separates us, what literature
brings us closer, maybe you will
never know because you never asked.
But we are on the road now, the
evening light frames you as though
you were in a movie, smoking a cigarette,
And I am thinking, lets never go back.

And how incredible is that?

There are no stars tonight. the cold

has enveloped the world you know

The world shapes itself back,

it creaks, its breaks and you suffer too

You are halfway between heaven and hell,

How do you know which way to go?

Yesterday you heard a Simon and Garfunkle song

in a movie, today you looked back a little

to the past few years,

in the evening something gripped you,

a feeling of wonderment at your own life,

so insignificant but still your very own,

and how there have been times when you

have despaired, but somehow you got here,

a little bruised but otherwise intact,

and how incredible is that?

The perennial question

The question you asked me,
the perennial question really,
probably asked by millions of people
who left behind the home they grew up in
But I haven't left my home, not yet,
merely found myself in a country
that doesn't belong to me.
So how do you identify yourself?
Is there a dissonance?
For that I would have to trace myself
all the way back to the summit of Koubru
where we once dwelled,
because everything else was a vast
expanse of water, when the water retreated
we stepped into newly formed land,
leaving behind our abode in the clouds;
and then the oft-repeated story, sung
as songs, the filling of the swamps,
the clearing of the woods, the sowing
of the seeds, of Gods and their mortal lovers,
a love that didn't last.
But facts are scarce and far-between,
I make myself up as I go, string bits
and pieces of stories together,
One in the long line of the witches
that elude, breaking down the old
with our laughter, creating anew
with spells wistfully whispered.

Its been a while so first there is the

awkward laughter to get past, then ofcourse

the relief at the familiarity, the filling up

of the lost years, like sand slipping through

the fingers, and the disbelief in your voice

that my life did not mirror yours,

a guarded distance now, a fractured smile;

you had been in love only

with the idea of me anyway.

The art of leaving

The wintry winds have brought with it
 the ancient lores Abok-Ahanbi would tell you
 to ease you to sleep

The story of the seven wise men of yore

Who shapeshifted into birds and flew away

When the king gave the decree

 To burn all our ancient books,

There is an art to leaving,you are thinking,

Because sometimes that is all there is left to do

Because partly hardly wildly

you are still looking for a great adventure

 to set out to and in your heart of hearts,

 in your dream of dreams,

you know this is not where the story ends

So you leave with a spell whispered

Because wild hearts can never be tamed,

Only loved, only craved.

How you still read my words
the way I want to be read
We got a lot of things wrong,
but this strangely stayed
And even though years and kindness
separate us now, I am always
so touched when you tell me so,
Always tell me so.

Because partly partly partly...

Sharing a book with you, courtesy Frank O’Hara

 who must be quite mad at me for borrowing

 his opening lines ever so often,  is more fun

than going through a whirlwind of parties and after-parties,

partly because we had written similar

dedications to each other, partly because

at my age, which is not all much really but I do feel quite old

but not too wise, I have realised how precious

female friendships are, the ones premised on

“saving the world” if you will, one person at a time,

one book at a time,  .

At this stage of my life when I seem to have outgrown most

Of my friends, I am so glad we are exchanging notes

On our lives, the way I used to when I was younger

and had a best friend who I have now seem 

to have lost to time and distance.  

And I would rather share this Delhi winter afternoon

having  a conversation with you, flitting from one topic to another,

to keep rolling the wheel of discourse is the endeavour.

By now we are giddy on wine and ideas, 

and planning backpacking trips through Europe(a cliche?),

also terribly inspired that you have taken up painting again.

And here we are, taking a respite from our newly adult lives,

faltering, bruised but laughing till our stomachs ache.

Because not every poem needs to be a love poem

Nor every muse a paramour.