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>