Elephant In The Room

There's an elephant in the room
And it's called Us.
It didn't come by easily;
It was born over years and years
And months and days
And moments spent listening to Band of Horses
While you gently swayed like a
Tree in my lap to the music.
While you ran to check if your father had
Left the house, and ran back to kiss me
While we helped each other discover each
Other, while you and I 
Spent the nights whispering in half-awake
Whispers, inching like two turtles, day after day, towards
That one fateful day when you could say
You loved me, without hesitating
Or wondering if you
Were more hopeful than truthful.

It's been days and days and
Months and years
Since that winter day, and now
We meet in unfamiliar drawing rooms
And the air is pregnant with a whole 
Litter of stillborn sentences 

There is an elephant in the room
And it is Us.
And it breathes down heavily down 
Our necks and we half-wish that
It would swing its trunk in impotent
Elephant-rage and destroy the room,
This too-small room,
And then spontaneously combust 
Into flames, and die. 
And we would heave maudlin sighs
And we would make a bonfire
And collect our vanities - our letters
And books and trinkets
And watch everything burn down
And maybe hold hands 
And smile melancholic
As we watch
Everything burn down.

But for now the elephant sits alone
In the corner and 
Watches us.
Through its beady black eyes
Watches us
As we talk in parallel streams.
And soon, after years and years
And months and days
And moments spent avoiding eye-contact
The elephant shall wither away
Die, silently.
Unmourned. Forgotten.

Until some day, you and I shall watch lonely clouds
Wander over our coffee mugs, and wonder
Why there is an elephant-shaped bump
In the rug.

Unedited

Written for 4 different women, all of whom I love in different ways, interspersed with some musing.


Brat 

Your words float

Half a centimeter off of

My computer screen; bid

Me into your world and

Your emotions, your

Half thoughts, your daily

Love affairs, your

Mascara running down your

Face in twin

Streams born out of a reluctance to move on,

And move me in ways

I wish I could move.

My words are plodding

And fall thick and heavy,

Blunt, transparent

Meanings: none of your swirling, purple gypsy

Swimming in emerald complexity; mine is what

Is apparent: your apparent is the canopy

Of a teeming forest seen from the sky.

The fundamental tragedy of my life

Is distance: always too far away, in distance

And Time from the things I love and things

That fascinate me, make my heart their own.

My sincerest words rap like petulant stones

On the windows of your poems –

Your ingenuity sparkles through like

Lighted rooms for a travel-weary traveler,

Inviting in their simplicity, beautiful in their delicate lattice print.

I love your words more than I love you.

…

The moon and I are silent tonight.

We give each other company

In our shared solitude. We both cannot be touched; high up in

Our refuges protected by the gaspy, wispy surrounding thought-clouds.

Yes, we are alone tonight.

Like me, the moon is haunted by stars

That seem so near, yet are billions of miles away, in time and space.

Like me, the moon is imperfect, and like me it wants perfection, and it

Strives every night for it, bleeding itself dry over and over and over

Again until it’s swallowed up. Constantly in motion, never still,

Always half a centimeter away from happiness. So close.

Always making do with substitutes.

 I shall have some sucralose in my morning coffee, please.

…

Rabbit

So perfect. Have you seen yourself in a mirror, or

In a dream? Your façade is flawless, my best friend;

Your nose is a cherry on any man’s cake, a capstone

In any boy’s life. And yet under

That gossamer skin of yours

Is a forest, a brambly uncut forest

That shall ensnare and puncture me in a hundred

Thousand different places if I let my armour down for

Too long.

You are perfect, and your perfection is your curse,

My darling bunny.

Never close, an infinite expanse of ice separates

You from warmer climes

Of other men’s embraces, and they all want you,

So much, and yet despite yourself you shall destroy them.

You cannot be of this earth.

Oh how I want you!

And yet that is forbidden.

You are forbidden

Fruit, and I shall wait for you

On the outskirts of your tumultuous summers

And never give in despite myself and despite you,

And eschew arguments for the beauty in the unity

Of two parts of a jigsaw, shall sacrifice aesthetics for sanity.

You are my best friend, and I love you,

But we cannot be.

The neon and the lamp-shaded exist simultaneously

In your enormous brown eyes.

…

Dani
 

Your mannerisms swim half a centimeter below my skin. Your criticisms keep me company on curtain-less days when I float helplessly on a stream of circumstance and feed me warm familiarity. You are my protection, my bear skin against the cold of the everyday, a pillow I snuggle into at night on my bed that breaks my back, your voice flows like an undercurrent to my thoughts, barely audible yet always there like a firefly or a moth. You upon whom so much of my happiness is predicated; you upon whom I have bet so much – so much, that it scares me and my daily sacrifices pinch the undersoles of my shoes, yet this thread of vermilion that is anointed with liquid egg-stained memories is what anchors me on some Sunday mornings, when I can’t get up from my bed for fear that I shall float away.

…

Let it all out. Words gushing

Like raindrops: sentences

And paragraphs like aforementioned downpour, washing

Away built-up dams that I periodically build up

Around my heart so that it beats less painfully –

Fades into the background when I don’t have time for it.

And yet look now! My pen

Dances like a light-drunk moth adrift

In the impersonal evening breeze

Of my mind – a sort of an agglomeration of

Memories of Chandigarh and Montreal, mashing up

And melting together

Family and intellectual exercise, inconvenience and loneliness,

Light and dust and snow and heat and oil

And lingering memories of my mother’s concern-lined face, as

She moves around the tiny house forever caught up

In Loving.

So much, so much love.

“Where shall it go?” I have

No one and I must love.

My screams for now are the

Furious scratchings of my favourite pen

On cheap, Romantic paper.

I could spend the night writing, and

The morning shall find me lying in a pool

Of black ink – death by overexposure.

We shall all die of loving too much.

…

Mother

And yet what a beautiful way to die, cooking lunch or braving forty degrees celsius and Indian roads and travelling forty kilometers-a-day just so that I could go to a football field and eventually learn to pass the ball before I even got it, hide in plain sight hoping no one would consider me worthy of being given a chance.

Every day a part of me dies when I wake up in a bed that’s not in your house, every day the paper boy brings in more and it’s all I can do to not take my life because I love you too much, I love you too much, it’s too painful to live and I love you too much.

…

I have a permanent half-tear in my right eye and I half-wish I was free.