Remember

You are beautiful
when the lights shine into your eyes
and lights up everything inside -
one space, one breath,
a synchronized heartbeat.
Stars aligned, not slid together by
a cooperative universe,
but yanked together
by the force of your will.
I tell myself, this is the closest I will come to
a perfect kind of happiness -
a complicated happiness
dissolving in our palms,
even before we knew it was there,
before we could breathe it.

You are beautiful,
you – not your pores, hair, muscle -
no, I mean the worlds you hold within you,
the worlds you have the power to unleash
to hold back, give, take, change.
Those worlds bubbling just under your skin
frothing and breaking in your voice, in your dance,
seething under the surface of your silences.
Worlds roaring, rumbling under your dissatisfaction
at the distance between the reality that is, and what could be.

You are beautiful,
not just in the way the light catches in your smile,
but in the way you let yourself be stretched far and deep,
let others be warmed by the flames in you.
There will be other moments like this one, almost perfect,
dissolving and recreating like this night melting away in our breath -
but, remember this space, this feeling,
this synchronized heartbeat. It is a part of us,
and it would never have happened,
if not for you.

Felt more than a little corny after writing this one.

Bitch.

You make your anger your song.

But the bitch on the road -
dirty and flea bitten
is more honest than you are.
She snarls and whimpers -
the bite glows in her eyes.
Rabid madness cannot lie.
She sinks her teeth into
the soft rubbery flesh without
singing about it.

Winding Up the Charm

Winding up the Charm - Stella maris College Play 2010!

Hello,

We’ve got three mad witches, exploding tea, and one very lost star crossed heroine! Do come and watch!

Also, I helped with Design and Script

Dragonfly

Dragonfly,
stop pretending your wings
are made of dreams and silences,
and shit like that,
because we both know that
you die like the rest of us -
you don’t even stick around
when the rain starts to fall.

Don’t flatter yourself that
in your crazy loop-de-loops,
you reveal the secrets of the universe -
the carpe diem of mortality -
death is never that pretty,
and for the record,
contemplating death
is just another form of self-obsession
no more glorious than being a
hypochondriac
or that annoying aunt who
just won’t shut up.

Your wings are colourless,
left-over wires tangled,
but your eyes are pretty cool.
I wonder if the world would be a better place
if we were all flies
with a multifaceted point of view,
swatted out of existence
now and then.

Were you disappointed,
in your first breath of air?
Don’t worry,
nothing is as bad as it seems,
we’ll pretend your wings
are made of dreams and silences,
and your crazy loop-de-loops
trace the seams of the universe,
if you will accept

that you are still mortal.

December Child

The scene plays in my head
over and over again in an infinite loop
as I try to understand
what it would feel like to hold a child.
The air keen in her lungs, cold and throbbing,
lightning darting out of her eyes like
flashes of the future. Heart thundering.

Now all I want to do is sing her a song -
a promise of magic and laughter and a perfect world
where she can be anything she wants to be -
a dream chaser, a cloud surfer -
queen of the stars!
But the music dies in my throat
somewhere between intention and reality -

Because you see, I was taught that a star is just
a big ball of flamin’ gas far far away
and it’s really not that much fun to rule over
a thermo-nuclear reaction.
How do I tell her that?

How do I tell her that in this world
we have created for ourselves,
parents sometimes have to bury their children,
and children sometimes have their childhood stolen from them
and are given guns (metaphorical or otherwise)
and are taught to kill their parents.

How do I tell her that
we have poisoned her rivers, carved out her mountains
ripped apart generations of people -
”We’re sorry, but we thought it was necessary.”

How do I warn her about
the do-gooders who will shoot down her dreams
when they are still soft and naked,
with just three words – ”not good enough.”

How do I sing her this new song of this new world
when all I wanted to tell her was that
ever new dawn is a reason to dance.

She looks like nothing more than
a big pink soggy raisin in my arms
a mess of snot and hope,
but when she smiles,
the light just spills out of her eyes,
and almost drowns me. Hands shaking -
I cannot fight her strength
because I am reminded again and again that
she is a miracle,
and the end of the world will just have to wait -
because she is smiling.

I don’t need a song of rainbow and stars
poverty and heartbreak.
This is my song.
Just come home.
We’re waiting to see you smile.

Winner of the Prakriti Festival Poetry slam – Audience favorite, student, english category. So someone must think it’s good, yes?

Editing at Midnight

A flick of the slick knife
cuts away the wheeze of clinging clauses
and the whirling worlds of wordy wonders
are slashed with a snickettysnack chop chop
into a pile of well ordered ideas
dropped with a thud onto a page.

The truncated stubby ends of sentences heal
under the crack of fresh mint full stops
free from the granulous gangrene of verbosity.
With no bombastic ballast the words go
flap-flap-flapittyflap and soar away
into the horizon of a new thought.

The abandoned ideas flip away
and flop into the dark corner in your head
where they gyre and spiral like
chickens with their heads cut off.
Tick turns to tock as they wait for the
clunk to click into a new beginning.

Outlines

Perhaps the world would be better in black and white.

The colour dripped out,
the landscape scrubbed with acid
to get out those nitty-gritty stains.

Spotless.

Sterile.

Simple.

The imaginary lines touch at the imaginary horizon.

A breakdown of
all that you believe in and
all that you are
into sharp angled shapes.

Meaningless.

Isolated.

There can be no sunset in grey.

The Temple at the Corner

Before stepping over the threshold of the temple,
I take off my half-baked sartreian ideas
along with my slippers and leave them
at the corner where the old flower-seller sits.

My bare feet make no sound on the naked stone.
(The questions of skeptics and
the pockmarks of history
have worn it equally smooth.)
I indulge in a game of quick hopscotch
across the thin line of belief.
The air smells different on either side.

The goddess seems unfazed by my usual offerings;
I suppose even goddesses must get bored.
I make do with the warm smile
on the flower seller’s crinkled face.
She asks me if I want flowers in my hair;
she knows I always shake my head in reply.

A little boy delightedly tugs at the bell rope.
The sonorous clanging reverberates in my head
and touches a childhood memory.
It has the comforting ring of the familiar -
the sound of those things that never change.

Puzzle

Puzzle

A modest second attempt at photoshopping.

Scars

They cut through your skin of innocence that night.
You crawled out naked and raw, the air keen in your lungs,
cold and throbbing with the promise of unconquered dawns.
Your soul burned in the red-hot heat of reality;
you ripped off the scabs with impatience.
Those scars are your story. You wear them with pride.