Eulogy 1

Would you believe me if I say your words shatter me?

Complete in my awe

I walk away

I am used to walking away from everything that moves me

As though I can afford to be shattered only once

To witness you in close quarters and be broken again and again

Is as beautiful as it is, frightening.

Dig a trench in my heart

Where I can hide some semblance of sanity and self away

Because this could be war

My body riddled with holes where you have reached me too sharp and too fast

I allow myself to be in this line of fire

Where gentle touches could burn like acid

While deluding you into believing

That you are growing new skin

Don’t Fill My Blank

Did they see us?
The wall that refuses to break.
The blank that refuses to have love poems written on it.
The empty that has space for no longing but for that of peace.
Love is living but always having lived without this heady brand of it makes me feel like it will be a certain death that I will be tempted to embrace.
My lonely is at peace
So when you watch me leave and my blood is a river threatening to flow right back to you
I will have a strange difficult decision to make.
I fought for my peace
Everyday has been a war fought in a proxy land
In the third space between my mind and tangible reality
So when I space off, I am fighting.
When I walk… alone, I am fighting
I have fought my battles
And when a friend walks into her war
I will rent out my worn out armor with a free hug
Because at least something good should come out of this.
This history of just fighting. This history of just fighting.
When I see you, how do I tell you that being shattered by you will be a lovely end
But I still crave living.
I still crave my peace
My nothingness.
My blank.
Untouched by love.

 

An Ode To Queer Grief

Queer means “denoting or relating to a sexual or gender identity
that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender.”
The first time I read this definition was while writing this poem and yet I am it.
The first time I read this definition I registered some irony in the fact that queer even has a definition.
To me, it is ambiguity. A label I leave to people for interpretation
Because their perception of the word will still not mould me. I have finally learnt to be free.
My sexuality may be fluid but it isn’t water, taking shape of whatever container you try to put me in.
I dread being asked what does queer mean.

Queer means that your growing up was magical.
Because you literally magicked a rainbow unicorn out of mid air
As you crafted your super-gay identity out of societal and media invisibility.
Queer means you partly brought yourself up.
The internet was your mother who taught you everything and society was the father who abandoned you
Not letting you know where you came from and who you were. You were always searching
Queer meant that some words in your vocabulary were always missing
Like ripped pages in a dictionary. Like a conspiracy theory
That the heterosexual world was in on a plan to not even let me know I was different for the first 18 years of my life.
Queer means you were are a finder. Always looking. Always searching.
Searching for an identity in the words and experiences of strangers on Internet.
Searching for people like me.
I am a database.
Every queer person I meet is a new harbinger of wisdom and
I desperately learn them. Archiving their history at the back of my mind.
Queer means your future is never in sight
And the present feels perpetually information deprived.
Queer means I crack terrible jokes.
I correct my posture by saying “Stand straight. Be gay”
Because I guess I get to have a laugh at the expense of something that hurts me.
Because queer hurts.
It hurts like an open wound. It is that side of me that asks for too much.
I sometimes wake up and wonder what normalcy feels like
But that word “normal” jars against me and I realize
I only wonder what privilege feels like.
Because queer means I have never been spoon fed morals and values
I had to fight enough to find and validate my own
I had extricate my self-worth from the carcasses of my confusion
Find myself in a sea of invisibility
But not reveal myself for the sake of safety
Sometimes people say “It is all the same love” but I beg to differ
Don’t try to simplify this struggle. Trust me, I have tried.
Queer tires. It is feeling like you have been running before you have even begun the race.
And you have. It’s just that some parts of this struggle are seen less.
And when you read a research article use the term “minority stress”
You close the door of the room and you cry.
Because somewhere some great goddamned researcher named the ocean of grief I hold within me.
Queer is an ocean of grief but I grew up becoming a capable enough swimmer to navigate it.
Queer taught me the real meaning of resilience. To keep swimming with no shore in sight.
To get hope from the stars at night when you realize your identity is a part of a larger history
That there are so many who live like this alongside me and shine their light anyway.
We are never alone but sometimes we just need space to call this grief own own.
Recognize that it takes time to emerge from the black to show your colors at Pride
It takes more than just silent acceptance from the world to not let our hope die
So we try.
We fight to live and live for the fight.
Just let us write our ode to our queer grief sometimes.

Teach A Monster To Dance

What monstrosity dances in your head?

Wake up and realize that it still hurts.

Calm the fire in your heart, your head and your loins

You burn yourself and others

You spontaneously combust

But take this unholy ash now and smear it on your forehead

Become the agori sadhu, naked in acceptance of the world

And feel the calm of the river for once.

Cherish the moment even as you feel the waves of disgust rolling in

Waves of discomfort cried to yourself so many times that it became as familiar a feeling as hunger

The waves will come but maybe peace will begin to feel familiar too

When you are born under Mars and burn with desire

And burn your desire till you blacken your heart

Peace…does not come easy.

Peace does not come easy

But fire will try to burn like a gentler flame.

And maybe peace will begin to feel familiar too.

And you will befriend your monstrosity again

Teach it a better way to live

A calmer step to dance

And you will be fine again.

Three Seven Seven

Somewhere as a haunting tune plays in my head
I see her hands.
I see the fight.
I remember the gentle slouch. A whisper of a soft name.
I remember the date.
Eleven Twelve Thirteen
One Two Three
Years
I remember we started a war that day
Our hearts had endless capacity to bear
We loved with one hand and fought with another
Touched with one hand and wiped an ally’s angry tears with another.
We were gentle and battered at once.
Hold on to your rose petals as you storm into the fire of revolution
In a cold land, you await the day you can say
Three years and we still survive
A lifetime of our existence on this land and we still survive
From amorous sculptures to underground clubs to the streets
We took our deepest secrets and used them to burn and give light
Remember every face you saw dancing in the color of the street
And close your eyes.
You will feel the wave of grief washing over you
Leaving a renewed desire to fight. And live.
Because we live for the fight and fight to live freely.
Someday we will forget.
Remembrances will be made.
But gladly we will forget.
Because freedom will come as easily as a newborn breathing
We screamed the first scream already
And for these few seconds, an infinity
We wait.

An Ocean In My Palm

When my heart broke
It fled to the soothing embrace of the ocean
Waves crash back. A flash of lightning
Illuminating a single memory
Till unwillingly my floodgates open
To the illusion of you
In hallways and corners
In dark rooms. You were but a kind illusion
Who missed the sea.
How many can say that kindness broke their backs
And that they themselves conspired with the sea to break their own hearts.
There was just one at fault in the end.
I walk past you with an ocean of emotion hidden in my tight fists
As you calm the currents in my veins. My world slowed down for you
As I hope the waters wash away your invaded grief
And that the sea finally dreams of you.
As the breeze whispers the last secret to me
That I never really knew you
When my heart broke
It fled to the ocean
So I let it drown me sometimes.

Under The Tarp

They build up your walls
Brick by brick
Under tarp that you passed by the street and you never noticed
Till it was towering above you
You never still noticed
We don’t see how easily cities grow and change
We think we are the same
The flood comes
Making you take in the suffering in one breath, one view of the skyline, one bird
Two eyes
And we see for once the walls your trauma built for you
The walls our collective grief unacknowledged built for us
But we know for once
That anger can destroy our walls
The delicate flowers will over years take over and crumble them all
We see the suffering city and witness its beauty for once.

Rein

I stopped writing when the clouds lifted

And I saw the sun for what it was

Brutal and real

I stopped finding when the delusion lifted

And I saw that you were real

Brutal and real

Shining like the sun

I avert my eyes

I see you only in the periphery of my vision

I never stopped watching

I am attuned to you feeling your light

No matter if our eyes don’t meet

But I always walk away

Waiting for the day the rain will wash the memory of you away.

Waiting for the day the gentle rain will let me be myself again.

Reaper of Death

Oh you dear being!
Death brought you no hope
When you chose death because hope died
Rise from the ashes, not as a phoenix but as a charred human
Living this disfigured now is much harder
But still much braver.

Writer’s Block

Writer’s block?
More like an attempt at recovery.
My self-inficted wounds ooze ink.
Or whatever programming goes behind computer type.
When the world is an ocean crashing against your shoulders
Shed the weight in every word you create.
If pain created beautiful poetry
I would gladly let go of these words and embrace a happier reality.
There are writers who create words in celebration of this universe
Then there are us, mad women, creating words to simply enable us to survive.
In this universe.
Maybe when I see the light, I will draw instead.
And the ink of my past will fade away.
Just as my romantic self would say
Instead of deleting words on Microsoft Word as a happier, more rational me would dare to say.

And I would finally be okay.