THE FOLLOWING POEM WAS SELECTED IN WINGWORD POETRY PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST.
As I sat on the decaying windowsill,
I could feel my jhoomkas swaying in the gentle breeze.
Red and Gold clashing against each other,
The conflict that forever lives.
The gentle sound forgotten trinkets make as they clink against each other.
Never fails to remind me of how gentle your voice could be.
Funny how the harshest atrocities creep in softer than the breeze,
And take more than the roughest storms ever will.
This feeling of gentle devastation,
Manages to creep in unnoticed on most winter evenings.
It’s made its home in the hollows of my bones.
And every time I dare to look down,
At the rotting flesh that threatens to shroud my battered hips,
I remember the taste of your hatred,
Clashing against my own.
As the glass above me caves,
Sprinkling down like snow,
The kind that could bury you faster than your regrets.
I remember you limping into our room.
Holding onto your Rosewood cane,
Softly trembling under the weight of war ravaged years.
Sandals falling apart as they clank against the dungeon floors.
I learnt early on,
Fireplaces don’t help with years of emotional baggage.
Sadness that’s as cold as ice can never be destroyed, only experienced.
It finds a way to thrive in the darkest crevices of your soul.
Until your heart, in itself is rendered numb.
And by the time you realise it,
You’re suddenly shackled to the floor.
Desperately beating your fists against your chest,
Hoping it will revive itself.
And the moment has passed,
I’m helpless again.
The mind numbing darkness
Has made its home in the depths of my scarred and fragile chest.
So I cry a little bit louder,
Hoping my tears are melted glaciers,
Built from the sadness that shapes me.
Maybe somebody will hear me this time.
I startle at how quickly they fade,
Ss soon you walk into the room.
Much like what’s left of my resolve.
I notice the earthen mug of warm chai grasped in your shivering hand.
The generous sprinkle of saffron reminds me of glowing embers.
Much like the ones trapped helplessly
Within the confines of the bones you’ve bruised.
When I rest my head against your barely beating heart,
I can hear them desperately throb
Against the bars you’ve fashioned with such care.
Wailing to the tune of a lament only funeral pyres know.
When you finally let them escape,
I’m left with nothing, but new scars.
They find fragile homes against my burnt flesh.
It’s too late to heal wounds that have started to rot.
Buried under years of neglect.
Aching to be found,
In a world that’s blind to the tears of the frightened,
And waiting on the fancies of the feared.
My skin can’t take the brunt anymore,
So I pick it off and tuck it away in secret drawers.
I will go back someday,
Plant what’s left of my suffering in the ground
As a gift to the dead.
But for now, I’ll smile and stare into the grey that your eyes are.
Melancholy etched so beautifully in the depths of your irises.
Funny how much of a storm brews inside of you.
And you use me as a shield
Against the very destruction you house.
Smoke and mirrors,
Smiles and tears,
Bridges built on fear,
Pain and passing years.
When you weren’t carrying muddy kullads of chai,
You carried vehemence.
The kind that used to brim behind your father’s restraint.
The kind his hands shaped on harmless Autumn evenings.
As you pull me closer,
The blanket barely covers the scars
That have now found a loving home
On my naked Defenceless body.
Nothing could possibly hold the both of us together,
Not even fraying ropes disguised as Hope.
You can cover up the violence with generous amounts of eyeshadow,
But it never truly leaves.
It creates a home
Under the rainbows you paint your guilt with.
Put on rose tinted glasses
And you’ll see the world as a shattered kaleidoscope.
Colours help cover the pain,
But nothing hides for too long in a world that devours secrets.
Maybe that’s why your grey eyes are home to me.
The home I didn’t want, but was handed.
As I reluctantly rest my head on your shoulder,
I hear my stomach drop,
Never to return to a place where butterflies exist.
I can feel it
Slowly crawling its way down to the carefully dug out graves.
The cacophony of their screams is deafening,
I know the secrets they hide
And they know the secrets I hid.
A relationship stronger than anything we could ever hope to create.
You see
Dry deserts and enchanted forests
Only hold pits crawling with silver scaled snakes.
Slit silver tongues that will swallow you whole.
Until there’s nothing left,
For anyone else to feed on.
Snap
You gently bite my neck,
Slowly feeding on my inhibitions.
As I bleed out,
You refuse to acknowledge the Vermillion flowing down my skin.
Let alone my forehead.
I smirk to myself and wipe away these stray tears.
They roll across my cheekbones and down to the ground.
Its almost as murky as the troubled waters my eyes are known to talk about.
A simple offering of peace
Silence
They can hear me sniffling,
Cackling with their eyes rolled back.
Smiling as they feed off of my misery.
I can hear them scratching away
At the lids of those handcrafted coffins.
The last nail is about to come undone.
Tick tock tick
I can hear the clock ticking,
With every silent tick, your nails dig deeper into my skin.
You always have managed to leave a mark.
I lie to myself everyday
Huddling closer to you
Telling myself
The one’s before you are responsible
For these bleeding scars painted on my thighs.
Crack
I wake up and blink a few times,
Almost gave into that haze again.
I see a bluebird walking along a fragile branch
Unaware of the deafening cackles.
Unaware of the death it passes in its wake.
Snap
The bough breaks.
I miss you.
On warm summer evenings, I miss you.
I miss your touch
The way your arms resembled sunshine and hailstorms.
I miss the chaos you brought with you.
My therapist says it’s because
I was taught to fall in love with doors that were slammed shut.
Men that found a home in your heart
But made sure to leave no room for you.
Scars that were hastily hidden behind torn Amber dupattas.
I miss you.
I reach for the jhoomkas you bought me,
I find myself running bruised fingers along the threads
The ones that barely keep my sanity in place.
This is all I have left of you,
This is all anyone has left of you.
I tried to warn you,
Instead you chose to harm
What you couldn’t understand.
I’ll never forget the feeling of your fist against my chest.
I caved.
I fell.
I bruised.
I hurt.
I rose.
Ding dong
I hate how obnoxiously loud my doorbell is.
I wonder who’s here.
I wonder how long it will be
Before we’re nothing but bare broken bodies
Intertwined together.
Ding dong
I jump off the windowsill this time,
Nails sliding against the gentle Black.
Just another scratch and you can see the skin I plaster to my wall.
I always go back to the ones that destroyed me.
As I open the door,
I see him standing.
Hiding behind the agonising innocence
His smile betrays
To the flocks of grievers that surround him.
Green eyes, warm hands and the strong scent of rain.
Why must he bring nostalgia and the taste of a lost childhood in his wake.
I smile up at him.
Making sure to nibble ever so gently,
On my cracked and broken lips.
The taste of metal,
The smell of broken sea shells
And the oceans they imprison.
I’ll have to make a sapphire coffin,
Tinged with Indigo - the colour of desperation.
After all
What else could do justice to those eyes
And the lust they barely conceal.
I hold him by the head and place my lips on his neck,
I feel him sigh.
His hands on my back.
Life always feels best, minutes before death arrives in all her glory.
You see
Regret isn’t something my mother taught me to feel.
She taught me how to hurt and never to heal.
Regret comes with wishing for change,
But what do you do when you’re too numb to wish for anything?
But perhaps, a few more eyelashes?
Hoping they fly away with the snow.
The kind that shrouds graveyards
And sits with trees adorned by the dead.
Now, the candles have been blown out
And all my eyelids are bare.
But mercy? I can’t find her anywhere.
She held my hand
Taught me how to land punches that would take his breath away.
“Disable a man before you fall and break yourself in the attempt to love him”
She whispers as the alcoholic who crossed her
Dies at the mercy of a scorned woman
And her torn dupatta.
Just like you held onto your mother’s despair
I hold onto her anger.
I am my mother’s daughter,
Fragile and armed.
He’s screaming now,
His hands holding onto my waist,
Hips trembling as he speaks my name.
I can feel him quiver,
So I hold onto his neck
And slide just a little bit further,
Letting him take one last bite.
He’s holding onto my breasts, too afraid to let go.
I let him kiss me
And all the inhibitions I keep hidden beneath my skin.
My hands in his hair,
His lips on my skin,
I find myself sighing, letting go of decades of pain.
Curving my lips desperately,
Trying to moan his name.
Too afraid to let go of the storm he conjures in my chest.
Every time he kisses my belly button,
Something inside me begs to be set free.
It feels carnal.
Am I the monster or am I just in pain?
I kiss him before he can breathe,
Can’t have him giving away any of my secrets.
As I find myself arching my back,
I think of breaking his.
As I drip all over his trembling ribs,
I steal a glance at the bleeding ground.
I can hear their desperate screams,
They know it’s time.
As his breath hitches and his eyes roll back,
I smile and shake my head at the warmth between my legs.
They never manage to arrive.
After all,
It would be a mistake to let any of them in.
Thump.
As I climb off of him, my mind races to that night.
Jhoomkas dangling defiantly,
Swaying around violently,
Indicative of the storms,
I have known and conjured my entire life.
As I grip the shovel, I whisper under my breath
“I’ll miss you.”
But what can I do?
I am my mother’s daughter,
And she taught me how to make the most beautiful coffins.
So I made one for her,
And I make one for any man that dares to touch me.
On summer nights and warm evenings,
I sit on my patio.
Sipping on the blood of men that dared to wrong me.
I miss you,
Sunshine and hurricanes, they coexist
So do the living and the dead.