When I Opened My Eyes This Morning

When I opened my eyes this morning

(Most people wouldn’t call it morning)

There was a bullet in me.

So I didn’t sit up, or turn over.

I lay with my eyes open and the day

Breathed around me,

Inhaling light, exhaling shadows.

I bled beautifully, needlessly, profusely.

There was no pain. There was no wound.

I did not know where the bullet had lodged itself.

It may have been my rib-cage,

My thigh, my wrist, my brain.

They shouted, “That is art!” and clamoured for a better view.

But it wasn’t.

There was no pain. There was no wound.

Of Wrongs and Rights

She felt as though her ribs had shattered
Into a million shark-teeth
That were slowly sinking
Into her ravaged heart
That someone had squeezed
Into a pulp, a bloody, messy pulp
That could be rotting away
Into a stinking bitterness
That smelled pungent, boring
Into her flaring nostrils
That made her eyes pour
Into a tear-stained pillow
That lay beneath her throbbing head.

They said what she felt was wrong

Simply because,
She didn't have the right. 

Labour Pains

"Dad, how was I born?"

Years later, when the son had one of his own, he finally understood his father's answer - "We made you that night when we made love instead of having sex."

Blood-shot

Pick that almost healed scab.

Ask not what caused it.

You know you want it to bleed once more.

A pinprick of scarlet swelling into a pool.

And then running  red furrows down your skin.

Warm and sticky and icky.

Watch the patterns it makes.

Oozing.

Let it spill and drip and slip.

Count the minutes until it stops.

By itself.

You'll do it again.

Because you can't cry.

Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscopes have always fascinated me. They are so simple, yet so beautiful. When I was a kid, I spent hours on end just rotating the cardboard tube and looking at all the myriad designs forming inside the cone. I think I still have one back at home. I wonder who invented these.

I like to think of my life as a kaleidoscope. It's made of a lot of ordinary simple things, but it's still beautiful.

The friends who are so weird that you can't live without them.

My family which is the reason I'm this crazy.

The roads I've walked, drove and passed.

The college that ground the brains out of me.

The skeezes who made me realize my own worth.

The poems I read but never understood, only my skin was left in goose-pimples.

The fairs I've been to and got lost.

The cats I cuddled on the road.

The last benches we carved our names on.

The wallets I lost, and lost more than money.

The best friend I found in my boyfriend.

The scars on my legs when I was learning to cycle.

The tears I wept that nobody knows about.

The burps that scandalize but also amuse my buds.

The flowers I picked from a far away hillside and pressed between books.

The autumn sky with clean white cotton clouds.

The smell of a brand new book in a musty store.

The vapours of a plate of warm khichdi on a rainy afternoon.

The old house with vines growing on its walls that I once called home.

The wind that blew tiny leaves in my face and hair.

The forks of lightning I viewed from an open terrace.

The make-believe stories I played out.

The reality which had once become make-belief.

The dates that went bad.

The movies that made me laugh and cry and swear.

The times I loved and lost, but learnt to love again.
  

To all those bits that make up my kaleidoscope every day -

A Celestial Love Story

He lay on his terrace floor and gazed at the sky, seeing nothing of the otherwise glorious night. The pain of realising that he would never be able to be together with the love of his life sheered his heart with every passing moment. If he wasn’t so steeped in pain he would have admired a night of poetic beauty: the velvety black half globe was sprinkled with shimmering specks of diamond, somewhat marred by the impeccable sphere of unparalleled gloss. As in most of us mundane creatures, pain was the only thing that forced some philosophy in to him and he looked at the Moon in a whole new light.

“All those lines and cracks must have been caused by ancient tears... but what could have caused them? What could have caused pain to such a beautiful thing?” he wondered aloud.

Miraculously and astonishingly, the Moon heard him. A sad little smile spread across the wan face.

“I cry because I can never be with the one I love, and I cry more because I cannot go far enough to forget him. If he and I come together it is the end of eternity. If we let go, it is the end of eternity too. Yet we are tied together by the strangest of bonds, the most painful and the most beautiful too. I can’t ever have him, nor can I ever give him up...”

“Who is he?” he asked, empathizing with the Moon, perhaps getting a bit hopeful too.

And the Moon answered, “The Earth, my dear.”