what follows after the storm
is tenderness
something so soft, so fragile
it’s near impossibility to try and hold onto
the grasp must be loosened and the strings untied
love must escape
and past felonies must wither away like scars,
deep-rooted, but old enough to warrant accumulation of fresh skin
over tired hearts and defeated eyes,
aged with a continual stream of regrets

what follows the storm is quietness
life renewed, but humble and subdued,
something you can find buried in the cracks under the soles of your feet,
perhaps in between the ruffles of an anniversary chiffon dress,
in the glint of a single pearl resting on your neck,
or maybe beneath the smile of a wrinkled eye, shaded by a lock of silver satin hair.

Serendipity has marred my impression of your love. Let us find a quiet corner, perhaps a simple spot under the oak tree in your backyard and we can figure out what went wrong and where the mistakes stopped being excusable. Perhaps we will find lies in our history, or misspoken truths and unsettled metaphors in our complacent demise. Or perhaps we will discover the vast ridge of facetious felonies aimed to alter the course of faltering promises that we tumbled over each time you brought me flowers. That first time you picked the yellow daisies out yourself so thoughtfully, I plucked the petals and saved the dried leaves as bookmarks for irrelevant anniversaries we never celebrated. Yes, I respectfully disagree. Love is still love when it is found, whether broken or mended, stiff or pliable into whatever you want it to be. It is larger than you and me, and yet, within you and me. Perhaps I shall still marry you someday, but it is unimaginable to me that we will be friends. What happens next, I will record unfaithfully in a diary and pen paltry promises to never break your heart again.

there is shallowness
in the air you breathe and the space i occupy
in the myriad reasons that we should not be,
and this may be hard to imagine
but when there comes acceptance, there will be losses

lately i can’t seem to tell
if you used to worry and i consoled you
simply out of fear that a shared collective guilt
would wipe us
or if my words rung empty and you fell apart
when i sent letters in remonstrance

i know this may not seem like it
but i fear tremendously for this love untangled
where we walk vicariously
never dreaming, never hurting
only dwelling in uninhibited passivity
secluded from the tyranny of being
and through the years when fits of rage
compelled us to walk out on dishonest contracts
i wondered why you never read my letters
leaving me to withstand a silence that refused to tell,
refused to share secrets we had promised never to keep,
and when i found your unguarded letter
snuggled neatly, as if almost calculated
underneath the broken coffee table,
the goodbye was anything but
for we had already agreed that when i would worry,
you would walk

Sometime tomorrow we will dance in the sunlight
fight our way through glistening tear drops
shed in memory of family and home
and we will remember,
reminisce about a time when we traveled together
through decapitated emotions and turbulent grief
to find a gulf of unbidden joy and immeasurable peace
and after every momentous occasion,
emerged stronger, lighter, but left one behind weakened

And when we dance tomorrow,
squandering professed ideals in the pursuit of happiness,
we will leave a companion behind, two another day
until we disintegrate into a family of dispersed dreams and suffocating sorrows

The sunlight dances with us
and we are all but ashes and dust,
blowing steadily through time.
Won’t you dance with me still?

looks of disillusionment
hide silently underneath a
glimmering sheath of evaporated lies
and faulty laugh lines that
are wrinkles in disguise

On the definition of life, take two:
to be free is to struggle against despair
to go through cycles and routine motions
with a heart severed and a mind deceased
to walk while you talk through a streaming barrage of ineffective flair and obscenity
to fight till every notion aches and every sincere gesture scrutinized
with ceaseless skepticism and turbulent malice
to submit until submission is Complete.

then you will have lived, have known
what it feels like to emerge from a smothering tide
unharmed and in complete denial

Only yesterday mother had chided me for being so bold and brazen with my remarks. She had seen an ignorant nonchalance in my attitude and thought it her duty to warn me of the imminent perils of unattended speech. Today I had to return the favour. She was being too emotional, invested in reasons that were faulty and irrelevant, careless at best. So we hashed it out between ourselves; she would be the devil and I the pawn, and tomorrow we would switch places and re-enact the entire play. Now that the parts were assigned, we stood stripped of ambition and malevolence, courageous enough only to scream profanity back at the spectators who once marveled at our fortitude from the sidelines. And today I am what I have become – the daughter who turned against mother, who swore to be good and follow the lettered command to be honourable, but in a bid to be caring and protecting, left her to sleep while promising to be there, waiting with a glass of milk when she awoke.

Mother was sick and though she would never have me, I knew she needed me here. But a selfish abandon beckoned and I ran as soon as her eye lids stopped fluttering and never looked back to see her gasping for breath when she awoke. Tomorrow will be my turn to play devil.

and in this night we stray
perchance we may find grief
and encounter remorse strung into a rosary
each bead bearing witness to
a contemptuous lie, a palpable delusion,
reflections upon which we have built
this sturdy mountain of truth

if you ignore the ignorance we are steeped in,
i will tell you that i know the meaning of these words

I have lost
ability for agile speech and
finding meaninglessness in things mundane
and have infused a sense of
dainty religiosity
tempered with aromatic musings
into a life that is worth living, worth falling for,
but never lived and never felt

And in the process of this arduous acquisition
of missing pieces that were perhaps overlooked, perhaps simply
cast aside,
somewhere alongside winding roads of poetry and
broken promises buried underneath snow-covered pavements,
I went searching for severed seasons and veiled reasons
ones that no longer visit us and steer clear of
our hesitant conversations, always tainted now
with a false sense of sincerity, the kind that
creeps alongside wisteria vines
and abandoned dreams

Colour and Permanence. After much agonizing, those are the things I have realized I need. Relief from Scrambled Thoughts, Overwhelming Label-Less Emotions that have taken up residence for no good reason is desperately desired. The suitcases have been emptied, colour co-ordinated clothes and handbags hung in an unfamiliar closet, assorted sock pairs folded and neatly assembled in a new drawer. Cardboard boxes filled with books, trinkets, miscellaneous things we couldn’t part with have found new niches on foreign tables and recently dusted shelves. They show no fear, no reluctance, and we marvel at how easily these inanimate objects that mean the world to us move on so quickly, without looking back, without even a final glance. They settle with such comfort and ease, forget so fast the places they once called home, places that are still haunted by our decapitated hearts and souls. We, who have left behind everything worth taking, and only remembered to pack Lifeless Bodies for the future, are broken.

But I know a day will come when our souls will return and it will be a bittersweet reunion.

I never told you this, but I fought furtive battles in my room at night when the alarm clock had been set and the lights turned off. Only the indiscriminate car alarm and resident wind witnessed the struggle to keep going, the resolve to never look up, and the flurry of prayers that beseeched not for success, but for a mere passing. A plain, simple, that’ll do. I never wanted anything more, would be satisfied with less if it meant that I could still cross the bridge and make it to the Other Side.

I am not the destitute river
that never made it to the ocean;
I am the sturdy rock
underneath the ceaselessly gliding water
that simply
erodes with time.

I know that writing this down is futility; there is a lot that needs to be said, but truth dictates that I hold back and hide all the lies that I had gifted over the years, wrapped and topped with a bow. And after all this time, I’m still sorry that that the innocent baggage of The Past had affected me so, that the taunting and the unyielding silence meant so much, that the mark his Anger and Eventual Disappointment left stung for more than that endlessly long second, that the bruises still submerged, sit quietly and submissively underneath the thick, impenetrable skin. I’m sorry that I buried myself under the pretentious glare of acceptance, and that years later I found myself first cowering under the spotlight of solitude, then relentlessly seeking it.

Most of all, I’m sorry that all this means so much more than I’ll ever be able to understand why. I simply seek refuge in the luxury of reflection and marry my regrets to The Past even while those around me are still mired so absolutely in a sorrow far too real to comprehend. Yet I will resent this past even as I embrace it, and I will fear your future, even as I hope for it. And so long as there is Colour and Permanence, I will return.

Truth be told, I took a fall
and tumbled headlong into an abyss
of crafted sympathies and broken sentiments
favouring unhappy explanations over
seemingly trivial epiphanies

We fought alongside hunger and greed
for a manifest way, a path not carelessly strewn
for veiled hearts and blinded eyes

Tell me Dina, did you cry those fierce nights
when the wailing cats kept your misery company?
Or did you swallow back the rising waves
of emotion
threatening to crash over sturdy, slightly flexible souls?

We cried for you, you know.
We, who once struggled, who once fought,
who once, a long time ago,
learnt that victory is small, meager
and bereft of eternal sunshine

I ache to tell you, as do every verse and every secret shared
that pain is everlasting, disappointment is fitting
and cloudy days survey horizons for specks of light to extinguish.
But in every pinch of pain, in every trickle of disappointment
and in every rain-burdened cloud,
there is mercy,
far be it for me to hide it