“blue dreams and railroads” – Nayana Nair

.

so my blue dream
is not even mine now.
i am just a mesh of people who hate me.
their fingers are my fingers now
poking my skin, endless railroads of red are built
with their nails that they do not even cut
before they sell me their fake love-filled eyes.
their eyes are my eyes
that wants to smash every reflective surface where i fall.
every reflective thought is just a poison.
a poison, a gossip, an untrue version of me running wild
in the minds of those who look at me.
they gossip about me
so i gossip about myself ,
whisper my secrets into the air
or better, into the ears of lovers who are chosen
especially for their talents in indifference,
vulnerability, and emotional violence.
lovers who can break me – are all that i want.
i need someone else to do this breaking for me
because i am coward who can’t move towards the end i want,
and also because my hands are busy.
i have more things to do.
i need my hands to tear my talents apart
in the name of value, tear my feelings apart
in the name of my worthlessness.
i need my hands to paint again and again.
paint indifferences on my insecurities
that come a bit too often to the surface of my skin now,
paint laugh lines on the bleeding corners of my lips,
paint dreams of love, moments of hurt, grand betrayals
on my otherwise lonely mind,
paint humans that match the shadows in me,
painting causes and assurances.
i must paint.
i must paint a reason-
a reason why i suffer so,
why this world works like how it does,
why i must break as the world breaks,
why i must break even for fixing this world.
i must paint a face
so that others don’t break at the sight of my face.
i clip my nails everyday
so that when i become someone’s ghost
when someone suffers because of me
at least my hands won’t leave them scars.

“What I Remember (30)” – Nayana Nair

.

The “sweet escape” is now more expensive
and better hidden in a packaging devoid of bubble wrap
and crumpled newspaper (how does that even work?)
I can no longer remember why it caught my eyes.
But such things normally do, so I don’t question it much.
“Such things” almost always refers
to things that I will always see and be drawn to, but never get near.
And I am not talking about the bare minimum semblance of love,
or the friend who must eat food without me to feel accepted in this world.
Now that is out of the way,
we can all imagine with utmost accuracy and pity
everything that is definitely on this list of mine.
Things I know the price of
because my pockets are empty.
The kind of empty a drop of dew feels
in front of a desert(even the smallest one).
This is not even a smallness fueled by insecurity or class consciousness.
This is the lens of pure objectivity at work,
which I sort of stupidly relied on to cure me, stop me
from showering my attention
to something that challenges my place in world
in the wake of release of a random new replaceable product in market.
which is sort of weird because
I do not know the price of the meal I eat
or the clothes I wear –
I feel them.
So I know better. I really do.
But the billboards that fly over the cities
-abducting cows, and UFOs, and fixed deposits, and basic sanity-
make me want to dial the number to someone, anyone
who can get me a card
that, I am told, can get me every luxury I do not yet deserve.
To my credit, I never dialed that number
simply because wanting something that was designed to be wanted
seemed stupid,
poking a hole into the balloon of my existence for it
seemed stupid.
In the list of more stupid things I can now “not want”
are grand expectations of a basic acceptable life, minimum respect,
of love, of family, of wanting a fair chance at a dream,
of food that tastes like food,
and air that doesn’t clog my lungs.
I am told that at a price one can have them all
but to the one who is barely afloat it sure is a stupid thing to want.

“All this for nothing” – Nayana Nair

.

And this is the sorry sorry state
in which I find myself
after everything is done.
The checklist can now be torn
and thrown away in this trash can
that sits like a queen in this empty street.
And I sit like an attendant beside it
filled with vomit and dread
and thoughts of “now what? now what?
now what?” circling my head
like vultures who prey on words born out of
insecurities. Insecurities that should have died long ago
if not for the people who love you
and who need you to have these flaws
to feel comfortable around you.

They are so convinced that they will drown
that the only thing they promise you is a death together
and it is actually very romantic…
to see them take a knife and peel of a layer of their skin
and hand it back to you so that you can do the same to them,
so you can smile at each other, convincing each other,
that this is what everyone does,
this is what goes on in everyone’s life,
that this is somehow normal,
that this is love.
Because it was still better than every other hollow feeling
that you get from this world
that would only leave you wanting for god-knows-what.

This is the road of betterment though.
So things have changed a lot. I don’t handle knives anymore.
I don’t leave my body unattended in hands of strangers.
I don’t curse at people who tell me that I need help
(though I still feel that I should give them an earful).
I have forced my way out of that life.
I have quit my demons. I have quit lOvE.
I have quit things that hurt me with the promise of life.
It is almost the end.

It was supposed to be fine now. But now,
no matter how much I ring the door of better life,
no one answers.
It is night and I hear voices calling me back.
There are people out there that I have promised to die with
and they will be here for me anytime.
And if I see them, I will probably walk into their arms
and all this will be for nothing.
I know I shouldn’t be crying over this.
If anything the world of sanity
seems to be as unreliable and as irresponsible
as my friends who fill their head with smoke
and drive into the nearest wall.

“now it is my turn” – Nayana Nair

.

her touch – always a procession
of feelings that won’t leave her heart,
of everything she doesn’t have or even want words for.

i hold back her hand and it all quiets down-
the waves, the death, the crashing planes,
and the flying roofs.
the cities in her mind grow silent.
they- the tiny inhabitants, the ugly parasites
in her heart,
they look at me as if i am an enemy,
and yet smile at me, as if i am one of them.

they wait for her to smile at this, which she does.
she tells me she is fine. in the same tone
in which i use to tell her the same lie.
she leans in and touches my cheeks.
now it is my turn to go silent.
now my cities and their helpless monsters wait
to see where she leads this madness to.

“Temperaments and Thoughts” – Nayana Nair

We once loved this world
more than ourselves.
Now we just like everything
only as much as our own temperaments and thoughts permit.

The oranges reminds him of view from his broken home,
the sour taste of everything that should have been beautiful.

The glowing beads fill my mind with the images of meaningless gifts,
the faces of men and friends that always fall short
even in the face if my plummeting expectations.

Going out of our way to hide
is the measure of our love somehow.
We sit across each other for every meal
and talk about things that make sense,
everything and anything that can’t cause more harm
than the things close to our heart have already done.

I feel the rustle of a world buried deep in me,
he must feel the same.
But the world that is lost and the hope that is no longer mine
can only do so little.
There is a happiness that doesn’t look enchanting.
There is a kindness that isn’t grand.
There are things only we can be for each others
even if there are thousand things we can’t.

I would have told him “I love you”
if I didn’t know how hearing these words
have only made him cry.
He lets me love within the boundary
of my temperament and thoughts,
he stands by these walls and knows why they are for.

“50 goodbyes a day” – Nayana Nair

There are no dances waiting for us,
no innocent moments of sunlight,
no darkness or headlights striking our windows,
nothing worth the wait.
We are stranded here in this life.
We are stranded on a planet
far away from our home-
a home that becomes more and more beautiful,
the more we are convinced there is no way back.

Here the days are longer than our lifespan combined.
Here we record 50 goodbyes to ourselves a day.
The air, the hurricanes,
the rain, the smile,
this peace of mind
are all just luminescent chemicals
that delivers more than its promise
of a near death exhilaration.

The rainbow of lies is our constant sky
the friend we cannot live without.
It is the only thing
that helps us live with the dust of betrayal
that settles on the clothes left out to dry-
another thing we much dust away and forget,
another thing we must do to be called a “good sport”.

I sit here knitting another version
of my beautiful glorious past,
another tribute to the world filled with rare ordinary
and you sit across me
complaining about what the world has come to
as you paint my brain to match the new you-
one less insecurity in this perfect world.

“Sweet Nothings” – Nayana Nair

i crawl into another embrace,
scratch the surface of my fake love
to find something true.
hopes.
hopes.
is this what they call hope?
it must be.

the coffee turns cold as my story ends.
again i am wearing a skin i have stolen.
the one breathing beside me
has a knack for sad stories recited by happy girls,
of being a knight to one he doesn’t have to save.

me,
i love drowning the world in sadness
(the only way i can take anyone’s breath away)
i love leaving loose ends,
leaving people behind-
i call it the fear of being left behind.
i have a list of similar innocent motivation
for every mess i make, for the mess i have become.

when he leaves
i throw away the coffee he never drinks.
i get over my urge to be seen for what i am.
i dip my fingers into another color
that he might like, or at least remember.

“The day we held hands” – Nayana Nair

The silence wrapping our words
was not born out of a deed or two.
Or out of lack of love.
We didn’t wake up one day
and began feeling alone.
The day we held hands,
we felt the alienation
that only love can bring.
No great love can
change what we were.
Where the plains of our own
lives and its insecurities met
there we see a crack,
to remind us everyday
that we never fit with each other.