April 7: Magic

I'm searching for MAGIC:
hiding and smiling, moving and grieving
the songs and the sea - I'm walking, learning,
falling and crawling, marking out stars on the
blackboard of sky until I touch them all - touch
them all, their fiery eyes and flaming tails, distant
conversations and categorizations, I need you to know:

Magic comes easier when you're a child -
if you want it, it wants you right back, embraces your
footsteps and your shadows, nudges your elbows when
you tremble, and lights up your windows with shafts of
sunlight and love. Books were my magic - I read hundreds,
and filled the shelves of my mind with the kind of hope
that's hard to find as you grow older and

books grow sadder.

I'm searching for magic - people wish they could go back
to being children, but really, I'm okay - I'm searching for magic
and bloody hell, I'm going to find it, I've learnt a hundred new words
and a hundred ways of thinking, I'm taller and stronger and less afraid
of strangers, my eyes look less silly behind this pair of glasses, and
I'm sure I can do it, I'm sure I can. Isn't this what we work towards,
a goal and an aim, ambition and creation, most of all reason?
When I say MAGIC I want no sparks, I want no dragons and
no wands - all I need is reasons, unbelievably starry nights and
heart wrenching poems, winding conversations that tell me,
HEY
life, life really is, really is
worth living. This moment
really is, really is precious.

I always thought
this kind of magic
would be easier to
find as I
grew
up.

SO WHAT IF IT ISN'T
the struggle is real but so is the flaming,
fierce, ferocious fire that rages in my belly.
I will fight the ravines that will one day
stretch my skin, I will hold a hundred happy
moments in my calloused hands, and when
age hits me like a tornado, I will hug it.
I will have lived well enough.

April 6: Countries of the Body

"There's a place that poets seek
as real and fearsome as the body."
- Tishani Doshi

Tishani - may I call you that? - I need you to know,
I'm in constant conversation with your words, how
you delicately string them together with silk, hang
them to dry under red sunsets and mist of memory.
How your words wrench me from myself, future and past,
here and now, space and time. How your words transcend.
Your every line captivates me, but nothing so much
as when you called the first collection of poetry,
Countries of the Body - oh, how to explain to you
the shivers in the various continents, the swaying forests,
the revolutions, the silhouettes of truth, the trembling restlessness
that arose in the cities of my belly - how could you
coin a phrase so beautiful, and then put it out in the world
so it would reach me, wrench out my regret and lay it
to dry under the stars, touch me in places I didn't even know
existed - how could you?

I've been wondering for years now - what is art? - and
I understand that it must transcend representation alone.
And yet, with a pen in my hand, all I want to translate from
the shadowy world of images is the body - the poetry of it,
the misty mystery of it, the shadow smoke and concrete curves
of it. How the universe could really exist in a single mind, and
how a mind exists in this separate, almost self-sustaining universe
of a body - how it escapes definition, preservation, categorization.

I want to paint a hundred bodies, have people hold still
while I let my lines caress their corporeality, their mortality.
Flesh, muscle, bone and sinew - the creation of metaphors
began in the body, the realization of metaphors too.
What is as beautiful as skin, skin, stretched tight over
a form you perfected of yourself in so many years,
your errors and misjudgements, your petty joys,
your stories and your rainy days, your memory -
wrapped up so tight, tucked up inside, giftwrapped
with golden-brown, slightly freckled, even toned.
How gorgeous are curves - not only breasts and hips,
but the curves of sensuous arms as they rest against
a wall, catching a single shaft of sunlight against
shadow complexion. Calves and ankles, muscled
with strength and resolve, stray hairs lit up in noon
sunlight, shadow and light entwining until this thing
of beauty is formed in my eyes - who can say all bodies
are not beautiful - close your eyes for a moment and
when you open them, notice only fragments:

the strand of dark hair pushed aside with long fingers,
motionless mouth with contours and crevices, full lips
open against sky. fluttering lids of star-speckled eyes.
undulating plains of thighs. ashy mountains of knees.
twitching ankles. wrinkled hands. mysterious ears.
All bodies are beautiful. All bodies are singular worlds.

One day I want to fall in love with somebody
and name every country of their body. I want to
soak afternoon sun in the ocean and dissolve my
unyielding flesh to the seas. I want to outlive my
corporeal frame. I want to live only as long as it
lasts.

April 5: Things Distance Lets Me Say

I'm afraid when you go, you take my poetry with you.

I find it so hard to write love poetry - I find it so hard 

to love - but it's easier now, when the distance makes 

the shadows clear and your absence lights up the lights

that I wondered about so deeply on starless nights.

I'm not telling you I love you. I'm telling you I miss you,

and you and I both need to see that those are two different things.

I'm sorry 

for taking you along with me 

on this voyage of promises and starry shores

(when I myself could never be sure, can never be sure).

But now, at least, let me write lines I was afraid even to feel:

when distance makes my heart pump louder, thud harder,

let me tell you that your face is lit up in the dark for me -

that your laugh has slipped deep somewhere under my skin

and your smiles caress the sores on my overworked mind.

You and I will always be too practical, too afraid, too cautious

to throw away our anchors and put up fragile sails, to truly hope

that such a thing as love exists and your hands really do belong

in the crevices between my fingers, your flyaway hair against mine.

For me, it's the easiest thing to run. Run and then regret, run from 

the regret. And what if right now running is the wrong thing to do,

another incident I will laugh about while my life grieves in the silent sea?

I'm afraid because I'm still not sure. Half of me wants to run, this time

back into your arms like old bookshelves worn-in blankets scent of comfort,

and half of me will keep running even if I reach where I wanted. Don't

come back. Please come back. These are things distance lets me say,

things I know you don't want to, don't deserve to hear, and yet

I throw them behind you in the ocean you waded into. I'm sorry.

April 4: Home

"These young girls do not know it, and I cannot tell them, but I have discovered that past and present blur together, become one and the same, so that time means very little at the end." - Kim Edwards

When I reach home,

the afternoon turns the colour of gold.

Memory lights up the smiles and soothes

the bruises on the walls, the cracks in your voice,

the hollow spaces and the restlessness.

I search for comfort wherever I go

but poetic justice declares that I will find it here:

in the bed I slept in when I was eight, the room

I ran away from, in the city I hated like a disease.

Comfort where once there was unease and movement

settling into my bones like an unseen tremor.

Alone in that bed, scent of the past wrapping around me

like mist or music, listening to father and sister watching

sitcoms in the next room - every sound magnified,

the whirring of the fan and crinkling pages of books

resting against bare thighs and brown arms.

Walls covered with crayon drawings, shelves filled

to bursting with odds and ends, ragged toys and leftover

board games with missing parts - where I lost little bits

of myself as a child, under the bed, behind cupboards,

tucked into childhood books like bookmarks -

I don't need to search there, just sit.
Let myself breathe in the music of this moment.

Hope will find its way home,
it's lived here for too long.

April 3: Angry/ Guilty

"There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear...
I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in colour
as well as sex
and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations."
(from Who Said It Was Simple, by Audre Lorde)

The language I write in will never be my own,
my accent either an apology or a betrayal, my choices
doused with flammable history, fragile at the end of a match.
My skin will always carry with it the memory of oppression.
My sex will be a signpost, a barrier, a letter of inferiority.

I'm angry at the weight I have to carry.

I'm angry at history, at sorrow, at the tears of blood,
at misrepresentation and no representation, at the lies
of law, the blind faith, the scars, the servile compliance,
the leftovers, the ladders of grief, the child-sized coffins,
the loss of identity, the tall tales, the powerlessness, the sin.
I'm angry at the inevitability of this narrative.

Learning to negotiate the chasms between theory and reality,
I tiptoe the blurring lines of forgetting and recollecting.
Trace out a situation, hold it up to the light, watch the
shadowy dance of political economy and heart-thumping humanity.
Most of all, I'm guilty that I'm not affected enough, guilty for
my education my privilege my facade of white and superior.
I'm guilty for the American sitcoms the denim shorts
the stuttering Hindi the hazy memory of mythology.
Guilty for the jokes I laugh at: sexist racist thoughtless.
Guilty for this intellectual academic knowledge of the stories
I carry inside of me and around me, the liberation handed out
to me freely, as much as I could ask for: guilty for knowing only from afar,
being able to forget at will.

April 2: Stars on fire

Do we believe the stars are on fire
and the vein on your forehead might pop,
do we believe that it's not all okay, that the insides
of your mind are a hell right now, that your hands shake
even when you laugh and even when your gaze is so
steady; how do we believe it

if the streetlights still look like fireworks to you,
if the horizon lit by sun means the universe to your
petty gaze, if you can possess beauty with a click and
if all you really need is the warm touch of comfort,
a body against yours and a blanket for warm nights -

I'm afraid I'm afraid I'm afraid

because my fears are multifaceted and so complex,
my anger at the world is a hundred different hues of
gender colonialism social construction and
I talk to Camus in my sleep and my boulder
gets too heavy some days, the existential ache of
trivial conversations hangs in my mouth like a lie,
and my problems are pathetic, intellectual emotional bullshit,
if it's pseudo I'm sorry but it really does hurt, in a hundred
different ways on a hundred different days, and I'm afraid
of not making a difference I'm afraid of ambition I'm afraid

most of all, I'm afraid that talking doesn't help anymore,
I'm afraid that the answers aren't where I thought they would be.
I'm reading all the books and underlining big words, I promise,
but the questions keep getting bigger and I try to remember Rilke
telling me to love them, the questions themselves, as if they were
locked rooms or books written in a foreign tongue, and it helps:

but only because of the particular feel in my chest when the words
come together, the memory of joy in a classroom, of discovering
beauty for myself that I could keep. The answers the answers the answers
are taking too long, are taking too much out of fragile me, the answers
might never come and the questions keep piling and comfort doesn't always
arrive;

but when it does it's never in the form of an argument, logically arranged
or typed out double spaced font size 12 Times New Roman no
the comfort comes in the form of

golden sun streaming through windows at 5pm, lighting up corners
of my room and my heart, it comes in the form of a doodle in my notes,
rotring pen lines as thin as an eyelash, or watching the birds fly in a flurry
away from approaching footsteps, comfort comes in the form of memory,
in the form of desire, raw and earthy. Comfort comes in the shade of home,
in the scent of rain, in the sound of conversations dipping and rising from
the ashes of ideals I fashioned and polished once, then shattered and
burnt

still shining like stars on fire but I'm afraid
I'll forget someday to look down for comfort, to
recognize simplicity, to lie down in grass and breathe
to myself. And if I forget, I swear, the insides of my mind
will be a hell, my hands will shake
and I will forget to laugh.

April 1: Beginnings

Beginnings
are different now.
are different every time,
bruised by months and weeks,
the hues and scents slightly changed,
the weight of memory against twisted back
shaping the winding pathways and conversations,
the sunsets. the phone calls. the stargazing loneliness.
the secret tears that hang from the bed like icicles. the mosquitos.
the smiles I smile to the moon every summer, the quiet
disbelief at joy, the corners of my mouth lifting at
silly interludes, April darkness and memory
of white fog enveloping the long night.
singing songs of leaving home.
then songs of returning.
the things that
change.

And then the things that don't. The things that write themselves into
your skin, and always feel new, like discovering secrets in the sky.

To Damien Rice

Your voice is like sandpaper
on my soul - I never pretend
to understand music, but my god,
you have to stop tearing me apart
like that, watching my secrets and
fears as if I were an open book - I'm not.

I never listen to you sing until the right moment arises.

Right now, last shadows of golden sun falling
against college lawns and library glass,
work piling up on my table and my soul
refusing to sit, only fly and flutter, hold on
so tight to the past and the future and the
trembling present - your voice is the last touch
I want to stir the storm in my mind, your voice
caresses the chaos in me and reminds me that
life is so beautiful and so fragile, a shard of glass
in an ocean, a single blooming bruise on a painting.

You have settled on my skin like dust,
and I have to scrape you off like peeling paint
when I take off the headphones, ease you out
of the recesses and ravines of my mind.
It's been years, and you're a guilty pleasure.

Do you live your life like art? Are you an
asshole in a relationship? - I'm sure you are.
Are you kind to strangers? Do you sing to
yourself on rainy mornings, strumming on
an old guitar, watching the sun fighting fog?

Your voice is like a mountain coloured dawn.
Like bitter alcohol in a coffee mug, like a dying
memory, like a frozen ocean making waves.
"I'm going to be dead soon", you said to the
interviewer, "And I want to kind of grow up
before I die." What nonsense, Damien, you're
always going to be old and young, wise and
unbelievably foolish, raw and burnt out, burning.

When you give the world a fragment of yourself,
you give the world a piece of time. You might change
and you might live a real life, walking to get coffee in
the morning and waiting for a phone call, forgetting your
towel out of the shower and falling asleep to the sound of
midnight - but you will never do these things in my life,
in my life you will live your life like art, intense and full
of passion, you will live your life like heartbreak, every word
you say will sound like smoke and wildflowers, every note
on your guitar will be an open door, a bone of truth.

Thank you for letting me have you
in the way that only I can have you.
Thank you for letting me listen.
Your music isn't your music after it plays
in my ears - your music forms shadowy
pieces of my fragmented life, angry at the
world and yet broken by its beauty.

Wildflower

Dingy rooms and beige window shades,
The ticking clock knocking against the silence.
Wrinkles carved on aged faces like ravines, riverbeds
emptied of the taut motion of hope and youth - whisky
in a glass you wouldn't touch, conversations in translation,
in transit. Fragments of lives offered to each other over
salted peanuts in shadowy bowls, and fried snacks -
the evening rises and falls on the shore of music,
voices piercing through darkness and time. I'm so far,

and a tumour blossoms in you like a wildflower.

Memories are suddenly bruises instead of roses,
Petals sticking to skin and bones in angry shades of red.
I'm afraid, and I don't know why. You were my understanding
of age, my hope and my dejection about time, my life wrapped
around a house and a family. You smell of home, of comfort
and cold cream, of perfume and carefully chosen nailpaint,
of the kitchen and the garden, of books and the upholstery
you got changed every month to match the furniture well.
I'm afraid,

because of you, because of me, because everything we knew
is tied in delicate threads to each other and to promises
that aren't as sacred as you believe them to be, and I swear,
the understanding leaves scars that shine like lightning
on rainy nights - do you know

because I know. I'm learning. I'm trying. I remember
the time I made you a card because I didn't know how else
to tell you I was angry, you had ruined a childish game and
I didn't know how to forgive you because I didn't understand.
I think it comes with time. I forgive you now.

I'm afraid of death. Forgive me. I'm afraid.

Sonnet to Aparna

You're a charm in every rusted memory box

in my cupboard, and you're an unapologetic ode

to the skies, purple as they were on our walks.

I think you and I should live our lives on the road -

we're far too large to fit into a singular space.

Your hair curls around every edge and cracked

corner of my dreams, and it never leaves a trace.

Your joy follows me into the fog like a hazy fact,

and I dread the day when it will drift away.

Are you and I strong enough to fight the world,

will we be able to stand still and not sway?

My hair flying straight in the wind, yours curled.

The cityscape is drenched, it looks raggedy new,

and I wonder if you know that I dream about you.