“The Short End” – Nayana Nair

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The short end.
The end where I load our secrets
in the last bogie of the night train
in silence, as I scrape
the inside of my mouth – the barrel of words,
now empty of all the letters
that could lead us to us.
Even now, the old us and the new us
play another game of twister
in the same old apartment
we made sure to lose our keys to.
My half of “the way to once-home”
now lies in the muddy river
where I lost all stones that refused to skip.
(I wonder where your half of the way lies.)
As the ghost of our games
haunts some other new love,
the snowball of loss grows silently,
the net worth of love brought down to pennies,
my empty hands can pick up new safe things
now that the dice and the board – the chance
has been taken away from me.
Three blocks away
I scrape the barrel – my heart,
for the something made of you,
a meaning to paste in my journal,
an excuse of youth and love
to make everything pretty again.
But I only find foolish words in me.
The ruins of moonlight play
on the slippery roofs of metal
as I am thrown out of the city I built.
Everything seems sadly perfect,
everything in their right place.
My days of hurting love
come to their destined end.

“The Fiction of Dragonfly and Ducks” – Nayana Nair

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Sometimes it was okay
and we would all know it,
even when the the shadow of our protectors
still weighed heavy, their greed
still felt on our backs as the soft whip.
Sometimes we felt loved by our land
even as the flag with our faces
stared down at our sewn lips.
We would wake up,
step out of our tired used skins
and know it was only now
we could pray to each other.
Now when the towers of red
could be seen sleeping,
now when the cruel songs fade.
The only time we could kill,
our fear – of the monsters we had become,
our fear – of friends we had come to yearn.
In the silent hour,
in our every moment of relief
all we did was kill,
all did was bury.
We did whatever we could
to hide the the crystals
of love and hope
away from all the blood.
We did all we could
so that we could remain
like a dragonfly, remain like a duck,
so that our organs knew kindness,
recognize it easily when touched,
so our remains wouldn’t forget
the feeling of trust
even as we made the new towers
with bones of our friends.

“The Seventh Spring Song” – Nayana Nair

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The fine metal, the teeth of your name
winds around my throat.
The raving crows, the blessing bells
are singing the songs
I cannot sing.
Love has made me a coward.
Fear has given me a home.
The rains and the blooms
make sad visits to my closed doors.
I sit there, in the borrowed safety,
in the dark shelter with you fast asleep,
your songs buried under our bed.
I sit there counting the springs that pass
and the life that doesn’t.

“The asteroids burn out” – Nayana Nair

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My little ones play in the mud
putting their hands
under the carpet of cement.
Their fingers curling
around the dandelions
hiding their giggles,
pulling out all life,
the extinct, now babbling
like an year old baby;
the scales and furs and roars
all bundled up and settled softly
on the four legs no longer broken.
The skeleton in the books fade.
The asteroids burn out
long before they reach
the new earth. They learn the age
of planets, of sun, and of death,
and rush to tell me
all the curious things
I have forgotten.
They run to me on fours now.
They giggle and spread,
launching into air,
touching everything.
The mud smeared beautifully
on the vase, on the carpet,
on our smiles no longer made of milk.
They sit in a circle
with the dead and the dying
and the ones who will always live
but not know life,
the ones that only know
the songs of burnt fields.
We tell them that it is too late
but they insist,
they promise to go to sleep,
to eat the greens, to grow them even more
if we sing something sweet,
sing them into birds. They assure us
it is all a play,
that wings have never harmed,
have never taken anyone away.

“lines that fit nowhere and say nothing” – Nayana Nair

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with my weak will and doubt eroding my armor
i stuff paper into my bag, silence into my mouth,
cleaning the bleeding edges of my being.

because i can’t really breathe here.

faith becomes a new monster.

my breaking should serve something.

breathe in and breathe out
hold my hand and never let go

giving up this fight, this fear
should have been easy

you have robbed me. unjustly,
you have taken the only part of my soul
that i could bear to live with.

i answered questions about my life with words that were not mine

and when he asked me about love i told him about stories that don’t matter,
about the people who i didn’t want to abandon, cannot still abandon.

because i know you in ways only a failed lover does.

becomes a new monster.

hiding (from) all i love.

reason i cannot stay –
you
reason i cannot leave –
you

as i try to fit my head into the narrow small sweater.
someone laughs.

i hated myself for not knowing how to love this freedom
how to look at it in the eye and …

…that only haunts me
and leaves you untouched, unharmed.

a new monster.

i try not to worry
about how worthy i am of the sun that showers
and the rain that blooms

as the fragrance of life ate me away,

-a short happy death.

“Folded Softly” – Nayana Nair

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The broken beings of magic
dance around my fire, my burning,
the vapors of all my homes.
This loss, like all others before,
is taught the eternal shadow of hope,
taught the rules
of all simple games of heart.
Its fingers tearing at the sorrow
are folded softly into the memory
of prayers, secrets, and embraces.
As I count the change I should give back,
as I switch off the lights before lying,
even as I learn to bandage all kinds of hurt,
the dance, the folding goes on,
the windows, the portals of light keep getting made
in all the worlds that were once promised deaths.

“Made better. Made Worse.” – Nayana Nair

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The hurt in my skin
sings of a gentle butterfly,
A spring, a blade dripping with love.
From the clay I fashion a sun
I dream of a sky, and plant sprouts of wings.
My mother and her mother, both once weary,
sit under the shade of my branches here.
They lay their head on my roots.
My roots, surfacing like dolphins glittering in sun,
find a golden sleep in the warmth of their skin.
I find the smell of cooking and the tears of lost dreams
decorated, made better, made into me, made worse,
By the things they tried to save me, tried to stop me from.
Again the story moves to sad corners,
to the places they would have hated me to go,
to the roles they always lose their daughters to.
All the hurt they have known, I learn them all.
Yet, this hurt sings of a gentle butterfly,
A spring, a blade dripping with love.

“In Honor of the Choir” – Nayana Nair

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On a day made of rains,
the oldest sorrow,
the longest file of mouths
marching to the tune of
whirlwinds and dark tunnels,
after years of harvesting obscurity
find themselves trapped
in the shrieks of shutters
and national interest.

The crowd is here to eat them up,
to take their limbs, to tear off a piece,
to record this pain at their hands
as proof that the seed of history
has always been human indeed.

The descending gods of rain
find themselves less real, less divine
in face of this worship, this day old pedestal
made of degradable attention,
the easy hunger munching
on crude flesh flavored with dreams,
the salt decorating the wounds,
the songs torn from the throats
now hoisted on the softest poles of love.

This is beautiful, this day
before the building of the halls.
when greatness is ordinary,
is within the reach and not on the walls,
when the favorite of humanity
with skin cut with curses,
sits on the green grass,
politely declines the food
they have long forced themselves
to live without.

Today, at least there is innocence
and yearning in theft.
This day even with all its violence
is better than the march of money and blood
that the gates of this dreams have been sealed for.

“The Rumoured World” – Nayana Nair

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The country of red lights that we left only hours ago,
is already turning into a fiction in my mind.
The autumns I had grown up holding,
the rules that had owned me, hurt me
are slowly turning into vapors, into dreams.
Behind the clouds I see a god taking a peek at us,
looking at our beautiful free skin,
our hollow bodies, these earthen pots
meeting its destined water.
Our hands dig up the remedies to all sorrows
from the soil of each other’s being.
I sew a strand of your hair on my broken wrist,
the red sealed back into life. I feel like a god in making.
Prophesies flower in my mind. I see future,
“future” the rumoured word that meant nothing until now.

“The Half Apology for the Stolen Sun” – Nayana Nair

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In response to the half song
that you have painted across my skin,
I have no smile to give. I have no river of joy
that I can spill from my ache cursed brain.
This peace is not a garden, not a spring
where we sit across each other
building back our innocence
from the bones of our sins.

Peace is a truce, is an answer I give
when I am too tired to fill the blanks for others
with the obvious answers they don’t even want to read,
truth they don’t want to see,
only because the halls of endless guilt
is a awkward place to be.
Peace is a moment of silence, that you rejoice in
the air free of wailings, the streets free of complaints,
the rare beautiful clean sunset on your private beach,
the music, the glories, the money playing
all your favourite games in the background, every morning,
as you stretch your ageless body
in the sunlight that only you can afford.

I have nothing simple to give, nothing easy to sing.
I am not to be placed at that table
where everyone wants little fun,
little understanding for their helplessness,
a small anecdote to know the heart of the ones
whose sun they have stolen.

I only have stories of sad worker bees
stranded in an artificial desert made for
the aesthetic filming of struggles,
of tortures that are just made up lies now breathing,
of new age morals to be learnt
about how the skin breaks and the legs fight the weight,
tiny teeth hopelessly biting into the rich honey skin
of the lovely giants. I can only sing of a world
that paints the drowning ones as monsters
who claw at the beauty of the ocean.
Ocean, the otherwise gentle water to the ones
whose lungs have no knowledge of salt.