People like me have killed

Ourselves enough with finger guns,

that now we are not afraid

To decorate our own graves.

We are planets without rainbows,

where sunsets are muted blue,

moving in foreign rusty orbits.

People like me tend dried mustard flowers

 near fire because under the bandages

our scars are still raw.

Our happiness taste like egg white and

when rage oozes between the pebbles

in our throat we stay silent.

People like me has

minefields as our landmarks .

so we have gifted our legs to clouds

to walk through grasslands and cities.

We mark our territory with

Black coal pencils made from our burnt fingers.

People like me are hopeless romantics

adoring long lost lovers

with payers that remain unanswered.

We have our mouths numb with heartbreaks

So how can we taste sweet kisses and love?

People like me wrap

the shoulders of butterflies in fur

hoping to become toothless like them

so that we can stop chewing grief.

We call nectar as the tears of flowers,

who are mothers weeping for

the daughters to be born.

People like me drink our coffee slowly,

because we know that the music of men

frozen to death frightens time.

We give our tears a false name- smiles-

and people trust us, our masks.

People like me know to say

 ‘Thank you’ in four languages and

“sorry” in ten.

We have bubble gum hearts that stick

everywhere, even under your shoes.

People like me forgive everything

except ourselves and our knees are 

calloused portraits of ourselves.

We classify world not according to taxonomy,

But by pain they hold tight to.

People like me should be called poets.

If having unstitched loneliness is a criterion.

We are several waterbodies away from homes

and search for rented homes

with danger signs in our foreheads.

People like me shelters courage in us

like a Jew in Nazi regime

because history is something that repeats itself.

When we hear ‘fear’ we mistake it

for someone’s name and flee.

People like me are tragedies with names *

no ones dare to look twice,

trying to stay alive by ignoring knifes and poisons.

We are articles stashed in dust bins,

abandoned by critics and lovely sparrows alike.

People like me rescue silence trapped between city lights

on a Monday morning, and offer it bed and cakes,

inhaling the last sunset into our lungs.

We erase our family names and thus are half bloods

who have nowhere to go-

spiders feeding on own bodies.

People like me denotes a verb and

will never turn into an adjective, nor a noun.

Our toes are cotton soft

so we can drown easily and disappear.

People like me has our blood ink thick,

And our shadows overweight than our bodies.

We have embedded polished emptiness on our palms

And own graves in place of gardens.

People like me call summer our sister, spring our brother,

autumn our mother and winter our father.

Our mothers are named after moon and

we named our daughters after storms.

People like me have skin colour

borrowed from father’s side 

and melancholy inherited from mother’s side.

We are unlucky shamans  wearing

gleaming velvet white shrouds.

People like me rob stories out of letters  

and  hide them under our fingernails.

Our ears are bellflowers

begging the wind for a pat.

People like me speak to ourselves

And listen to ourselves (die. die. die.)

With a tenderness no one can offer.

We are time between the seconds and

space between closeness.

People like me make dolls out of toffee wraps

to fill the pit next to our breast bones and 

witness an old razor offering freedom to us.

 We call it god,

And thank it for the small mercy shown.

     


                                           *slight adaptation of  Noor Unnahar

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 I am yearning for death.  Forever longing for it...achingly..When people around me crave to live, do everything to have a life, I could never understand it. I could never understand the meaning of their desire. I always wanted to die… slowly, painlessly, and alone. Over time, my death instinct  became an inexorable habitual thought. The yearning to merge into an infinite darkness is there, always. The swelling torment I can't put into words. There was nothing, until him, that could dilute my urge to die. I used to think I can hold on a little, until he disappeared. I was obsessed to wither completely.  Look at me now. I think I have died, when he left. What a metaphor, the old cliché, you may think. I can declare this without embarrassment, but I can't express it. It is really so heavy to be afforded by my vocabulary, thoughts, and consciousness... Many moons ago, I listened passively to Nee Mattume by T.M. Krishna. And yesterday night, like a little miracle, it ca...
Read more

THE BOOK OF SETHI

PROLOGUE: THE FIRST TIME GRIEF SANG I don’t remember the first time I heard Ali Sethi. I remember what I lost when I did. Something inside me— the part that kept sorrow folded beneath my tongue— opened its eyes. It wasn’t music. It was recognition. A voice that didn’t arrive like thunder, but like memory—slow, precise, mercifully cruel. It sang in the key of ache I inherited but never named. This is not about songs. It’s about the ruins they left glowing. It begins, always, with silence. And then: Ali. 1 TO THE VOICE THAT ARRIVED BEFORE STORM Some nights, I don’t know if it’s rain, or your voice pressing its forehead against my window. Ali, you don’t sing— you stitch. Each word, a needle pulling centuries through my skin. I keep your ragas in my wrists— they flutter when grief walks in, asking for tea and permission to stay. Who gave you the right to know what longing sounds like before I could name it? Who taught your throat to echo the ache I buried beneath my mother tongue? Sometime...
Read more

The Unanswered Ring: Returning to Decision to Leave

Some films don’t scream.They breathe. Softly. Like someone lying next to you who doesn’t dare touch you. “Decision to Leave” wasn’t a thriller to me. It was a letter never sent.A wave that crashed but never reached the shore. I watched Seo-rae fold her silences like laundry. Every movement quiet, every word a disguise. And yet—every glance, a plea: “See me. Even if you don’t believe me.” And Hae-jun— he didn’t fall from a mountain.He dissolved, little by little, like a man walking into the sea,telling himself it’s just water. The film didn’t ask me to watch. It asked me to listen. To sighs. To footsteps. To hunger that never became desire.What kind of love is this? One that doesn’t kiss, but watches.Doesn’t hold, but follows from a distance. Doesn’t beg, but leaves quietly, hoping to be remembered...The kind that hides in plain sight. The kind that tells you,“You’re better off without me,” but still checks if you’ve eaten... A Scene I’ll Never Forget: (And perhaps, never forgive) Seo-r...
Read more