“Luminous” – Nayana Nair

The night doesn’t quite reach my land.
There are columns and mountains of light
that my people have given themselves to.

I never roll down my windows.
There is a scent of death in the air.
I don’t want to remember
how burning is painful.

In my mind I run towards the memories
of my perspective correction classes.
I pick out a card, a line that works the most
“burning is luminous”.

Yes, burning is lumious.
Burning is magic, burning is beautiful.
It is beautiful as long as I don’t hear the cries
of one being burnt. It is magic
as long as I don’t ask
for confirmation of my worst fears being true
from the others who never open their windows.

There is red in the news no one talks about,
there is red in the names that disappear over night,
there is red splattered inside the world in my head
but the world is suspiciously clean even when all I smell is death.

When I close my eyes, it is never dark.
Something burns before me, I am always aware of it.
I wonder if I would ever know sleep again.

“Mess” – Nayana Nair

A shadow moves in the clearing ahead
avoiding the columns of lighted air.
It steps on the green
now splattered with red
and looks for a hand that can help,
to get rid of this blood.
It finds my face and looks away
seeing probably I am in a bigger mess.

“Undone” – Nayana Nair

The world drips down.
One drop at time.
Dragging and blurring
the colors
that marks the edges
that separate all of us.
A drop too heavy,
a drop too light.
And as it splatters
into smaller drops.

My love and my peace
are droplets fallen far apart.
My happiness and my people,
my dreams and my courage,
exist in different planes,
different moments
confusing me
of what I am,
of what should I choose to be.

And there falls another drop
and someone else
also gets to know,
what it means to be undone
and scattered.
And how beautiful it was
that a droplet of your pain
fell on my droplet of love.
How beautiful,
that a new world was colored
in the drops of the one destroyed.