“Once, my heart…”- Nayana Nair

.

They set me down softly.
The cloth made of stars and leaves,
laid to rest on my heart.
My heart, once a gaping hungry mouth,
a volcano ready to freeze
all life, all skin that roam and breathe
within its realm. The tyrant helpless ruler
of the subjects that bleed in their sleep
as they murmur their pleas, reciting memories
it can’t bear to listen to.
My heart,
a café lit with dying songs and cheap menu,
a landscape of wrecks well-hidden.
My heart, a sceptic, now sits in a structure of wood,
with its half-written paper
on “questionable power of blood”
sprawled on its desk,
while it waits for the final burning
wearing that one warm worn-down love,
that somehow still breathes.

“Forgetting” – Nayana Nair

.

Is forgetting something like

descending down the the narrow white steps
and finding myself knee deep
in the coolest spring on the hottest day of year.
An year that I feel I am yet to live,
a temperature that feels a bit too familiar.

Is forgetting something like

looking back at the steps and trying to recall
where I am from, trying to recreate the horrors or happiness
that I am running from,
Wondering if I was actually running.
A part of me begging me to go back,
a part that keeps saying that where I came from
was the only place I ever wanted to belong to.

Is forgetting something like

being brought back to the year,
that I am trying to avoid looking at,
by the receding cold water,
to see my feet run
after the blue shadow, the floating leaves,
the place no summer can reach.

Is forgetting something like

reaching a place
far away from the narrow, broken stairs to past,
but also a place where no springs, no summer exist.
In such a place without symbolisms and signs
I keep finding
another pitiful deity of broken and beautiful hope.

Is forgetting something like

finding faith, loving again, blindly believing.
To close my eyes, to the me that I am now,
just to hear myself running down the stairs,
just to feel the water find my feet again.

Winds Howl

.

“Over the wintry
forest, winds howl in rage
with no leaves to blow.

– Natsume Sōseki

“Before we are set in stone” – Nayana Nair

She stood ten steps away from me.
Smiling the sort of smile
I thought I would never see again.
The leaves and their shadows,
the broken light
only for us tonight.
I remember the how I loved her
as the wind rushes to hold her.
She, the mast of our broken ship,
asks me how I have been.

My fingers that ache for hers
hide behind me.
This is the answer that she wants
The simple answer
that can be nothing more than longing.
Longing is all I can feel, that’s how I create one incomplete world after another.
Longings are my wings that break me apart,
are my roads to run away.

My longings have so often been her dark room,
the flash that sees her cry,
her weary thin heart spread on mine,
her food and wrist going cold.

Ten steps away
I told her goodbye
when I could have told her prettier words –
words she would eventually lose faith in.
How tragic it would be.
So before the leaves could fall and dissolve on her shoulder,
make her yet another victim of hope.
Before we are set in stone.
I knew I must make my exit.
She is beautiful
I hope she remains so.
I hope I forget her again,
I hope this time it is easier.

“Nothing can be greater” – Nayana Nair

The story that sleeps in me
it never talks of you or me.
I wait till it speaks,
till it sees.
I wait till I no longer have to convince myself
that “yours” is all I want to be.
But the story that repeats itself
tells me not to bother
with saying things I do not mean.
There is a sun in the sky
that is smaller than the hunger in my heart
and nothing can be greater than the my need to be seen.
and that all the eyes that fall on my lonesome drooping figure
will wander when I start to bloom, when I start to speak.
The story that sleeps in me
sings about how everyone leaves.