Friday, November 22, 2013

Need for distance

I feel so far away from you
And you never seem to have felt
The need to be close at all

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Terrace farms

Perhaps there is nothing more beautiful than
Finely crafted terrace fields
Shining with ripe golden rice

At once reminiscent of
Incredible diligence
Sciene
Art
Beauty
Nature
Culture
And the ultimate comfort,
Food

Stranger effect

For the seeker of strange new things everyday
After a week among far-flung cultures
You, the man from home,
Are finally not exotic enough.

I hope this means
That you will now stop haunting me

Gifts

When i see someone
Giving a truckload of gifts
When one well chosen piece
Would suffice

I wonder if it is because
They don't know
Which little piece it is

Seasonal affective disorder

There is no doubt
That i struggle with SAD
every year

But sometimes i wonder
If it is an excuse
I use
To be lazy
So that i can be excused from making 
the eneormous effort required 
To be happy

Saturday, November 9, 2013

The dream that could not be interpreted

Once i dreamt of a man with mustaches
Who was wearing a short red ghaghra
And a sexy blouse that struggled to contain
His full breasts

After i woke up, disturbed,
I could not decide for the longest time
If it was indeed a man
Or a woman who had sprouted
Luxuriant, shoe-brush mustaches.

The girl of fifteen that i was then
Knew that this was a dream
No dream interpreter could explain
For the answer to this
I would have to dip deep into my own soul

But only now
Long after gaining the confidence
To tackle the dream with ease in daylight
Can i own up
To what it means to me

Hounded by insecurities
Inadequacies
Of not being beautiful enough,
And as a result, not desirable enough
By a man,
According to the standards set by
Smooth, hairless models and heroines,
The girl that i was 
Only found expression of her fears
In dreams.
Fears
That the extra padding that
Puberty was putting on her body
Would leave her hirsute
And unable to face any man without shame
Fears compounded by  the natural hairiniess
Of her race
And the unnatural capacity
Of her brilliant peers
To get rid of this problem 
That in her social ineptitude
Seemed impossibly beyond her

Dreams often tell you
What you do not dare acknowledge
In daylight

And this one told me
How deeply 
Images foisted by the ubiquitous mass media 
Can root themselves
In a subconscious.
Images idealized so thoroughly
That they are beyond recognition
Even by the subject herself

How do i know they are deep?
After years of
Threading
Veeting and anne frenching
Wax stripping and epilating
Many variations of the image
Of a full breasted (wo)man
With a shoe-brush mustache
Still continues to haunt me 
Leaving me breathless and perspiring
In the morning,
And ultimately,
Inadequate

(Perhaps they continue to haunt me because
I am unable to stop the
Waxing anne frenching epilating
Despite knowing 
that it has been foisted upon me) 

(Who sets the standards of my beauty?
How can they take away my free wil
And squeeze my subconscious?
How can they enter my sacred space
My dreams that i share with none
And that i believe feed on my very soul?
How can they tamper with my soul, just like that?

Why can i not compete with faceless entities
That tell me how i must look?
Why can i not tell them that thy are wrong
And i, with the natural hirsutism of my race,
Am right, am perfect.

The story of my hatred for
rivers of money that 
multinational cosmetic companies
Spend on advertising
Should maybe be put aside
For some other day)

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

So many lives are destroyed - II

Love can backfire
In so many unexpected ways

Her quietness gave her
An almost ethereal aura of dignity
He noticed how
She demanded nothing
Of anyone
And yet was content
With her lot in life

He 
Who believed he deserved 
Everything that life could him
Believed she
Who gave without asking for anything in return
Was perfect for him

And yet,
When he was lost
Even to himself
Within wells of despair
It was her very quietness
That turned against him
For she had not the ways
To reach out to him

Having not the smile
To take away his tears
She cried along with him,
Which bound him to her all the more
But doomed them both
To a lifetime of prozac and its equivalents

If only he had chosen
Someone more effervescent
Who would have taken 
Quite a bit of him
In his happy times
And yet
Would have acquired from it
The strengrh to reach out.
Maybe his story
Would have ended differently

If only
He hadn't spurned their vivacity
When he still could

So many lives are destroyed - I

Words come to his lips
They play on the base of his tongue
On the edge of his eyes
On the tips of his drumming fingers

Many a time he tries to get them out
But every time, 
Something or the other stops him

Sometimes its the memory
Of his uncle telling him
What a fine big boy he was and
How big boys don't cry
Sometimes of the girl
Spitting out as she left
To stop crying like a girl
And most of all
Of his father
Biting back his bitter words
To let out a smooth flow
Of reassurances
And of his mother
And everyone else's mother
Admiring him
For being
The calm man who could 
Take care of everything

He wipes the half a drop of tear
Beginning to form at the edge
He curls his fingers
Into a tight fist
And the words?
He swallows them whole

The silence of a storm
That has imploded upon itself
Is often inaudible.
But once you hear it,
It is stunning

The silence
In the hunched shoulders
In the half-glance
That looks and then looks away
In those impatient, impatient fingers
That will never again stop drumming
On any flat surface they will come across
How many stories they would tell
If only they were held
Until they calmed down

The sound of that silence
Is absolutely defeaning
Once you hear it,
There is no way you can unhear it

The loudness of it makes me wonder
If men are the truly oppressed species
At least my stories
Are greeted with hugs, not jeers






This alien creature

I am what you asked me to be
What you yourself wanted to be 

And now that
I have surpassed your expectations
And become what 
You could not

You realize, too late
That you don't kno
What to do with this
Alien creatur
That it was not 
What you want me to be
After all

You understand



When you do everything right
And still don't get loved

And someone who has no care
For how anyone else feels
Is smothered with affection

The world seems grossly unfair

And then you go fall u for him
Who breaks every rule in the book
Just to see you smile

It's still not fair
But you understand