Poet in the Big City

After three days, the city finally opened itself
to the poet, unfurled its petals like a hesitant blossom
responding to shafts of afternoon light. The poet wandered,
marveling at her footloose days, at fallen leaves, at ruined walls.
The poet spent hours getting lost in the cramped streets of
bookstores, quiet minutes spent with titles like strangers' lives
she would never access. She leafed through verse and prose
until she could taste words blooming on her own hesitant tongue,
could refer to herself in third person, half-amused and half-overwhelmed
by her gloriously human mind, her petty fears, her loves as vast as cities;
and by the city itself, that she encountered anew each day, an insistent lover
she could never learn well enough, a world of strangers and familiar lives.

The poet was still as a wallflower, the words all packed within her but
covered with thin ice. The city expanded and shrunk itself, sometimes
seeming as large as the distance between where the cab picked her up
and where it dropped her off; sometimes as small as the blood-red and
speckled leaf she gathered from the sidewalk to her chest like a gem.
Some days there is enough fear to render her helpless, leave her mind
frantic and desperate, and then aching. Some days the walls of the room
do not seem strong enough to keep the vile world out. It is often hard.
The poet never feels like she belongs, and often confesses how afraid
she is of men on the street: their entitlement, their insistent eyes, their
fearless swagger. The poet has been thinking, but has written nothing
in so many days. She is, as usual, brimming and overfull, preparing
the land for monsoon and then a glorious, sun-yellow harvest.

Today the poet shed off fears like heavy fruit off her branches, let go
of the burdens she didn't need. The poet scrubbed her skin and walked
out in the city, hid only between bookshelves and strangers on the street,
collected moments and sun and dust in the lining of her skin until she
felt as large as love. To be alone in a city is a great adventure, she says.

Later, when the last thin moments of golden light were disappearing
behind vehicles and footsteps, she walked away from her solitude,
skillfully navigated a road full of frantic vehicles momentarily stilled,
weaved through scooters and buses like a small animal in the wilderness.
From the safety of the sidewalk, she marveled at her own swagger through
the city now, her heart swollen and glad, her footsteps racing towards a
kind lover. Her bag was filled with thin books like slices of the moon,
rare and magnificent, shining when she held them in her reverential palms:
how could the world extend anything but love towards her when she
loved it so fiercely, so fully, when she blossomed out of her own meager skin
like a reluctant caterpillar just so she could belong better, be bigger,
just so she could graze the day with her eager fingertips?

winter

it's not winter until everything falls apart, until the knots in my back form a forest of ache, until the transition from one day to the next can seem like, quite literally, a lifetime. everything is strange, and yes, jaswinder bolina was wise when he said -- how easy to wound, how much easier to be the wounded. my heart is breaking in ways that i never knew existed. for all of the organising, the understanding, the closure i ever wanted -- ha! what i get is this, life drenched in irony and longing, my room so cold i cannot step into it without shivers. sunshine is thin and provides no warmth. oh please let me go through a winter without tears, without death, without a sadness so large it eats into my soul. oh please let me go

in love

It is the strangest, wildest thing to be in love. The things that once made perfect sense seem to mean so little; and everything that was confused, scattered, broken... seems to form a perfect blue sky, the most wholesome sigh in my belly. You leave, and I wave wistfully at you through the gate. You gently kiss my cheek, and I know I will trace the shadow of your lips all day. It is absurd. I feel as vast as an ocean, and so hilariously fragile, so easily breakable -- but whole. Literature always taught me that it wasn't possible to feel whole -- but I do, I feel as though the universe has filled me up from my forehead to my toes and I am billowing in the wind, I am wide and complete and so deeply satisfied, so gentle with the world, so at peace. For the longest time, I forgot how to read love poems. They made no sense, they were too soppy, too personal, too much. One could love other people, but how could one be in love with them like this, how could one ache so desperately to graze their lips or to catch a shaft of sunlight on their cheekbone, how could one know someone intimately enough to hate them, to judge them, and still feel only desire, oceans of it wrapped in one's mouth? I thought it could be true only at 14, only when desire is silly and half-uttered and unrequited. But I am not 14, I am older, old enough to have broken hearts and moved so swift that nobody could touch my receding back -- and here I am, back in this room with my desire as big as a house, as a country, nowhere to go and no wish to leave. I map the stains winter sunlight leaves on the furniture, on the floor, on the walls. I wait for you to come back, simply so I can lie in your arms for hours. It is absurd. It is fiction and film, and so hilariously human, so obvious that I never thought I would feel it again. This is also what literature says, is it not? That these feelings are fleeting, and so important, so real -- they add colour, and scent, and flavour to this whole bare task of living, of going on, of pretending as though you will reach somewhere different from where you already are at the beginning of every day. Suddenly there is meaning, and of course it exists in the trees and the sunlight and the fragmented moments that I collect like a madwoman, like a child -- suddenly there is meaning and it exists also beyond me, it exists in the solid, warm body of a lover, and that knowledge frightens me, aches in my belly, and curiously uplifts me, leaves me afloat on the gentle wind. I trust you, and I trust life, and I am here with trembling fingers and tender skin, I am ready to be broken and remade, smashed against a wall of glass only to be picked up again with loving fingers. It is so human, so human.

my name

It is strange but
suddenly
I cannot imagine
you saying my name:
it would taste so odd
but bitingly precious

in your mouth.

I have spent an afternoon
drenched in poetry and longing
but still I cannot trust my words
the way I trust my fingers
on your skin.

still thinking

"I don't know when I will ever come to terms with the fact that articulation is always a 'squandering', that I am giving away more of my self with every word than I can ever get back, balance out."

sentimental explanations

I spend hours on the silver sliver of my macbook: various and irrelevant musings. I edit old posts. Read about printmaking courses that I will never do. Put on my headphones and lick my lips, wondering what it is that my soul is asking for. Eventually when I put on Damien Rice -- after so many long months -- I smile to myself. There is something to be said for sentimentality, after all.

I sometimes wish I wasn't so easily distracted. I console myself because it's not the I at fault -- it's the whole jingbang of capitalist consumerist culture that wants us to flick our eyes from screen to screen, open-mouthed, and never think deep enough to attack the things that need to be attacked. This, then, is a revolution: to stay with my thoughts, to travel deep inside these musings, and create. To read a book from cover to gorgeous cover. To study all the wildly exciting things that I'm studying. 

I have a thousand misgivings about keeping a blog. There is too much, too much I worry about when it comes to the wild forest of the internet, of social media, of easy communication. Some communication cannot be easy. Yet as I scroll down Shinji Moon's blog, or Bhanu Kapil's blog, I am so fucking thankful that these women chose to put up random fragments of their life up on the cruel and vast interwebs for me to read, consume, devour, as it were. The final poetic product is important and often dazzling, but I often want all of it, all of the incomplete and aching words that go into making it before it is made, all the writing that must take place before the writing. Sometimes Shinji's final poem will touch a stutter in my chest, but her vast thoughts and politics pull out that stutter, touch it, force me to travel down the lines of my body until I can unearth it myself. If I can touch somebody in that way someday -- it will be enough. So I write, I reorder, I put up a fragmented biography, a broken archeology of my life. And to be honest, I create temples of posterity whether I am on this blog or off it. All the diaries, all the fragments, all the Evernote notes -- they are all evidence that I am fearful, that I want proof of my existence, that I want to create something I can hold in my hands, or reach back to with a click, and know that it will be safe, like a seed in deep soil. A dead seed, I understand: what is living about the seed is already running in my veins through this conversation; what blossoms in me someday will be a result of the thoughts I think now. So why this, why the obsessive, almost neurotic desire to document, to prove, to hide away? Why this desire for stasis where there can only be river?

What I tell myself today, smilingly, is that we're all looking for ways to stay sane, reasons to hold on and make sense of this vast existence. I could say it subtly or crudely, but here it is. If I could not, did not question, then I would have other reasons to go on -- I could give society all the keys it wanted and play my role as a Good Woman -- I could live day to day because of all the duties and obligations that piled on my back like secret creatures, and I could marry, have children, worry about them. But that's silly, that's not what life would be like today -- I could, I will, I must, have a career! An ambition! I will study, I will get a job, I might choose to marry a lovely man and have children. Worry about them. Watch my body rot away until one day -- poof! -- like a leaf on the wind it will soar beyond my reach. Life is so long, and so hard, and so often it seems so unbearably bare. What keeps you sane? What makes you wake up every day and do all the things you're supposed to? What makes sure you don't curl up into a foetal position and weep yourself to sleep every night? I don't care if it's crude, if it isn't the right philosophical question to be asking, if existentialism is passe -- fuck that, fuck academic sophistication, these are the words that lick my spine and whisper to me with fangs when I am unable to leave the bed. I don't know the big reasons and I am often afraid to touch the big questions -- I don't know how to say them right, how to hold them gently, politely -- and so this is how I stay sane. This here, the temples I build from corners of my life where the lazy afternoon sun burns all edges gold and bronze and a plastic bag flutters in the wind like a poem, where the landscapes of my mind are sometimes solid mountain, and sometimes the uncertain sea. It isn't much (but what is?). I survive (even thrive, sometimes). 

So here I am, as usual, laying out my excuses and escape planes, flyaway bits of paper that hide under my thighs, that I hold down under desperate palms. The words are all I have, most of the time, and I'd always like to do better by them. I hope this means something, I hope I can create some meaning. I am reminded of the things I don't respect enough because they are often the things that matter, that force me to look up, that render me unable to hide. My body is an ocean that I need to tend to, that will wear out and snarl me into acquiescence if I don't pay attention -- listen, hear my stomach growling right this second... I am unable to curl out the twist in my spine, unable to ease out the forest of knots in my aching shoulders. I need to be better to my brown skin and tangled muscles. My mind is a mess, is always a mess, is sometimes bearable, is often interesting.

Meanwhile I remember an old conversation with my wise-and-crazy cousin where he told me -- in all seriousness -- in the middle of an increasingly cynical and nihilistic conversation about politics, relationships, life -- that the only thing that can hold out against the world, that can stay pure, that can change something -- is love. At least that's how I remember this conversation. In my smoky haze I was amused, sceptical. Perhaps he meant it in a more serious and philosophical sense -- right now I am not serious or philosophical. I am sentimental. And the one part of my life I cannot touch with the rough fingers of angst or the bruises of hopelessness is that -- that word, too oversaid by humanity -- the bubble of wholeness I feel erupt in my chest when my body is laid against yours on a bed stained by afternoon light, the laughter over familiar things in which we've built a home for ourselves, a haven. You've punctured my solitude, as Maggie Nelson said, and I've never felt more hopeful about it. I try to work harder, live bigger, feel less drained and bent over under the weight of the world. There is much to be joyful about, much to read, many fragmented conversations to have with so many people. So many sunsets to chase with my silly sentimentality, my disregard for truth, my chest aflame with hope for this life...

moments from mcloedganj

o mother moonface

Trying

I try so hard to search for poetry in all the corners of dreary afternoons, and my head fills with questions like a brimming bowl, too much, too much, too much, all I have are the words and they are too little, too little. Suddenly everything that was compartmentalised comes together in a crashing and toppling, all the separate boxes of desire and fear and anxiety and theory and literature and ache, all of it is here and none of it is here -- the too-much-ness and vacancy of it all -- and I am left both wailing on the ground and also here, on my chair, perfectly still. Well, if you want to know, here are the questions: where does it begin, and where does it end -- this crazy romance with the words -- this wild hope that the words will fix it all, will pin the monsters into little black alphabets and leave me free -- what do I do with this hope, do I believe in it, can I afford not to? Why must my sanity depend on putting everything in a box, on understanding understanding understanding, unravelling knowledge that I can verbalise and somehow control, organise according to date and time and colour? The knowledge of chaos has not permeated through my thick skull -- or perhaps it has, and that is where all the fear stems from? I try to live my life like an exquisite, thick, work of art, layered with detail and craft -- so much to dig through, so much to understand and unravel -- the notebooks, the fragments, the empty boxes, the facebook posts, the pictures, the sequins, the bookmarks and forgotten tickets. I am my own archeologist, memoirist, observer, devotee, biographer -- I am my biggest project. I do this, I live like this, and then I have the gall to ask -- why, why am I so afraid of death?

Afternoon sun lights up fragments of my room, of the corridor, of the grass, in bronze shadows and gold lining -- it is what keeps me hopeful even now, at the onset of winter, when everything seems to be falling apart. The internet confuses me, excites me, leaves me bleeding -- is there anybody out there, listening? Should there be? I write and I write and I write, I craft my life out of my flesh and of the scraps around me -- I hide some of these stories in the folds of my clothes, and I roll some into fragile glass bottles and toss them into this sea, with hardly a second look for the aches that shattered against shadow-black rocks. I scroll and scroll, read something beautiful in the strange forest of the internet, and sigh. I listen to Iqbal Bano and Noor Jahan sing Faiz and I try not to cry, try to hold the vast gaping holes in my chest shut, try to survive it all.

nomenclature

the white sheen of blank paper excites me
until it appears; and then it is only ever
a clenching in my stomach: such an easy
giving up. I give up too easily.

in my dreams, I am still lost, and blurry,
my edges pencilled in like forgotten things
and my feet standing on something soft
and infinitely breakable: somewhere along
the crawling away from death I forgot
what certainty feels like.

I am trying to remember, and also learn,
what it feels like to write a good poem,
what the balance is in between
casual words
and words that hold the world within them
fiercely. how do I make something sacred?
is it the practised ease or the rioting genius?
is it the straight pencil lines I fill in blindly?

I worry, and I worry about worry.
I am able to call my anxieties
anxieties
but I never want to call my sadness
a bigger word. nomenclature mocks me.
it is only ever self-diagnosis, and so many
kinds of self-doubt, crawling under my spine
like ugly things. I want to be a river of calm,
but sometimes I find a secret snarl at the back
of my throat. I do not know if I can live here.

I want to think of this as practised ease and an
unhesitant beauty, but it is also always just
casual words.
I once told myself I was the only true audience
I would find, and that thought makes me sad today.
I am a terrible, over-thinking, self-validating audience
for myself. perhaps for everybody.

I am learning how to love, and it is as easy as it is
hard. the simple things feel vast, like whole lifetimes
of this moment. the strange uncontainable joy of falling
asleep next to a warm body, knowing that your
fragility is, for once, in the fragile hands of another.
it's all self-destructing, but at least it feels
human, feels like love, feels like a dream.

I am feeling things in tidal waves
this time around: the highs are hopeful and I feel
as though I can blossom in ways that I never knew;
but the lows are snarling and dangerous and feel like
insidious holes that I could slip into like a shadow.
it would be so quiet and comfortable. in a hole,
there would be so much less to worry about.
only the silence, and the sadness
which wraps around you like a shawl.
winter kept us warm, covering
earth in forgetful snow...
new words speak to me each time and tell me
how to map my mind. I am a strange city.

I am afraid of writing
because I know I can do it.
I am afraid of giving myself to this vast world
and I am afraid of its disinterest in my small bones
and trembling fears and pouting silences.
love me, love me harder.
love me until I can find a way out
of a ruined city and a chessboard forest.

I love myself
but it won't do.
you must do it for me.
I will name you
river
and you can carry me through
to an ocean that I will call
only through absence. do it.

once the words are spilled out of me
like ink, they leave no trace. I do not ever
remember writing these stains into my skin.