“In the forest of reality” – Nayana Nair

.

Ghost of fireflies
in the forest of reality-
that is me,
that is you,
that is so much of what we don’t want to be.
But if it has to stay beautiful,
if it has to stay clean,
it must be this.

We must meet without meeting.
We must love without loving.
We must walk this path that we believe in
more than we believe in any love.

I close my eyes and tell myself,
“I don’t believe, I won’t believe”
even as the storms of despair
and the clear sky of your existence
are the only thing I know to be true.

You tell me,
“We must breathe the reality
and worship the fleeting.”
So I hold my hands together
again without a prayer on my lips.

I am afraid of prayers.
Unlike you (or maybe just like you)
I am always at the verge of wishing
for some real crumbs of you,
of wanting to stray from the “right”.

“The thought of losing you” – Nayana Nair

Today you are silent
and you don’t care.
You have changed
without changing anything about you.
You don’t want to be concerned with
should-be or could-be
as all that matters is what is.
what-is is a fact that needs no forgiveness
from what-didn’t-come-to-be.
You beg me not drag you down
into the waters of the past, “They are ugly
they are hard, they are things that we can’t have.”
is all you say about the life we once had.
what-didn’t-come-to-be is an ocean I must swim alone,
an ocean that just grows and grows deeper and wider
cause I can’t seem to stop hoping from you.

In the forms of “Renewal and Hope”,
in the forms of “Happy Married Life Again?”,
you fill the reason as “wandering and its joys”.
So I burn up all such papers
where you won’t look me in the eye
and tell me the truth
or at least some believable lie.
I burn away this life
where you wander in every direction but mine.
Where I am not wrong for you,
you just don’t want me to be the right.
“It scares me”, you once said, “the thought of losing you.”
How well you have grown, how far you have strayed
from your words, from yourself, and from everything
that you once happily called fate.

“The Dying Voices of my Angels” – Nayana Nair

Hold this,
whatever this is.

Hold this
till I find a way to hide it,
get rid of it,
or kill it.

They say I will die the moment
I set the monster in me ablaze.
But this is the reason
warnings no longer work on me.

This is why I cannot live the way I want.

This is why ‘what I now want’
is ‘what I never ever wanted to want’.

Don’t take pity on me
nor on this thing that eats me
and replaces my every cell
with hateful words
and spiteful actions.

Why are you holding me down?
Why are you holding me back?
Why do you want to preserve me like this-
at my worst?

I am becoming better at creating excuses.
I am becoming better at forgetting the hurt I cause.

It kills me to see myself straying away from my ideals.
Doesn’t that matter a bit?