“Telling Signs” – Nayana Nair

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“Does rust affect plastic dreams?”
I ask my teacher in my sleep.
She takes out an axe and starts cutting down
the first mouth filled with wrong answers.
Two rows away
she wipes her brows and folds her sleeves,
she takes another deep breath
before she checks the attendance sheet
and finds the next dream to kill.

She tells me I should think more and ask more
and ask the questions that help me live.
She looks at the metal that grows out of my pores
and gives me another chance.
She says only if I would try to be better
than the people I am clinging to, I could grow up to be her.
I look away from the blood that flowing down her neck,
the parts of her that she intends to kill by holding other’s breath.

“What about my mother’s arms, weak weak exhausted arms?
Are those my telling signs?
Does that mean I don’t have to worry,
that I am just someone next in line?
What about you? Do you rust like me?
Would the color of my rust, would my weakened heart
make me worth protecting,
make me deserving of kinder words?

She told me “It will not get you respect or equality,
if that’s what you are looking for.
It can sure get you love, of some kind, for some time
but it is just a matter of time
before you see the end that only you can write.
And you would end up writing it
cause that painful end would be more truer and more yours
than any love that you find by compromise.”

As she walks past me, smiling lovingly,
as she spares my life, that now she owns.
As she dissolves my only way back,
I realize too late, that my chaos and my doubts
were more hopeful than an answer like this
that promises pain to everyone else but me.

“I cannot tell the difference”- Nayana Nair

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“Long time ago” is a dangerous neighborhood.
All its season are holograms of perfect world,
the illusions of rain and snow and sun,
the illusion of hearts still beating under the non-existent skin.
The technician of this a weary magic
lives beside the empty park in the middle of my heart.
He knows the perfect days to make me cry, to make me see.
He invents new people, new details.
Sometime these are fake stand-ins for the what he has lost
in his war against me, all that I intend to forget.
Sometime they are what I failed to realize,
people I didn’t get to love.
Most days I can’t tell the difference
between the words I have forgotten
and the ones I will never hear
again.
This town
has post offices with stamps of words I no longer mean
stuck on its wall.
There cars and houses and roads and rivers
owned by people who will never die.
They all gather on my birthday
in the cemetery of one grave.
They sit on the endless green grass with their picnic baskets,
with the kids I will never have, with the pets I will never keep
and look into the eyes that will never look at me.
They smile knowing something I will never know.

“All the boxes are checked” – Nayana Nair

It hurts a bit more naturally
and less violently,
now that betrayal has a range,
has not one but many faces.
Now I need not figure what I did wrong.

All the boxes are checked:

family, family, friends, not friends,
thank-god-we-were-never-friends friends,
i-am-sad-i-stood-up-for-you friends,
people who marked my skin with their name
to own me
while i slept in their arms
(another golden cup added to collection of people hard to get,
people who won’t die if thrown away or left alone)
loves whom i am tied to,
the ones who demand smile and sometimes a bit more,
always a bit more.

They know the feel of my hand and love how it heals.
They hold my hand in their sleep
in their nightmares, in the storms of passion
that they need a person to aim at.
They break my wrist
in my nighmares, in my awareness of my fruitless love.
When I am at verge of crying,
they tell me to not give them a hard time
and to act like the refuge that I am supposed to be.

So I tell them “I love you”
and this lie hurts a little less everyday
as my heart becomes the stone pedestal
all my loves stand on.

“Show You Around” – Nayana Nair

Let me show you around.
This place that you think as mine
will soon be yours one day.
Especially because you will want to own this mess
more than you want to own my heart.
And though my eyes might roll
at the sound of the word “own”
but that’s just how things are.

One day we might yearn for each other’s glance.
And slowly with unsure lips we pray for more-
for some sweet words, for a secret to keep
for happiness of a day, for hands that don’t let go.
And soon with love drunk lips we demand more-
for reasons, for time we never seem to have,
for guarantees, for becoming better than what we are.

And that day when you will have all that you demand
and still feel like I have not given it all.
Come to this room, and see this mess.
These old clothes, old words;
these unwashed plates with leftover moldy attention.
And realize why I don’t want you here-
in this museum of what I was.
This is not the world I want to share with you.
Can’t we build a better one.

“Who seem to know a lot” – Nayana Nair

Nothing scares me more than people
who seem to know a lot about world,
who seem to know every answer
to every problem.
Especially when the answer
is that the weight and blame of this
collapsing world
only lies on shoulder of few.
And answers mostly revolve about how
not every one is equal.
I urge those people to make their homes in these
boxes of labels that they use as weapon
against people who were just living their own life
and live their life avoiding any thing
that might break their illusion of self-righteousness.
For that is all they have.
Nothing scares me more
than a person who thinks
what he thinks is best for the world,
who thinks that emotions and lives
are disposable things,
in front of the grand plan he has
for himself and this world that only he supposedly owns.

“River” – Nayana Nair

Rivers of people
crowded the alleys of my mind.
Every thought of mine
had to go through them.
And they were relentless.
By the time it made through them,
it was not the same.
That beautiful new born thought
had turned into a old stranger.
I learned one thing
that I can never have a thought
or an action
that is truly my own.
And even when the building and the skies
of my mind decay,
the people in those alleys will live on.

“Better without us” – Nayana Nair

The dust that lay on the page
that I left open long ago
is now a page on it’s own,
with a story its own.
I look at it and read
negligence and loneliness.
I read how things are forgotten
so easily
and how things are treated as things
by people who
live their life accumulating things
and rest half of it
misplacing, destroying,
replacing and forgetting them.
How people are treated on similar lines
but worse.
How we come back to claim our possessions
when they can clearly exist better
without us.

“Hobby”- Nayana Nair

My hobby is
to find an unclaimed space in myself
and then try to color it.
Because I am bored.
Because I have trouble
that are taking up much more spaces
and this is the only space left for me
in my own life.
And here I create,
I paint my desperation, self-doubt
on the whites of my eyes.
Again I create a monster,
again a little more space I lost,
again I lost a little of my life,
and I wonder why do I suffocate myself.

“Every time”- Nayana Nair

Every time I left a place,
running late to catch my train,
with so much luggage
which made me wonder
do I really own so much
and wondered why
I thought I had nothing
or maybe someone always had
something more than me.
Every time I left
it was with so much haste
and panic,
always afraid of leaving something behind.
There were so many places like this
which I found and left,
with so much ease,
with no emotions to account for.
The only thing I remember is
how it rained,
every time I left.