Kepler

We spend our midsummer days
Falling around each other
Like two stars locked
In a Goldilocks gravitational dance.

...

Carefully precise in our attachment,
We dance. 

Plath

"A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife. "

I'm scared.

Every passing second bears witness to a crime of galactic proportions - I'm sleeping. I'm petrified that every living instant, every second, is slipping by me and I'm not living enough. I'm not feeling enough, I'm not alive enough. My senses are fogged; I'm trapped in the belly of my mind, and my mind is dying one wasted second at a time.

Just going through the motions. Every emotion comes to me from across an ocean of confused ideas and thoughts. Every thought is slightly muddled; I am impure. I want to be a shard of glass, but I am an inchoate cloud of smoke. So... dead. Where is happiness? Is happiness only evident through a rear-view mirror? Is life lived only in memories?

I want to be pure. I want to torture myself, burn myself, until I can feel, until I can think, until I can touch, until I am raw from the living, until every second pulses like the frenzied heart of a dying animal. Tired of all this extraneous fat and blubber. Make me pure. Pure intellect. Pure. 

!haiku

Our kisses are cheap
Like paper butterflies that
Float abundantly

...

and yet 
Shimmer like dreams.

Distraction

I am a blade of grass
Shivering in the wind of
Awareness that swirls forth
From quiet contemplation.

My days are confused, and
I pump in activity to keep
Them from deflating.

Motion shall save our souls,
Shall deliver us from the
Edge
Of a dispassionate,
And undiscriminating
Ledge.

...

Time gushes forward with gruesome
Haste, and
I avert my eyes politely. 

The Fifteenth of June

You are
Wine sipped in fine company, laced with conversations
Studded with 'Rushdie' and 'Schumpeter', and
You are
Bombay downed in a violent gol-gappa gulp
Dripping with gulaal-coloured nautch and Bollywood passion and an insatiable will
To be raucously alive.

You are beautiful, and you know it; your
Eyes are the colour of soft milk chocolate
The kind we used to love as children; that we used to lick
From the golden-silver foil of a nostalgic Indian Cadbury's, and 
You worry incessantly about 
Spectacles and rashes and hair density.

You are godless, and
I do not know of anyone more devout.

You are American hope and ambition and the
Desperate need to be known and loved, and
You are the half-urge
To live away your life in a quiet cottage
With books, and someone you love, and pass away
As silently as you came.

You are rational and logical, and
You keep a list of people who called you on your birthday.

You are the strongest girl I know, and
You cry once a day.

You are easy friendship, and instant connections, and Little Tiny Acts
Of love, and
You are Delhi 2012.

You are regret
Of all the shared moments and individual ones shared
That I lost out on, when I went off in my search for
Happiness, and 
If losing you was the price, then if I could go back in time,
I would choose you.

You are anti-nationalist, and pro-Pakistan
and pro-Pakistani boys, and  
you were standing on a plastic chair, framed gloriously in your tri-coloured salwar-kameez-chunni against 
A sky awash with two thousand and twelve tri-coloured balloons, and
Your hair was flying in a sable cloud, and you were looking off into the distance
With a hinting smile on your lips, and 
In that moment frozen permanently and hung on a canvas in the gallery of my mind, I love you like I love Art.

You are now twenty one, and promising,
And beautiful and intelligent and charming and gracious and bursting at the seams with
Potential, and

Most of all,
Noopur Sen,
You are loved.

Happy 21st birthday, Khargu. *trumpet*

…

You are my reflection cast onto a prettier mirror.
You are what I hope to be and I love you.

Walks Along the Seine

She smoked cigarettes like minutes,

And we spent the summer

Being chased by days

That lengthened like shadows.

She smoked cigarettes,

And the ever-thickening smoke

Dissolved lovingly into the fabric

Of the Original Distance between us.

She smoked

Violently, and we burned in the frenzied heat and

In the lush green fertility of Novelty; until one day

She smoked herself away.

She left behind

a solitary cup of thickhotsweet chai,

Infused with ginger;

And soon the memories of her

Hazel eyes and bouncing humour and

the delicate warmth of her tooslender wrists and

Her armour and her monsters and

Her affected joy, all

Shall fade into a beige nothingness:

Like a lover

Or a dream.