“Love now is…always a new unbecoming” – Nayana Nair

.

You ask me
how long will we continue this?
How many times will we
sew back our affections
to each others skin,
when we both want
something better
than these patched-up rags.

While in my dark corner,
in the place you made for me,
the needle pricks my hand again.
“Sorry”, I say it not knowing why
but meaning it more than I should.
Blood blooms like a flame
and melts my blindness.
Love now is,
and maybe always was
a strange animal
clawing at my thin life
crying in the tongue of warmth.

Yet, I carry your broken head,
this machine fed with songs of leaving,
just as you carry the remains of my spine,
a relic that outlived every end.
A “sorry” you offer me
without my asking,
which could mean anything.
Love now is,
and maybe always will be
my tired hands
scraping your skin
to find your heart.

“I wrote it all with dread” – Nayana Nair

.

The sharp edge on your voice
brings back the glowing face of my father
talking about the descent of world
with an bright animated hatred,
his hands folding around the hilt
of an absent necessary knife,
as he ignored my own hands
tearing away at the dictionary,
gouging out some weak heart
from another chest of mine.
I wrote a song about his presence,
his looming beautiful voice,
about the ceilings of the world
that bent down to touch his blessed head.
“He will be soon gone”,
I repeated that line again and again
not knowing where to lead that feeling to.
I repeated the same pathetic show
to soothe his nerves, the same growing
of small violent flowers in his ashtrays,
as his drink swirled in the glass,
as it all devoured him slowly,
as I wrote again “soon he will be gone,
and I’ll be left behind to take his place.”

“I nod with a smile knowing what it means” – Nayana Nair

.

The sea in the cold basement
rises and falls and collapse around his moon eyes.
Last year, he was a deer forever running into shining lights.
Only yesterday, he was melting the roads he walked on.
Today his hands are cold and yet steady.
He speaks of himself, of me, of this world
in a voice of wind and thunder and love.
And after being other thousand things
I also have become today this light
that can find its origin to him.
The white perfect sails
of all that was and all that could have been
are drowning on every horizon.
“But nothing is ever lost.” he says,
“Everything comes back. Everything continues
to illuminate some life, somewhere.”

“even if you become my story, my only story, as the rest of me dissolves” – Nayana Nair

.

Even if this moment casts me to hell*,
even if this is a seed of hurt
that will soon be my new skin,
as long as your spirit embraces me
there would be only spring,
there would only be morning birds,
and silent roads filled with your sweet footsteps.

“changing light bulbs” – Nayana Nair

.

this tiny sun,
this lovely creation
how it shines, and how it dies.
it flickers like a dying trapped firefly.
it raises a lightning on our pages
that we have spread out to dream on.
we pull and drag a tiny sleeping tree
that we never sit on
and find a way to rests it against the sky-
this sky that is almost always falling down.
i climb without looking back
for i know you are holding my ground.
as another cloud rushes past my cheeks,
as i pluck another proof of death ,
i feel your fingers lingering on my ankles.
i feel the first storm of spring in my mind.
i look down at you and smile
and you smile back
as you take the dead orb
and sad prophesies from my hands
and hand me a new sun,
the one that you brought on your way back from work
just because you saw me look at the fading light with worry last night.
my tiny sun, how can you love me like that?
you look at me and give a tiny clap
the moment i am done placing the sun back in the sky,
you look at me as if i invented life.
even if you are mistaken,
it is beautiful though
to see you wearing your silly delicate beliefs
only for me to see.

“These Roles” – Nayana Nair

.

You smile
as you place the plates on table,
as you serve meals made of fire
in front of my body growing cold.

You smile
as you drag your feet
from the threshold of the door,
as you run towards the world,
as you swim back towards me.
Knowing, always knowing
that I also feel the weight of this water on us.
So you smile a bit more
and always rush to me to as if you are the lost child
when you also know the muddled one is only me.

I feel your doubts soften in my embrace
thinking of all that i have been and all that I ever could be,
all that you will ever love and never need.
And in my turn, I summon a smile thinking of what you are,
of the gentleness of your soul, of this genuine heart.
And just like our hands that are never still
trying to mimic and catch up to the heart of the other,
we are forever melting between these roles.
And because it is so,
because even this small me can save you with a smile.
I can love you even when you get wounded in my hold.
I can love you even with a guilty heart.

“i cry blood and drink blood. i live another day. still shamelessly wanting.” – Nayana Nair

.

I am a fearful soul.
I can only hold the hands
that can break under my grip,
hearts that do not know
of their power over me.

I fear, no one would believe
in my fragile nature,
nor pity my deteriorating state
once I start breaking others
before eventually breaking myself.

My breaking is not my secret
even if it is an act that is remembered
only by my own hands, my own skin.
It remains a fabled tale
of the last death without spectators.

It lives to dissolve into the stronger truths,
it dissolves into the concrete results
that are now engraved with names
that were breathing just yesterday.

I walk to them
with cruel empty hands,
with loud disrespectful steps,
with brazen breath daring to still flow.

I take their name with my own,
with a sadness,
as if some part of me
has died with them as well.
As if I know anything about dying.

“Oddly Enough” – Nayana Nair

.

Somehow I feel that
the ropes that we walked on
for each others sake
were never really ropes
but figment of our imagination
stretching from your mind to mine
connecting centers of chaos
and wanting and hatred without direction.

Once I thought we stood together
against everything else,
against every force of reality.
But now that my sockets have grown eyes
and now that we have moved so far away from
our self-indulgent blindness
that we could never separate ourself from.

Now every glimpse of past is sad and pitiful.
Looking back why does it seem
we were just clinging to each other
as if we were each other’s last hope.
As if we let go, we would never know happiness of any kind.
As if we held on, we could change each other
and find in each others changing a reason to smile.

But thankfully or regrettably, I have not grown much
cause sometimes I feel thankful to you
for sharing all the dark moments with me
even if you caused half of them.
I feel oddly grateful to you
for sharing my pitiful fate, my mundane days,
my cycles of planned and impulsive destruction,
for walking with me to our day of separation.

I hope that we find happiness in future
without pinning our hopes on the ruin of another.
I hope we see the ruin when our hands begin to create one.
It was not all bad. Or maybe it was worse than I remember.
Oddly enough I wouldn’t change our fates.
But I will never wish for it again.

“Our knowing of faith” – Nayana Nair

.

“What do you know of prayers?” she asked,
as she held my hands together within her own.
I asked her “Don’t you know anything about me?”
and there appeared another crack on her hands,
there bloomed another rose in her hair
there was another smile – the “looking down” smile,
“you don’t know any better” smile,
“you will soon thank me” smile,
“I know you hate my smile” smile.
I tried to imitate it, to drape it on my own face.
Cause even if it didn’t seem like that, I loved her smile.

I stared at her smile
wanting to save it somewhere in me. I stared
at her small beautiful parts
wanting to un-see the person she is in this moment.
I am always trying
to forget how suffocated these moments with her are.
I am always trying to forget
that with her words of love there was always a plea,
a suggestion, a manipulation – to make me something like her.

Would it make me seem pathetic, petty, or romantic?
if i called her a poison. Though everyone here is a poison,
even me, but she is a poison for me, the only poison
that works on me. The only one I didn’t want a death from.
She tells me about another deity I will never believe in.
She tells me a bit more about saving, about faith, about her own self
that can never be broken, how even breaking can’t end her now.
I wished she was right, I wished there would be never an end to her.

I wished for all kinds of ends for myself,
even the ones without her. But in no version
did I invent an agreeable version of her that will better for me.
She has to be herself. Whatever that might mean for me.
I wonder if there would come a day like that, a day when
she would love me like that. Do I even want a day like that?
Can I even tolerate a change in her?
Wouldn’t that break me more than anything?

I get up and say something about “better things to do”
and she says something about “the dangers to the faithless”
and I can only smile for now
at this weird, beautiful, messed up part of our life
at our of differences, knowing of love,
at our knowing of faith in different things that save us in their own ways.

“green branch” – Nayana Nair

.

only the lips of hope,
the planets that break in sunlight,
the dreams that never forget
that they are made with love
but also with vapors that can only dissipate
and lose form eventually, slowly….taking
my form with them
into the void of love.
only this would do. only this i can welcome.
only this i can hold.
only the lips of hope that won’t utter my name,
the hands that won’t let me go,
this violent landscape
with the only green branch in this world.
only those i know to be real.
only that i know to be love.