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.

Fragments

Words upon words upon words upon

Rain. Soaking through trees and tar,
grimy cars and construction sites where
cement and sand swirl in an endless vortex,
the evening rises like smoke around my arms
and droplets the size of my fist thunder past traffic.

I taste you like a metaphor on my tongue,
Feel the dust of you on my skin.

The shadow of a city, the bruise of a life,
the thump-thumping of nostalgia against
closed doors and the carnival of memory.

In my hair, I wrapped my childhood. In my
arms, I wrapped you. In my trunks, I tucked
letters and rocks and tokens and broken nights,
catching snippets of song in butterfly nets and
hanging them over my bed. I watched your voice
as you slept. I watched myself sleep.

If all I have are fragments,
I won't be ashamed of them. I will find
stories to tie them up in, plot lines that
flutter and attempt to escape me.

Mountain stream

I can taste silver sand in my mouth,
feel the shiver numbness of icy water.
There is so much to say, heaps and heaps
of broken images against harsh sun, memory
of Eliot and cracked sky turning orange.

My hair smells like loneliness and smoke,
despite the gushing truth of water against feet.
What do I search for?

Ache

It's an existential ache more than an angst.

Not quite a crisis or a culmination,

more like a winter morning 

when you crane your head out the window,

watching drizzle turn to mist before it swallows

the sun whole - but the ticking clock 

still tells you

it's only the start.

If a day is a journey then

I need to find a better map -

I'm strolling in circles and getting lost,

hiding the world in the bags under my eyes.

If a day is a progression then

why are mine so circular, how can I ever

find meaning in this neurotic carnival where

I'm strapped to the chair of the ferris wheel and

morning always leads to night no matter where

I look; and nothing matters, that's the problem.

Nothing matters.

If no (wo)man is an island then

I need to stop burning bridges and boats -

perhaps I can't escape

anyway

and

my collarbones will smell of sun

and not smoke. Maybe wo(man) is

a desert of thirst. Maybe there are no oceans

here - only mirages and the occasional

oasis, desire mixing with memory

until you can almost hear the bluebird

but

my throat is still parched.

Spring hasn't reached where I am yet;

I'll be patient. Winter fog still settles

in my bones, and the countries of my body

give birth to no flowers, dance in the moonlight

with no thundering rainstorm. It's cold

and quiet. It's quiet. I could

sleep for months. I could sleep.

Damn this cement and concrete

Do you know what it's like

to be woken by birdsong and golden sun?

I miss walking down

paths of a forest I was deliriously

in love with. Mapping the soil under

my sandals and the sun on my hair,

tracing the veins of red leaves on my 

downy arms and telling myself 

this is how life ought to be lived.

I'm so far from my forest.

From my birdsong and shaded paths,

folk songs and moonlit night walks. 

I never want to forget

what true joy feels like.

As though all of life wants to rejoice,

all at once, in my belly. My smile goes

beyond me, and I can't hold it in any more.

The sun is setting against horizon of Gulmohurs

and orange petals are falling at my feet

and I just walked

to the mossy well and waved 

to the turtles,

and climbed a tree and sang to the sky,

wove a blanket of golden sun and slept on a roof;

I never want to forget the feeling of rock

under bare feet and rain against bare face,

the sound of wind thundering through trees

and tousling back hair, I never want to forget.

Damn this cement and concrete,

The artificial flower beds and manicured lawns.

Damn the glass windows and clean white walls.

Damn me if I ever get used to this life.

Exhale

Mist settles on the lamp-lit streets,
stretching across my arms like a moan.
The horizon trembles in an effort to stay whole.

Poetry writes itself on the cobblestones.
Open the blinds to the sun-clear day, wait
for dusk to streak the sky gold, then wait
for grey. Rain rings in my ears. Cold grief
and shiver. I forget,

and I scrape memory off my skin
like a frozen ocean. A fractured dream.

Inhale first. You know how.
And again.
Breathe out, slow as a movie, into the night
choked with fog. The smoke rises, curls around
my face until I can't recognize myself anymore.

The sound of exhale. The fear of forget. The life of a life.

All of me

If you ask me what I'm learning in college I just realized I can tell you in a single line:
to live with contradictions (both yours and mine).

I can sniff them out like a dog at an airport now -
in literature class when the dust starts to settle

just shake it up.
There's no black and white.
No right and wrong.
Every duality has a hundred hidden shades
behind the image of itself -

and I

I understand
I'll get an A in the damn essay
but my god

what if it all ends and the books are put back in the shelf
and I still don't know how to live my life
because I'm learning -

I'm learning damn well how to live with your contradictions,
I can forgive, I can see the hundred masks behind a single face,
and I tell myself I'll be okay, be okay,

but what if I can't forgive the contradictions in myself?
What if I know I shouldn't and yet I must
box everything in neat categories
and weep about what doesn't fit?

What if I don't understand why I don't fall in love -
or I do, a hundred times, hold it to my chest as if I'm drowning,
and then let it go - to the wind - like a hundred hidden birds -

as if I swallowed all the water and painted a face on the newborn sun
and everything is blossom and bud, freedom and forgetfulness,
there's no need for a lifeboat, there's no need for you

just me
all of me - but -

can you forgive me for that?
Can I?

Winter sun

Everything breaks through into blossom
by 2pm, a single shade of sunkissed afternoon.
My skin shines like marble, smells of flowers.

There's nothing as hopeful
as winter sun
nothing as truthful.

A sheer cloak, pale gold
over the trees
over your particular midday smile
and my hair.

Everything is clear and bright
and things that don't make sense
don't matter

the horizon has never been so clear
I can count the leaves on trees
I can shrug off the weight of winter
of cold grief and shiver

everything breaks through into blossom
and you can really live this day
by 2pm

but then it ends all too soon
wintergrey and ice
shiver comes to rest
darkness against sky
and lost birds.

Pretext

At thirteen,
My changing needs made me afraid.
I rebelled, cropped my hair
close to boyish face, and
stole my father's t-shirts.
I was suspicious of breasts,
waited desperately for a spot on
plain white panties. Anything
for surety. Either here or there,
as long as it wasn't neither.

With time, I took pride
in long brown arms and legs.
Mother's thin shirts and denim shorts,
hair falling across the sunburnt plains
of shoulders and neck. Afraid of beauty,
and desirous of it at the same time,
cautious and greedy, young, mid-flight.

What does it mean
to have a nose the right size?
Curls of gold and clipped brows
placed ceremoniously upon forehead
of bronze, lips carved from the essence
of cherries and wine, sunset and blood?

Helen wasn't a character
simply a pretext.

Troy and Sparta, loss and gain -
the world before her was a lie.
Long shapely legs cannot rise above
the white veils we cast on ourselves.

Nobody knows whether Helen wanted to leave.
Perhaps she was a poet, a dancer, a lesbian, an ocean.
It didn't matter.

What I Want to Tell You

You are the greatest poem I could have found.

You are a sunset bathed in purple, a prayer of longing across the sky.

You are the sound of rain against my window, and I’m afraid you forget it.

Here’s what I want to tell you: I know you’re afraid.

I know you’re wading through the solid chaos of a life,

Impatient and unsure, blundering through darkness,

And I know you’re disillusioned, and I know you hate it.

Baby, that’s all of us.

What I want you to know, really, is that it doesn’t get better.

Life is always going to be callous, and strange, and so unbearably short,

And so terribly long. And what I want to tell you,

Is that we’ve got one chance at this. A single shot,

And that should scare me, but it doesn’t anymore. It gives me goosebumps.

It excites me, and I want it to excite you. We’ve got one shot to live this.

There’s very little formula to it, actually.

All you can do is wake up in the morning and go to bed at night,

Drink chai on crisp winter days, buy new shoes when they wear out.

But I want you to be content, not with washed-out days and tentative nights,

I want you never to postpone a date or sleep through a meteor shower,

Numb yourself to pain or think of taxes. You’ll be fine.

I want you to watch the stars even when you need to rush,

Sleep in on a Monday after watching a Sunday sunrise, always

Get wet in the rain. Be a desert of thirst. Always ask for more.

I know you’re afraid, and I want you to be okay with that. I want you

To fall in love a hundred times (even if it’s not always with me),

And I want you to fail, at least at ninety-nine of those. I want you

To have the courage to let yourself hurt.

I want you to talk to the moon when you’re alone. To never take beauty for granted.

To laugh at yourself, every day, and yet be goddamn proud of yourself.

I want you to be as kind as you are, but I want you to watch out for yourself, man.

It’s okay to screw up. It’s okay to get lost, to spend a day in traffic,

To have made a mistake. Forgive yourself. I want you always to forgive yourself.

It’s okay, as long as you take life by the collar, and promise me to live the hell out of it.

I want you to feel this in the small of your back, rising up your spine

Like truth. Like a winter chill, or like joy.

I want to tell you more than a flimsy paper can hold,

More than a midnight conversation can possibly balance in itself.

I want you to be responsible and sensitive and have the balls to walk alone

If everybody who walks around you is an asshole. I want you to do the right thing

Even when it’s the toughest thing to do. I want you to smile at strangers.

I want you to go on a thousand road trips, to have a thousand sleepless nights.

I want you to get drunk even when you have a job interview the next day,

And I want you to shrug your shoulders if you break your phone. I want you

To know what’s important, to love people even when they’re broken and lost,

To love yourself. I want you to get lost in a forest, to read under a streetlight,

And get on a train without knowing where the hell it goes. I want you to feel

Like you’ve made something of yourself. Like you’ve grown, like you have

An ocean-full of memories for every drop that you’ve decided to live through.

Rumi once told me, with shining eyes, to let the beauty I love be what I do.

Damn right I will, man. And that’s all I wish for you too.

I want to tell you to defy all the pain in the world.

Screw history. Screw philosophy. Screw law. And screw your fears.

For god’s sake, be happy. Live the hell out of this life.