Catapult

I’m here again, because of you. In a different home; a radically different person than whom I would’ve thought I could craft myself into. After being with two different people at two crucial periods of my life, and neither of them were you.
Neither could I love them like I loved you.

A series of ill-timed serendipitous events may have catapulted me into writing again, of you.

This is the most meant-to-be we have ever been
A muse and a poet, the cliché throughout the ages, as seen
And I know not how I’ve progressed so far
Archiving the structure of my feelings in char
An ink I’ve brewed from blackened memories of you
Wrung with tear streaked hands and you
You knock again as I refill the tools I need
To arm myself with against your greed
Although I could never figure out what charms to use
Except the verses incised on my door
To ward off your ruse

Free.

Free.

Is a word. Understated. A word so sprawled across, it defies its very definitions. Winged with defiance it invites us, to realms we perceived to be off-limits.

Free. Like one of its many symbols, is a bird, overtaking the skies with its magnanimity and its shadow is equipped with solidarity, a mere dark heraldic shape, of hope.

But free. Freedom. Isn’t pure. It bathes in the waters of those who have inflicted without cause and reasoning, and those, especially those, who have inflicted. It’s a pain that knows no good, no evil –  Its affliction blinds it of discernment. And in its moment of existence, all it identifies with is fire. Molten in veins, charred skin, and salt rubbed in wounds kind of fire.

Free. Is a release. A contamination which brews a preference to rather be  burned than sustain off the poisonous swamp its planted in. It’s an uprooting, an achievement that arrives a few generations late.

Free. Is unholy. It’s born of sacrifices and requires bloodshed. An extinguisher of bloodlines of hatred and stigma. It breathes shallow breaths in its captivity, and is often slaughtered in its conception.

Free. Is not a tamed bird of societal aesthetics. It does not carry with it the scent of lavender and roses, nor the connotations of conformity.

Free. Is an eagle, a vulture, a hawk, a vigilant owl. It’s cloaked in the stench of hunt. Bleeding, clawing, talons out. It reeks of flesh torn from barbed wire, pus from blisters, and dirt caked onto sweaty skin.

Free. Is wild, it’s a primal instinct. A force against all that flows towards destruction, desolation, and despair.

Free. Is a restorer of ruins.

Free. Is a horizon. Of possibilities.

The Edge

The abyss was a living monstrosity, heaving its charcoal chest, and billowing soot in minuscule wisps. 

I stood by the edge, the brink of an era, the last line of a chapter. The period ending a period.

A vastness lay before me, stretching farther on than I intended to fathom.

I stood frozen, clichédly in that moment, vaguely realizing that it wasn’t a moment that was lasting forever, but rather a forever that could end any moment now.

Fear, desperation, apprehension, thoughts shifting and forming into categories. I feel it, a throbbing pulse in my veins, echoing and beckoning from the nothingness of the everythingness.

I stand there. It’s veiled like a widowed bride in the hues of darkness. A nightly curtain awaiting to be drawn aside. With gallantry or shyness, I’m unable to decide. Does this require my brazenness or the gentleness hidden behind it?

But this is it. Is this it?

Does it lie beyond these velvet veils?

In the core of the pit?

The great beyond?

The future?

The… Future.

The end of my predicament, the release from this imprisonment. From the only life I’ve known, and lived.

All of it will fall away, one step ahead.

Fear. Dread. Confusion. Blank.

The opacity of this forever-moment chills me into forgetting the journeys I’ve conquered behind.

A long time ago, I stopped picturing the future. It felt like an illusion I’d finally evaded enough to overlook.

Pain. Hurt. Hopeless. Helpless. Out of options.

The chasm  threatens to swallow me whole, the veils will blind me with revelations.

The pressure builds, pulsating, summoning. Wondering whether I’ll be empowered by the blinding light, or remain unsuccessful at detaching myself from the engulfing darkness – I take that step, with bated breath,  barely scraping my foot against the edge, a tilt in my vision, my fingertips faintly brushing the silken of the mystic folds.

The future.

The abyss. The unknown. The feared. The desired. The sacrificed.

Unveils.

And like a burst of the Aurora in all its  glory and theatricality, an explosion of blinding lights, splitting the dark into the most magnificent spectrum of visual symphony, I witness a mere glimpse of the great mortal beyond, before…

I’m frozen mid-fall. Back facing the yawning oblivion, arm outstretched towards the absent warmth of luminescence that wouldn’t reach me.

An outcry dying mid-throat.

It vanishes, imploding, sucked into itself, closing the opening, my only exit forward.

The radiance strenuously emblazoned onto my vision, as my pupils readjust to the truth.

I’m frozen mid-fall.

It’s black again. Black, black. Dark, night.

And the forever-moment has tricked me into believing, into tripping and straying from my rigid belief in uncertainty.

Once again.

The silence floods my senses.

Once again.

Black.

Knock

Her skin had more words on it than freckles. Every movement shed them off her like motes of dust and yet there was always more. These were her thoughts, but her feelings ran much deeper.

Often someone was in her veins like coffee, she drowned herself in its bitterweetness. Grudgingly she distracted herself from that name, a name she loved saying out loud, a name she immersed herself in the taste of.

Her thoughts were as tangled as her lazy curls, all of the same shade, awaiting someone’s touch to untangle them. A touch so faraway, so beyond the horizon. They saw not the same sunrises or sunsets, walked not in the same rains. And yet a link was established, as words were exchanged, hearts entangled, and broken pieces fit together.

She felt him in the smoky haze of incense, twirling around her fingers, fragrant every touch. She saw him in things that constantly reminded her of his words.

And yet.

She sought to forget him.

When words grew less, and silences wrought heaviness, she sought to forget him.

When he said not how he felt, and in his fortified heart he dwelt, she sought to forget him.

Entombed within her heart, when he’d become her art, she sunk and frowned, drunk and drowned, as he kept his quiet, she grew desperate to forget.

Locked within her walls, as music deafened her thoughts, and books claimed her attention…

He knocked again.

Tinder

See, that’s my problem. That’s what irks me on those intensely reflective nights, when I’m sipping on retrospection and starving from the supposable lack of future prospects.

Even the night’s breath reeks of stale thoughts that steal their way into my lungs as I toss and turn, rowing through the ever changing stream of memories in my sleep deprived head, each creek leading to a bigger, deeper pool of pain.

That thing, those four damned words what no ink can express, the sentiment no paint can illustratively do justice to — that bothers me. When irrational reasons and self doubt loop around my ankles, inviting me to the murky depths, shouldn’t I let go? Sink, drown, die. Be freed of this world, decades worth of life that I haven’t been allowed to freely breathe through? Where the bad has been stamped all over with seeming permanency?

This is tinder. For every time my fire is all but gone, when it’s nothing more than a sputtering bunch of sparks and dimmed embers.

This fiercely guarded secret I’d kept from myself.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget what those words stand for.

Sometimes too hard to.

I say it, not louder than a whisper, not quieter than a breath.

Exhaling the smoke that had unsteadied me.

I say…

I ache to live. 

Emotional hurt

I love emotional hurt. I love how it enters you like a dagger and twists.
Twists you, your heart, your gut, wrenching them mercilessly.
I love emotional hurt and its cousins. Sorrows and grievances, heartbreaks and disappointments. All so simply related and complexly heartless at leaving you a wreck for impossibly long periods of time. All so capable of disabling your thinking capacity, letting uninvited people reside in your heart, and take over your mind. Ruthless!
And I love more the people who inflict and evoke emotions of such intensity, you’re at a loss of words as to whether to hate them or continue being helplessly in love with them.
Love. Ah! What a word, what grandness, what wretched foolishness!
Hurt guaranteed.
We writers, poets, artists, THRIVE on these. They kill us, and we find life in it, more alive, more creativity bursting from us.
We’re like grave-diggers and grave-robbers.
And we love pain. In John Green’s words, “That’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.”.
We feel it, deep within, we hold it in cupped hands, and drink from it. Neither sweet nectar nor salty tears, just a spirit of reality. High on truths and lies and betrayal; we revel in hurt, we revel in our originality, we revel in our harmless arrogance. And we dally with pain. But we refuse to suffer!
We are wrecks, mentally writhing in agony, living in social discomfort, and we love emotional hurt.
An anchor in turbulent seas, an anchor we let down or simply cut off. We might be stray ships harbouring desolation, leaving art in our wake, but nothing, no amount of emotional hurt can destroy us. Unless we let it. Unless we overdose on it.
I love emotional hurt and how it hollows us out, its inevitability filling us silently, making us irrevocable.
These irreversible changes mellow us, and sometimes sour us. Whatever the outcome, there is no going back. And we’re fine with it.
Because we love it the way you hate someone who ruined your life. We devour it with sarcasm, and an understanding we acquire in the process.
Because pain, is how you stay connected to reality.

And endurance of emotional hurt makes us, us.

Of broken souls, beware

When someone bares their soul to you — Run. Run as fast as you can and do not look back.
Because these people? The rawness of their soul will consume you. Their memories will frighten you, their experiences will demand your respect, and you’ll be drawn to the empty space in their heart, hoping, wishing, daring to fill it.
But can you? In the end all you’ll wish to do is hold them near and whisper comforting words.
But in the end all you can do is sit with them in silence and tears.
Pay heed to my words, dear friends.
Stay away from such creatures of courage. Leave them be, with their brokenness and solitude. You needn’t step forward offering warmth. They’re full of it, their hearts leak love, waiting. Waiting to bestow it upon someone worthy.
But that very bestowal is the baring of the soul.
Save yourself. For they will consume you. Love you like no other.
Beware, dear world. Of the broken souls.
Be no taker of the only thing they can channel selflessly into your being, take not what they have been saving in hope. Take not what you cannot return. Take not their affection if heartache is all you can give.
Make no promises or assurances of trust, if all you can do is break them.
Stay away from them, I plead.
More hurt and pain they do not need.

Neglected

My unblemished heart is brimming with words for you, my love. They constrict my throat, my ability to vocalize them, I can taste them on my tongue. Nectar.

Nectar to your poisonous love. My heart, the earthly ambrosia you brag to your pantheon of dining on, will soon cease to exist. Even the memory of the knock with which you entered my perfectly normal life, leaves me breathless. Eons have passed, and what brief moments you have given me in scarcity starve me into this madness…

How could you be so cruel as to infect me with something so inescapable I die everyday asking for more? Was it not but yesterday you let slip the truth of your intentions?

I am just another name on your list, just another ‘darling’ who fed your vanity. Your narcissism was attractive till it lasted only in sarcasm and fleeting jokes. Your wooing and shooing, the attention and the neglect have led to this.

I refuse to further it.

I have washed my feelings, wrung them and hung them to dry. Please, my love, do not let it rain.

Ofelia

She sat at her desk, wanting to write of terrible things beautifully, but words wouldn’t come.

Blank papers neatly stacked, lusted for her barbarian touch, yet words wouldn’t come.

Words wouldn’t come for they were already there. Hanging in the dusty space around her, ready to be harvested upon pages. Ripe enough to be plucked, torn, and gorged without second thoughts.

But words hurt. They hurt her. In ignorance and acknowledgement. They hurt the twisted soul inside the person sitting all writer-like. She was no writer, no craftsman of moving pieces of literature. Even her articles reeked of caffeine and imaginary attics.

Not a writer.

A handmade poster of a quote kept piercing her peripheral vision; she didn’t dare turn to the thing peeling off the back of her door.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

— Ernest Hemingway

It was coming off, but the words stuck with an earnest  glue, no pun intended. Bleed. Yes. That’s all she wanted. To bleed out and still survive. To make memories slither out of her bones and slap them into notebooks. Be a harsh, cruel, villainous writer.

She wanted to write of the things that had suppressed her expressiveness, every rule that had once been imposed on her, every bruise on her freckled skin, every scar she hid in mental corners. She wanted to write the fuck out of them. Mercilessly, with utter indecency.

Yet words wouldn’t come. Words. Her best friends through growing years, her passionate lovers, they wouldn’t come. They were settling on her like specks of dust, corroding her patience, teasing her.

Teasing her all the while.

The beer was gone, and the ash had cooled, but the unmistakable pungency, over her, drooled.

Armed with a fancy fountain pen, whose nib she had moments earlier wanted to force into the wood and drive holes with frustration, she scrawled across the paper laid out in front, scrawny she scrawled words heavy, no reason no rhyme, but words sunk in wavy.

They cascaded off her, almost sadistically.

She wrote like a bitch in heat, dried pieces of flattened wood pulp had thirsted for her love. She shook her head, causing the words that had lazied on her tresses to fall like snow and she built her soak-free snowman.

Why let razors kiss your skin when the deed can be done bloodlessly?

This was her poignant space, writing was her affliction. She bled, she died, everyday, but never in vain.

Immortalized, remained her stories of experience, imagination, and decadence-followed paths. People were given birth to and buried in the streets she built and destroyed with words.

Secretly she burned, cremated her past, watched it go up in flames, and coughed in the rancid smoke. Unknown to the world, it all happened, in the galaxies she created of her own.

Thunder growled at her ecstasy, she gave it a condescending laugh. Lighting a cigarette, she winked at her reflection in the lopsided mirror by the window; smoking, it took away the blood-like taste words left in her mouth. Erasing the recent high.

Her latest piece lay bleeding  before her, another illegitimate child of hers to be sent for adoption.

She was no writer. Another cigarette. More thunder, more laughter. She was made of cathartic self-destruct.

Words were ruthless bastards, and she was their paramour.