“The Night Wind” – Nayana Nair

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The light bulb blooms.
The petals of light, the tungsten
burning red and hot- invites, sings, thinks only
of the memory of wings.
The burning, the bodies and their count,
the trivial data, the remains of feeble lives
pile up only to be blown away by the night wind.
Far way, the plastic chairs rustle like grass,
as everyone leaves with their lips
stained and bleeding with illusions.
In the silence of the backyard,
I alone hear the wings drop like rain.
I look at my own charred and mauled self
and ridiculously, think of love, only of love.
I realize something is truly wrong
with this world that I’m caught in.

“Rewrite love” – Nayana Nair

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How are you?
Are you still there where we learnt to leave?
Since you left
I have changed my address a few times already.
My heart doesn’t lie broken
on the streets that only you could walk.
I find it funny and interesting and sad
that once I believed in “one and only love”,
that once I believed that I have found
what the rest of the world could not.

My hands don’t feel like my hands now,
Now that my hands
have reached out for love even after you.
My mind doesn’t feel like my mind,
now that my mind can forget any hurt caused by love,
now that my mind can easily rewrite love as something else
something trivial, something passing by,
something non-existent,
the moment I am near another light-filled human
who only wants a breaking out of me.

I feel less like myself, the more I heal myself.
Whatever grows out of me
doesn’t want to be anything like the person you loved,
the person I was so proud to be,
the person who couldn’t live without wounds.

It hurts less in the body I am now in.
It hurts less to know finally
that I am more than enough
to fill the void of my own size – the everyday lacking
that I always felt I needed to do something about.

I find it funny and interesting and sad
that I could learn to live only by losing you,
by learning to walk away from you.

“Fading Heaven” – Nayana Nair

You asked
“Is this what becomes of love?
When this star falls and loses it’s distance,
when it loses it’s light
does it become nothing more than a stone
to be kicked around?”

I knew better than to tell you
that the stars do not care
for such trivial things as our love,
that the stars are more than mere stones,
when they fall they will take us as well
and that no one up in the fading heaven
is rooting for our happy end.

So I stay silent,
never meeting your eye.
I won’t let you see
all the faults of ours
that swims only in my eye.
I don’t want to say things
that I don’t want to come true.
One of us needs to be blind to reality
for this love to continue.

“Slip every time” – Nayana Nair

There is one step
where I slip every time.
And just because I know now to jump across it,
doesn’t mean it ceased to exist.
It just means I have to keep reminding myself
what to avoid.
Sadly, the trivial betrayals and their deeper hurt
doesn’t reform my trusting heart.
My aloofness is just a way to ensure
that others don’t know of this.

“Same World” – Nayana Nair

From where I sit
I see the beauty that moves my heart
and makes me realize
why I am alive till now.
And though I love you
and wish to see the world with you,
I could never gather enough courage
so as to tug your sleeve
and ask you to follow my gaze.

…

I fear you will look at what I see
and mock my eyes, my mind
to be fascinated by the things
that for you are trivial.
Worse, if you take me away from the beauty I found
for you know better things.
Worse, if you refuse to look back
for you have better things to do.

…

I wish I could tell you my heart,
tell you my fears, tell you about the minutes
of my life where sometimes I feel I am trapped,
and sometimes set free in a world I cannot share with anyone.
It is enough, I guess, that I can hear your steps beside me
and believe that we are in the same world,
even when we are not.