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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.
.
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 outhold 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.
.
The window swallows light, the swallows fly
away, from the house now broken.
The walls without ears or swollen corners
of mouth, of places where bones collide perfectly
to cause adequate and explainable hurt.
Acres of skin now without a family line
to hang from, without the skin of another
pinning you down, carving the joy out of our eyes.
We sit, while away our time, as our hearts dry in sun.
Our hearts – dug out, salvaged from their hiding places,
under the floorboards, under the framed report cards,
under the aroma of food, from the palace of delicacies
surrounded by rivers reeking of salt, silent tables,
the nail of memories still sticking
out at random cruel angles,
the harmless metal that never digs in too deep.
The dust sings in the beams of yellow,
a demonstration of a gentle chaos.
“The brownian motion” I tell my mother,
my mother echoes it back
in the voice of knowing,
from this place in the now.
By the hungry window, we take turns
to speak of words that can be now born from our free skins,
words we always knew, but never lied in or hurt for.
As the afternoon brings back color to our flesh,
we realize all the things waiting for us,
the yearnings we can now make space for,
even the shadows taking new meanings, other than fear.
.
She told me that it is essential
that I learnt not to stare, not to pause
no matter what I see here.
Do not fall before you are aimed,
do not find the bullets
for there are plenty lying around.
And it seemed such a simple thing to do-
to section off areas where
I can and cannot be myself.
I was good at dressing up my skin
for the festivals of purity, whenever
my presence and submission was required.
I was already being eaten up alive
from where I had come, pretending
that I understood this world and
it understood me back.
I could wash off
all the my blood and all their hate
without flinching, without feeling
that I would lose myself
to their hollow human gods.
Not staring should have been easy
for the likes of me,
for my eyes were now colored in fear.
But it wasn’t. This was a new nightmare.
Now I had learn from scratch
how to get over my reflection
in the deep red pools of blood,
the bread that more and more
tasted liked last words,
the flowers that the crowd looked at
never daring to touch,
the songs that were suffocated
before they left the bodies
of their instruments,
the doors that go missing at night,
the streets that politely ask my cooperation
as they make a copy of my face
for building some ultimate fantasy
for the virtuous lot.
I now get personalized tips
on the ways to seek forgiveness
along with my news.
They claim I will learn and repent one day
and till then they shall wait
with love and patience and knife.
She says this is not even the worst of it.
.
My tiny life holding its tiny fist
stood at the gates of a thatched school.
The broken lies and lesson flew out of windows
with their sharp painful wings.
And though my heart despised such birds,
hated the thought of growing
in the presence of their mocking chirps,
I still walked. I walked
because the winds were strong,
and my eyes were pricked with the image
of the ones with warm leaving in hurry,
because i too wanted
to be at a place where “i need to be”
even if it was filled with cruel noise,
even if my skin was shrinking in fear,
and maybe precisely because I was going to lose myself
some part of me wanted to know who would care.
I walked towards walls, windows, and wells closed (for now).
I looked in and saw faces and their lips
that sculpted words without breaking.
I looked at the empty place waiting for me.
I could already see – my bending spine and twisted tongue.
I could feel my heart already learning not to care anymore.
.
The silence was deafening
because there were people in it.
There was a tiny space made of granite,
a smallness born out of the spacious halls
now crowded with people.
the air stale with staring. The long moments
of confused and alienating gazes.
The wait. And for what?
Everyone knew they must speak,
only then a god will be formed,
only then we’ll have a reason to meet again.
But they were afraid of everything.
which was not really a problem.
They also felt among many other things
that only they felt and knew fear,
that fear kept only them as a pet to be played with.
They felt good and miserable when they though that.
They also felt special.
And because we were all special and doomed
and carried poetry in us to be looked at, to be listened to
we all stood there staring.
We stood shoulder to shoulder, sorrow to sorrow
trying prove to others that we knew life,
and that once, once we really did live.
But all we were seeing and feeling
under our feet, in the hollow of our hands
was that place, the house on the slippery slope,
the home we could never leave.
We were all there alone. Trying to avoid the weight
of another person who might just end it all for us
by saying something stupid as
“you are a bit too much for me”
and “this generation is not capable of love”
and “poverty is a state of mind”
Or something as true as
“this was a bad idea”,
“you do know that we will never meet again, don’t you?
at least we are all praying for that.”
.
the last time i was young,
i was as young as the numbers i colored
on his last birthday card.
i remember the burning of birds
that followed our song of hope.
since then nothing was the same.
“the innocent” and “the sweet”
were the monsters that we killed
in the forests that grew in our house.
we killed a lot. we killed plenty.
hours swelled into years into decades
at every tear i tried to hide.
everything i tried to hide
grew as me, grew into me.
he grew into half a monster of kindness.
he devolved into an angel wielding my fear with smile.
it was the truest of love, without any doubt.
it was the only love of the world. the only one i would ever have.
knowing that helped. it helped me wish for nothing more, nothing else.
i grew my claws into the gentlest shapes.
i grew every contradiction in subtle ways.
i grew them nonetheless. that is how i hid.
in the light of his skin, my eyes learnt to love darkness
and yet when the day came, he asked me
to become someone from his memory,
someone untouched from the poison of our world.
he would pester me like a child
to show once again the trick of undoing,
to show the skin i hid from his fear,
to show the heart that he cannot accept.
“gentle things always begged for my fury”
he had said that once.
i remember the threat that lurked under his voice,
in that moment. in that moment,
i remember curling into myself in time,
before he learnt i was all that he couldn’t stand.
i remember choosing him foolishly.
i remember the violence of being chosen.
“what has changed”
i ask in my newest disinterested voice
and he smiled as if he was really not here.
his eyes looked at me as if i was already long gone,
as if he knew my every truth.
he reached out his hand and instead of new blood
i felt his new breaking.
“for a minute i am tempted to believe in this world”
he said in the voice we used to sing all our songs in.
and because i knew better. because i knew fear.
because i couldn’t lose my hidden flesh of hope
to entertain his momentary half-hearted wish to reform
i replied “there is nothing to believe.
there is only blood and flesh and lifeless spoils of war in me.
do you want to be free of me now?
why are asking for things i can never be, never give?”
i feigned hurt and looked at him
till he had to look away and laugh.
his laugh was filled, was welling
with something unfamiliar.
he looked in every direction but mine
as if letting me breathe in the relief of not being found
and the breathe out the disappointment of losing something unreachable again.
but i didn’t dare to breathe.
.
The crumbles of the day are out of my hand.
They fly towards the birds
who now only know how to sit and wait.
It is morning
and the birds have been dragged
to these grounds of freedom
again.
Again they have been given this abundance of sky,
again they will realize only the abundance of their own fear.
I color their feathers with the dyes of attention.
A friend of mine force feeds them something
that tastes very similar to the sweetness of a tender care.
But they cry and choke and try to wriggle out of his torn hands.
They are much more gentle on me.
My tears never dry,
so they are afraid of me in more softer ways.
I stupidly burn words and meanings into everything we do.
I move my hands on their feathers,
over this soft life that sees me as another bother.
I feel him smile as a kiss of blood blooms on his cheeks
as a beak stills, as they stare back at him.
They wait for him to stop smiling.
They wait for his love
to be withered by their tests of violence.
They wait for a long time.
It is evening.
It is again a moment of miracles
that never quite happen till they actually do.
We wait something to take flight.
We wait for life to find its legs.
We wait for a long time.
.
It takes an eternity.
It takes the courage of fighting
thousand bloodless wars.
It takes the the cruelty
of scratching through my own wounded skin,
breaking my own ribs that were made to protect
the soft things that keeps me alive.
It takes stupidity and few seconds
for my fingers to reach your lips.
You look up. Your gaze says something
that I do not understand.
Such beautiful hopes and possible disasters
come alive in your face.
My fear comes to the surface of my eyes
swimming in the black oil
glistening and waiting to burn.
.
the eyes made of glass stare at us
with its kind open clutches held out.
the eyes made of forgetfulness
and remembrance in equal measure –
they are beautiful.
they sing of the most beautiful fear,
the most hurting hope.
and we sing back.
me and my brothers –
we sing like we have never known death
as we hand over our hidden skin folded in half.
folded in half, we sleep in its arm
and we invent love, invent warmth,
invent meaning.
we hear it breathing.
we hear our lung collapse.
we have brought something to life again.
this machine of fear and ends –
it breathes, it tears up and cries.
i feel an ocean flowing into my eyes.
the suffocation ends.
and just like that there is
nothing of us left with us.
somewhere we will open our eyes
and stare at lips that sing of giving,
we will feel our hollow insides echo
with the memory of our own lightest steps
we will look
at the saddest sweetest children of this world
and we’ll know ourselves through it again.
we will know of the ocean in us
when it leaves our eyes.
and just like that we will be all that
we couldn’t bear to live as.
it rains in my heart 