70 posts
Latest Posts by btlk-like - Page 2
Our love was wine drunk
At 3 am on the kitchen floor,
We made space for each other.
We were giggles illuminated
By the fairy lights in my room.
We were lights turned off
And windows pushed wide open;
We were a clear night sky,
We were so beautiful, so pure;
Two stars besides one another,
We were bright and free.
Boo.
To acknowledge the Monster is to say
It is here,
That it has been here all along;
It is to stand in the dark with a terrible thing
Hoping it does not devour you.
To be hopeful is to be terrified
Of anything otherwise;
It is to hold on
To withering threads of optimism
As the likelihood of the unfavourable
Gets the guillotine ready for your head.
To scream Monster is to say
Here stands a terrible thing
That scares me;
You cannot simply
Take the elephant out of the room
And throw it under the bus,
You know?
To be scared is to admit
You have something to be scared of
And something to be scared for.
To draw a monster and ask yourself
What makes one,
Is to ask yourself what you consider
Dreadful enough to be called inhuman.
To tell stories of your childhood
Is to say it is long gone;
It is to acknowledge
Childhood pushed you off the cliff
And ran away.
It is to say you have been
Free falling ever since,
Trying to grasp at things
That do not stay.
To have an inheritance
Is to say that
Everyone in the family is dead.
To scream Monster
Is to stand in the dark beside it
And say you know terrible well enough
To know what a Monster is.
To say you are here
Is to realize there was a time
When you were not,
That there will once again
Be a time
When you won't be here;
It is to say you don't know
What time is anymore.
To be alive
Is to be terrified
(All the time)
And hopeful,
Even if the guillotine
Is getting ready
For your very execution;
It is to turn the lights off
And sleep in the room
With the Monster
And pray like hell
It does not kill you.
- A.G.
I wrote a poem
And you thought it was for you.
I wrote an eulogy
And you thought it was
For my funeral.
To be with someone
Who thinks of nothing
But the ending
When you both are still here
Is to say there already exist
Thousands of ends in their mind.
I just wish he has also imagined
One mellow future where
We're both here and we're both okay,
No one buries us and no one burns us.
We kissed and fought wars
With our tongues,
You seemed to taste an awful lot
Like the lull after a bomb;
The quiet after the storm
When there is nothing more left
To break apart, nothing more left
To get undone.
We tore limbs and rearranged parts
Of our own selves-
Like the Jenga tiles
We never seemed
To arrange right.
We crumbled there on your bed,
And never could hold each other again,
Could never hold our own selves again.
Inevitable
We were a prolonged sunset,
Something beautiful
That we knew
Would end in darkness anyways.
We were a mouthful of words
The tongue couldn't help but mess up.
We were a tiny cat
Who climbed the big tree
And forgot it had yet to learn
How to come back down.
We went skydiving,
Up, up, up
And the earth pulled us back down;
We free fell into our own demise
And made a mess,
We left chaos behind.
Hi are you from india sorry if its weird asking out of nowhere
Nope it's completely fine! Yep I am from India. Brown and Proud haha :)
I am a walking grave
Of all the people
I did not let myself become.
This sadness is the only eulogy
They will ever hear.
There are skeletons which live in closets
That have been kept shut
For far too long
And the skeletons need their coffins
And the coffins their graves
And one too many graves
Makes a cemetry
I am the cemetery:
The door that locked its own kind out;
The graves, the coffins and the skeletons.
But I am alive, goddamn it!
Buried within myself
People I did not
Let myself become.
People were not meant
To carry so much of
What wasn't alive,
Coffins do no justice to the living.
Lives aren't meant
To be spent within boxes,
How the hell did
We get tricked into believing
They will do death any justice?
You are alive,
And everything
You could've been too,
Just not here.
But somewhere,
In another universe,
You exist
But are everything
You have always wanted to be,
And perhaps,
Someday in this life too.
Physics dictates the posssibility
Of multiple infinite universes;
Every decision you make is a forked path
Split into two-
The one which happened
And another one
Which happened too,
Just not to you,
Not in this universe.
Which means there is a universe out there
In which you do not hold me responsible
For all the terrible that befell you.
Another one in which
It didn't happen at all,
Another in which you remain unborn
So you do not have to try
(to make that happen)
But in this one,
The only one we get to live in,
We are here,
We are what we are
(Not what happened to us)
You can not undo a life that already happened.
But look around,
There is so much life left to live yet.
It hurt so bad and I did not want to feel all of this pain and dread anymore.
After Indian Mystic Poet Kabir Das
Kabir walked after death,
Walked his own body to a grave.
Flowers bloomed and plucked themselves
Out of their homes,
Placed themselves in the middle
Of life and a walk to the grave
To let a man leave in peace.
Kashi born,
He walked with the conviction
He had in his knowledge,
Challenged the Orthodoxes,
Challenged the convention;
Kashi born guaranteed a place in heavens
He gave it all up,
Got himself cremated and burried at the same time,
Got himself fights throughout life
And even afterwards,
Got himself a piece of satisfaction,
Got himself legends and disciples
And angry purohits,
Got a piece of logic and equality of castes
When there were no such words
And Brahmins were gods.
Man dead already,
Looked at his funerals,
Looked at the burial
And felt his head turn towards Meccah,
Could hear the verses ring in his ears
As the soil washed over the lack of his body:
"We created you from it,
And return you into it,
And from it we will raise you a second time";
Looked at the cremation
And felt his soul return to the gods
As they proceeded with the Antim Sanskaar, chanted:
"When thou hast made him ready,
All possessing Fire,
Then do thou give him over to the Fathers,
When he attains unto the life that waits him,
He shall become subject to the will of gods".
I was not the broken thing anymore.
I cried and fought and fell
And scratched and clawed
My way back from hell.
I made an armour out of this body,
Grew my heart into a soldier,
Marched to once friendly lines
To cut off all ties
And fought you off
With all my might.
You weren't here anymore
And I grew myself a garden,
Planted my heart in its bosom;
Took the armour out to let it rust,
Felt the sunlight burn my thick skin,
And I almost could feel the years turn,
And could almost feel myself turn to dust.
sometimes i still think about not being here, see all the futures in which i have ceased to exist. then my brain goes into survival mode and tries to find me all the things i will definitely miss, things i will not be able to do if i am not here. and i find it really dumb. all the things i will not be able to do if i am not here? bitch try everything! if you are not here, you have ceased to exist, as in, the real world no longer contains you as a person who is real and living and breathing. you're just burnt ash or like on your way to become fossil fuel for the generations to come. but does that faze you, not being here at all? sometimes the answer is no. but then i find myself overtired, fresh out of a long shower standing in front of the mirror in my fluffy bathrobe midst a daydream, dancing shittily to silence while brushing my teeth thinking of not being here and then losing that train of thought to all of the ridiculous things i could do if whatever i am doing does not work out and i am kind of content.
Are you scared to death to live
Or are you scared to live
Because you know you will die?
If there was no one to observe the universe
Would it cease to exist as we know it?
If a tree falls in a forest but
No one is around to hear it scream,
It still thuds and the ground still rumbles,
It's just that no one feels it.
So perhaps you are so obsessed with
Letting people know you are here
Because you know you could die
And no one would see the stars of your life collapse,
Feel the rumble of your loss of life.
It is possible to go away, quietly,
Unnoticed, leave things unchanged-
No one to mourn your loss
or to question higher powers
Over the lack of your presence
Or to tell your stories.
How terrifying it is to think
The universe in my mind could go away with me.
The sadness made a home out of this body
And there wasn't enough space for the both of us here
I could feel myself become empty,
Feel my body become things it never has been;
I felt the sadness seep in when I was already done getting out of myself,
I wasn't there anymore.
The sadness made a house out of my bones
And I collapsed into things that did not resemble a person anymore.
I am still trying to look for pieces in the rubble
And create a whole person out of all this mess.
You held me close before you stabbed me.
I guess there are people close by
Who keep you at a sword's length
So they get to use it.
Your kisses tasted an awful lot like war
And I will not be your white flag anymore.
Our fights felt like the earth shaking,
Felt like war cry;
The silence felt like an interstice between two tragedies.
Our kisses grew shorter
And interruptions became devastating
Until you finally struck and won the battle,
Won the war.
There's blood between us now
And one tragedy in all of this silence//
It has been a year since we last talked.
Surgeons// Cuts
The wound bleeds.
The wound bleeds,
Gushing with everything
That was intended to be kept on the inside.
This safe of a body was not meant to be shared, sliced open,
Quite so literally.
The blood will soon clot off, sealing everything temporarily//
Body's own defense mechanism.
The surgeon will surgically remove the growth.
The local anesthetic will make your body funny;
You'll feel your ear become a fabric,
The sound of sewing of sutures
Rings in your head as the surgeon finishes.
He is impressed with how well you handled the needles.
You smile.
Being numb doesn't even feel like numbness-
A lot more like no pain
But your body turns into things
It has never been.
When you exit the operating room
He tells you to keep the dressings dry.
You text a friend,
Tell them not to hit you in the head again-
You just had surgery.
It rains on your way home.
Playing God
The Gods, they envy us.
We get to live and be done with it:
We get to die and leave.
There is no eternity hanging over our heads,
No forevers to roll the dice over.
We will not become Fallen Angels
Even if we forget our own morality.
We get to leave into the nothingness,
Become one with the Earth,
Get trodden in the very soil
We claimed as Ours once before and then
Turned to dust in.
We become the dust;
The dust that is to us
The same as we are to the cosmos;
We are the nothing.
Galaxies erupt and entire worlds are created,
Stars explode and black holes collide,
So why does it matter that I fell from the stairs today;
Why does it matter that I stuttered in a conversation
Or that I yelled out the wrong answer in class?
The cosmos are to us
As the Earth is to the dust specs on it;
We will be blown away and it will all still be here:
The Galaxies; the Earth within one such,
Packed with an entire Solar System,
Turning around one Sun,
They will still continue being//
In one form or another.
So why does it matter
That I will not be here
When all has been said and done,
I’d still have existed.
There are things we do not talk about here.
Do not mention the lines that once
Ran along the length of your left hand,
Carved by you trying to play God
When you were barely a person//
Perhaps that was the point.
Half a year trying to make the scars disappear,
The other half spent convincing your own damn self not to.
Listen.
There are places in your head
You could disappear off to,
The ones which will make you so, so happy
And perhaps even a maniac,
But aren't maniacs just people
With enough conviction
To want to live in a world
That was their own mind's doing?
I am proud.
When the Earth tumulted and collapsed on me,
Trying to throw me off itself,
I held on with bare hands.
I dug my claws into the brown soil,
Trying to become one with the Mother,
Trying to grow myself some roots to stay.
I have already been here longer than I had imagined,
To have a place at all is magic in itself.
I have so much life left to grow roots out of.
Perched. So gently.
(for a better resolution, click on the picture)
Love Birds (but like the Love is real and pure)
I think we're terrified of being forgotten. I think that as soon as an ounce of intelligence entered our being, our first instinct was to scratch walls and make art out of sharp sticks and stones; We wanted it to be known that we were here.
Perhaps when Adam ate the Apple he was more relieved at being able to die than he was afraid of God's anger, perhaps even the Gods hate all this immortality business.
We are here to die. And perhaps the only reason we aren't relieved at that is because we might just forget to do anything but continue dying, we might just forget to live.
So here we are: scratching walls or ourselves, trying to make it become something other than our own coffins at the end of this journey.
Fell in love with a stranger for a few moments today.
Do not let flowers bloom in place of your words. Speak Up. No more shrinking yourself, staying quiet, being worried if you'll step on someone else's toes. They will shred you and they will like it, enjoy it even. Speak Up. Scream. Let it be known that you are here, you are here and alive and you sure as fuck will ensure that they know it. Speak the fuck up. No more hiding.
1. I will see the World however I see fit. I will grow flowers where they've dropped bombs and deafened people// I AM HERE.
2. I am a little caught up right now.
Desi Dark Academia
Wears Chicken embroidery Kurtas with pants to give the perfect combination of modern and traditional
Long, long haired women who always wear a braid to keep it out of their way
Glasses. Simple glasses. Removing them makes you look like a different person. Fuck contact lenses, you say
Have read The Mahabharata, The Bhagvad Gita, The Ramayana multiple times and analysed it to the point you know it better than your grandmother.
The stories of Akbar Birbal are a vivid part of your childhood
STEM students with an intense knowledge of history
Historical monuments splayed in ALL cities with their own history and stories
Havelis with squatters living in them
Villages.
Being Bilingual since birth, sometimes even knowing three languages before you enter primary school.
Your mother sitting you down, oiling your hair on Saturdays and braiding it for you
Your mother's gold bangles, which she got from her mother and will eventually be yours.
Mehndi. Weddings and Festivals which leave but intricate Mehndi designs that linger on women's hands for a while. Or your mother putting Mehndi in her hair because fuck chemical colors.
Haldi. Haldi is everything.
Your family cures and recipes.
KADAAS. Bitter Kaadas with herbs and spices that your maa, amma/daadi or nani forces you to drink because they're good for your health
Chai is the first thing in the morning. Or the last one at night. The calm that washes over you when you're in the midst of a late night study session as you make yourself a cup of chai in the middle of the night. Quietly, because everyone else is asleep.
