Muse

"I want to be your muse."

...

The tension that is born
of the friction between our skulls
gives my fingers potential difference; you
capacitate creativity in cogent conversation, condense
coherence from the vacuous vapour of vague
half-thoughts. The half-life
of a pretty idea is one
consummation, a muse
amuses and is used, but you
are fundamental, the paint
to every painting I paint.

Pardes

An awesome wave of aerosol
Sweat (501 parts per million) and a billion
Open human-beings flash-fertilizing dormant deodorized seeds of bile-like
Nostalgia, rendering sour
My 14 hour
(+10 hour layover) old
Nationalism; like Socrates
Painted over with star-spangled hypocrisy
I'm neither an Indian nor a Kashmiri
But a citizen of any-meritocracy
That will have me.

Aquarium

Trapped like tiny tuna in transparent tanks,
We wage war with water;
Our syllables silent and Sisyphean.

Interview

‘Italian' coffeeshop. Best in Montreal.

...

Wearing a faded leather jacket, a week-old blonde beard and a smile with a hint of exhaustion on his creasing face, he alternates between an unknown brand of cigarettes and a porcelain cup half-full with dark coffee. We shake hands and I tell him my name, spelling it out. He doesn’t tell me his.

Next, I meet gnomon, an Azerbaijani hacker with a PhD in cryptography, wearing a plaid sweater that looks like it hasn’t seen the inside of a washing machine in a year. He wears it as an extension of himself, as if it has diffused into his skin. He has chipped nail paint, a different colour on each fingernail. Runs his fingers through dirty brown hair in the interstices between his sentences.

I smile. I’d romanticized them, mapped them to cultural stereotypes and reduced them to a pastiche.

...

He smokes and sips. He’s quitting soon, he remarks offhand, so he’s trying to go through as many as he can before he does. I order a slice of cake and a cappuccino. When in an Italian coffeeshop...
The French man behind the counter pours the coffee into a tiny cup and slices a slice of coffee cake. Outside the coffeeshop door the day dusks delicately, the daylight demurely dying. I drink. My cappuccino is delicious.

gnomon slides out his laptop - a silver machine with an EFF sticker obscuring the manufacturer logo. We start.

The Trick Is

The trick is to write.

The trick is to write and create, and not endlessly ruminate
if my words are potent enough, if they burn enough, if
they showcase what I have learnt, enough. If I discern
that it is not enough
to endlessly polish old sentences, if repentance is
the genesis of living in parentheses, then I have had enough

of acceptances, I have had enough of
fear.

Fear.

Fear is the mind-killer, fear
that manifests itself as I swallow a career, fear
that makes ambition adhere
to my skin, fear that makes doubt
adhere
to everything I begin, fear
that sprinkles salt on my sins, that sprinkles salt
on the fertility of my mind.

Fear that manifests itself in this need to be polite,
to make connections, to curb affections, to be slight-
ly conscious of my complexion, of
intonation.

Fear of
being stupid, of touch, of falling out of love,
of loving too much.

Absolute truth does not exist, so I hunger instead for freedom. The freedom to be alive sans qualification, because in the long run we are all dead.

And yet
I do not write enough. Do not love enough. Do not run enough. Endlessly flick my thumb on my digital handcuffs.

Freedom from the Blood God. Freedom from all Gods, and what they represent.
Freedom from making do.
Freedom from fear.
Freedom from you.

YouBot

If I could
decant our conversations,
filter away sedimental emotion -
this
gagged love*, this saline sadness, this anger
etc -
and pour
only
the froth of
our younger words,

If I could
distill a you that would
only
sublime ideas with me
on the tip of your unattainable tongue,

If I could
lie in bed after a summer sunset
with a subset of
the fragile complexity that makes you
you

I would.

...

* - I shall keep my promise

subtle

gently, gently
pushing, prodding
the needle breaks the skin
and the ink sighs,
"we are finally home".
you poked a little heart onto my knee
the boniest part of my body -
the most resistant part of my body -
and yet you continue pushing and prodding. . .
i have never felt more loved

- Isabel

Random Selection

“You have been randomly selected”
says a bored man, as he extracts
an apology
for all 6’3” of me. Meat,
that
is now carved
by blue eyes and blue fingers and
vibrating wands looking for
weapons (that are illegal to carry
where I come from) as
I try to fly.

I try to fly, but
am weighed down
by the color of my
(passport’s)
skin, and the length
of my beard and
vowels, and only after
long last do I get permission
(permission!)
to set foot
(much like Columbus)
on this land.

...

How much greater
will you make this country?

San Francisco (“I hella like you”)

Hearts pumping faster
on a cocktail of
young money, younger
friendship and the odour
of impermanence.

"Do you feel like you've made it?"

I get asked, as I sit
shedding skin
in the backseat of my
friend's
friend's
BMW convertible, pressed to
the leather against the wind and
the feeling that
we don't deserve this.

...

Making sand
castles out of summer,
we gentrificate.

Too Much

"You're too old to be so shy",
says to me,
so I stay the night.

And let him touch me but
never too much never
too high or
too low like
the goldilocks he wishes I was and
when he kisses me he wants
me to want it but
the most I can manage is a
smile he

struggles with being a boy and I
struggle with being a woman and so we
struggle with each other every night.

I met a goldfish

Delhi, again

Written 4 years ago. A stray comment by Suvina led one thing to another and soon I stumbled upon this picture she clicked a long time ago. And anyway, I'm in the mood for posting old things.

dilli, by Suvina Singal (click to ENHANCE!)

…

Delhi. The smell of the city oscillates between the sweetly-salty stench of old sweat and tired deodorant.

Delhi. Delhi is a gauche black puppy tumbling all over your feet in eager gratitude for loving him by not removing your feet.

Delhi. Delhi is an undiscriminating, egalitarian sweat-moustache.

Delhi. Delhi is a beaming blind man.

Delhi. Delhi is a glaring car horn punctuated by suggestions of incest.

Delhi. Delhi is a plate of too-hot-to-eat semi-solid sodium-yellow noodles.

Delhi. Every personal landmark is fading as the car speeds faster. The speeding minute is unforgiving. Soon it shall be time to say goodbye, and make promises to return. Soon it shall be time to leave, and soon these people and these faces and these memory-ridden places shall exist only as ideas in my head and shall eventually be buried under an avalanche of new ones. For the moment, though, all it gleams like a shard of reflective silver inside me. All of it.

All the times you almost cried to me but stopped because we hadn't known each other for long enough, all the plays we saw and laughed at and sometimes gushingly admired, all the times I tried to stop you from leaving for home – maybe because some panic-struck instinct of mine wanted to hold on to you for 'just half an hour more', all the happysad train/bus journeys to and from Chandigarh, all the hours before exams spent in planning our post-exam hours, all the Metro conversations, all the classroom conversations, all the conversations on the back page of my under-utilized Microeconomics notebook, all the Irfan's conversations, all the paper-chit conversations, all the conversations, all the times I was too scared to talk to you, all the times we walked, all the times we walked, all the times we walked, all the time the sight of you used to liven me up, all the times at your house, all the stolen moments spent reading poetry and talking about Life and Everything underneath the metal awning of a dilapidated bus stop while we schemed to get you to stay out longer than your 7/8/9 pm curfew, all the times I wrote about you but didn’t tell you, all the times I had lunch at your house, all the times I stayed over for the night, all the times we had 5 rupees ki orange bar ice cream, all the times I talked to you at 2 am about going off and living in the forest, all the times you drove us around Delhi in your outrageouslyparrotgreen car, all the times I tried to get you to come to the Ridge with me, all the times we went cycling around North Campus, all the times I tried to force you to dance and we ended up getting stuck in orbit around each other, all the times I came to your house to study about ‘Monopolies in the Market’ and ended up watching Star Wars, all the times we Skyped till socially-unacceptable hours, all the nicknames, all the times we played basketball and you were the only girl on the team and I was stupidly, sexist-ly, making sure you didn't get hurt, all the times you told me how much you loved him, all the times I didn’t tell you how much I loved her, all the times we drank, all the times we didn’t, all the times we lost our dignity to Honey Singh, all those hours in the sun-drenched Front lawns, while we sat and talked and thought…

Everything rises up in me like steel-tinged bile, and makes my throat ache. It's all come to an end. Everything. Have I started loving you and all of it so much that ripping it apart shall wound me irreparably? Somehow, all this did not seem so loaded with sepia love through the clear glasses of the present. So why does it now burn like a bolus of flame inside me?

Nostalgia has no remedy, except in forgetting.

Delhi and I, we were just beginning to make friends with each other.

…

It's funny. 4 years on, it doesn't hurt any more. I'd still love to see your face though.

Aside

I met you, and
one thing led to another, and
now I don't.

Dreamcatcher

#1

The most pernicious of dreams
Are ones sipped incessantly by
Concave eyes, that slip

And every swallow
Makes the bottom of my chest skip
From giddy ambition.

An atom-thick layer of vague
Self-doubt sprinkled like icing sugar,
Forming a brittle pastry shell, but inside

...

#2

Globules of your scriptural strictness still float unbidden,
Independent of my structural strictures;
a constricting vein or two of constructed darkchocolate nostalgia

Remains untapped. I fill these
Open mines with slow falling
Sand, and all this while my personal brand of

Seismograph sleeps silently in soft
Satin sheets, slowly shaking, a cloud of
Cotton black that rests on

Soaking saline pillowcases; oh, for those sand-castle conversations that you and I sculpted out of
The desperate need to not suffocate in our skulls, that were born of the night and

Melded into melting mornings; just in time
For the chirping of the birds to remind me
to feel guilty.

For having

Kept you on a pedestal,
For having
Supplanted the facts of my ambition with obsessed fiction that I wrote for you
Every day, every night, and
every day, and every night

Until I became this literature,
Like a reverse Pygmalion,
Trapped in my own art, and only now do I start

...

#3

The process
Of
Incineration.

Free myself of ink
And synaptic paper;
And claim myself

For me; my dreams held
ransom until then
by the dreamcatcher that was you.

< insert word that is used once in the body of the poem here >

<insert melodramatic sweet love poem here>

...

<insert spin off thoughts here>

Polaroids

I heard that
sending a woman a love letter
is harassment, and I can see why -
you didn’t ask for it;
my love doesn’t entitle
me to any of you. So
I shall not send you this,
shall not tell you
that today morning
getting out of the bath, I dreamt
of tracing crop circles
on your shoulder, like you used
to ask me to do.
I felt affection
like I imagine
a father must feel - is that weird?

You don’t owe me anything -
but these Polaroids of love
are mine, and I enjoy
how they flutter in
uninvited
like you used to.

Christian Charity

An old woman gave me $2 while I was trying to sell poems for $0.50 a piece in the Montreal Metro. She said I looked hungry.

...

I wonder
how old
is this flower of kindness
that you just gave me.

How long ago was the seed planted?
A stray compliment, perhaps, when you were young,
that you grew hidden under your hair
until you plucked it and gave it to me.

Someone in your youth
or childhood
must have done something good.
Nothing comes from nothing.
Nothing ever could.

Marshmallows

Your lips
tasted like marshmallows
the night you left.

...

How can someone
so fair
be
so cruel?

Mansi

https://clyp.it/sccb4ehh

...

<3

Scream

She tells me she loves another.

And so like that,
the raison d'être of my words
violently dies in an explosion of ink.

...

C'est la vie.

Smell

Memories of you
live in a lake
behind my eyes, and
every now and then
I trawl through it and collect
dead hurt;
pile it like rotting fish
on the bank, so that
the scent of
your giddy happiness
the night we kissed on your
apartment floor,
might lose its way before
it reaches my nose.

But every now and then, on nights like these,
when the moon waxes eloquent,
the waters of the lake run high;
drown.

I pour liquid nitrogen hate
into this water, and my heart
pumps cooler, number.

I present you frozen words
wrapped in barbed wire, and
out of fear, refuse
to greet your reverse-Medusa eyes
they could turn me from stone 
into 
human.

You see,
you are not good for me.
You hold the trigger to my
insanity, and I
had hoped that time and
ice
would loosen your grip
and yet
here I am 
devoid of maturity, goodness, sanity.

So I will be continue being cold,
and give your burgeoning hatred
ammunition.
You should know though,
that this barbed wire
hurts me more than you.

...

"Why can't you be normal? Why can't we be friends?"
Would you give an alcoholic a glass of wine,
to sniff only?

Insignificance

my insignificance and i
often converse
about the insignificance
of our conversations.

i am an exclusive guest at
the long dark tea-time of my soul;
my musing sips on itself:
measures out my life in teaspoons
of self-indulgent poems.

...

i'm just a dog
looking for a car.

Beer bottles

The lips of this bottle
are still warm from yours.
Shoulder against shoulder, you and I
sculpt something
out of stray touches.

Alas, that we can never be.
You are too good to be true
to me.

Thief

i wish i hadn't
done all that I did with you

i wish i had saved
a conversation
or a walking path

now every favourite song of yours
and every gesture
that i give her
feels heavy and stale
under my solar plexus.

you prematurely stole
what was mine to give, and
she feels your breathless fingers
in every delayed
smile.

...

The fault of course,
as you'd insist,
was mine.

Pomegranate

today
my heart split open like a pomegranate
when i hugged you, and whispered
“i miss you”
to your kohl-coloured eyes.

the seeds spilled, staining
your clothes and
i tried to feel every one of them
as they dripped down our touching skin
but only tomorrow, 37000 feet away from
the infinity of your lap,
will today seem real.

you see,
this love
is too heavy;
squeezes the sweat out of my eyes,
squeezes my will until all that remains
are you
me
this sofa
and a lack of shoes.