Look at the moon,I'm dead

Said my friend,so burnt out from the consumption of a neon culture we didn’t necessarily create for ourselves,but perpetuate,nonetheless.The moon looked huge from where we sat.We sat on some rocks,with a vantage view of the rows of shingle roofed houses we’ve lived among for a few years now.All of them aligned,identical,except for the different number plates behind the white picket fences guarding the well  manicured gardens.Paths for people to take evening walks on,but ones not meant for dogs to “dirty”.Are any of us human beings or just parts of a well oiled machine? Stepford wives and Complan children.

We munch on green apples dipped in peanut butter,sip on Caprisun,snack we think we’re consuming.In earnest,it’s the market consuming us.

It is a dog eat dog world,they say.

I dream of forests and wake up wondering why I only visit shopping malls instead of these seas of green I see only in a state of semi-consciousness.

Shadow Of An Almost

Faiz wrote,
and I echo,
When the scars that missing you has left behind, begin to heal,
I begin to find reasons to miss you again.
I let you go,
because that's what loving means,right?
Every word of small talk
I say to you ,silently screams,
of wanting something I never had,
but dreamt of every night when I fell sleep,
every time you said goodnight to me.
I keep waiting for you to say goodnight
again.
What hurts,
is not that you've found somebody else.
What hurts is that you took half
of my hope away with you,too.
I used to tell you,
of how I've always wanted to know
what being loved without asking
for it,feels like,
but you forgot,
forgot to see the pain I'd let you into
the realities of my most horrific dreams.

Colour schemes

My sister always told me

She disliked photographs

In black and white,

colour looks better,she said.

I arrive home at midnight,

From the flight,I watched the city

Scattered like purple pixie dust,

Mocking the stars,mirroring them.

Woke father up,he looked haggard

In his royal blue kurta,

creased with fatigue,worry lines.

He enveloped me,sealed a kiss on my forehead.

I’ve been trying to find home

In the off white drapes

And aquamarine couches in the old age home,

Pastel has always seemed inviting to me.

I search for home,cling to the idea of it

In the soft silver hair of Nanna,

In the moist banana loaf she cuts up carefully

For us, the mellow lamp lit beside her.

I speak in fragments,it’s all there’s left

Of home,some term this post modern,

I call it mere poetry,when we watch yellow 

leaves fall for the summer,nature’s confetti.

 We laugh,as we savour our bubblegum jelly

Ice lollies,losing colour to our tongues,

turning blue.Colour looks better,she said,

I look for hope in colour schemes.

The absence of poetry

The words I took refuge in are no longer in plenty,I made it to the college I dreamt of but it's been reduced to a facade for me,someone I was in love with picked another person and there remains even no shadow of small talk anymore.

It would suffice to say this year was one of experiences because that's what you get when you don't get what you thought you would.I watched the sun sink behind rooftops last evening,the second last time this year,it looked like it left watercolour shadows on the clouds,while it skidded its way to sleep.Blackbirds and crows flew homeward,encompassed by a sense of direction that guided them home at dusk,one I was envious of.I've almost forgotten how sunsets meant a sense of comfort to me.

I moved to another city,one full of strangers,one where I'm a stranger,myself and although people tell me roots can change,the sense of home can shift,I can only wonder if it will.

There is no poetic justice about growing older,only dramatic irony.There is no emptier feeling that not having the power of the very words that led you exactly where you wanted to be.What point or purpose does an achievement have if it takes away what you believed in.My friend says we could shout from rooftops,what we've learnt about ourselves.We could wear the realisation that we're too romantic for a nine to five working week like a badge of honour,but it wouldn't change a thing other than the fact that we're not soft enough to be moulded,not cut out to fit in and only we can try working our way around it.

Change is the abundance of verse,which does not mention ketchup,refer to books read and yet there is space for new friends to watch stars under a blanket on Friday nights with and ones who read out poetry on park benches,over cheap Chinese food.There is a body made up of the discovery that for every image we know,there is an alternative reality,there are people who will give you roses to press in between in pages of a journal,old friends who will make you forget all that seems uncertain,

I've lived most of this year rationed out in weeks and months,semesters and holidays,let downs and heartbreaks,Yet,I'm here to hope,to believe there's better.
I guess I've done a bit of growing up this year,the most evident life skill I've picked up is to shut people out (quite literally),hole myself in a closet of a room all weekend,cramped in with my apprehensions.All that once seemed pretty no longer does and I don't know how to feel about it but in the absence of poetry,I've been looking for an abundance of refrains.

Sitting here in the underbelly of a wave,for I have swallowed a sea of all that could have been,I'm here, hoping for a little more poetry.

Lessons learnt in room 27

 Twenty seven,an obscure number in an equally obscure space designated the purpose of higher education.

Sitting here,one can hear the mechanical swish of the flurry of everyday activity,the metro going by,the corridors emptied out of students who have now entered classrooms,being mopped spotless. Leaves of frangipani trees stand lacquered in sunshine,outside the little square windows,as I learn nothing textbooks can teach.
 I discovered that caffeine is much like popular culture,if you can't consume it excessively,it isn't culture at all(So is tea an equivalent,because it's a statement the intellectual use to perpetuate their own subculture,but will probably not admit to) and almost nothing comes in one colour.Not people,not culture,not life.It's never only black,white,roseate.I realised the futility of hoping for somebody who tells you you're a colour they haven't imagined yet,because then,you're probably not a colour they welcome on their palette any longer.
You cannot belong to someone or some place,cannot fit in,because you're a dream not meant for a coffin or a skeleton to be tucked into a coffer box in a cupboard.
You are the colour of the wind-all embracing in its invisibility.
You need not be a youtube phenomena or a firebrand feminist to feel entitled to just feel the way you do,you need no validation to be too independent in your childlike demeanour to mould your life around the idea of an institution,to be outlined neatly with a cookie-cutter like label of this or that,because you can choose to be this,that or neither.
You are the colour no one can contain in words,disappointing and hopeful,alike.You are the colour you paint yourself with choices,a transcendent feeling.
 

Rubella Red

Plopped alone on my single bed,I stare at the length of my arms covered by a generous scarlet sprinkling of measles,as if staring at them long enough would make them vanish.I squeeze my eyes shut and pray that they do,but it's not happening.Yet again,I realise the magnitude of how little a fuck,people,especially adults give about each other.I have no where to sleep for the night,and in an empty hostel room,it's just my despair,my rubella covered arms and the awareness of my adulthood sharing space and a comfortable silence between us.
I'm alone with my thoughts again and the sound of them haunts me like a late Sunday afternoon when everyone is asleep and the corridor reeks of quiet.I realise I have caved in to rejection,caved in to the belief that my writing is not good enough for the couple of college societies that I thought I could have been a part of,that as much as I dislike going home,it is  symbolic of a screwed up sense of comfort.I've stopped looking for a physical sense of home,altogether because no matter how wonderful the people,how positive the atmosphere..there is bound to be a deep seated emptiness that cannot be forgotten.Like a dark room with soft music,when it's raining incessantly outdoors-a feeling so immensely beautiful,it has a sense of tragedy looming about it.I've come to realise,college isn't half the dream it's promised to be and just like school,there will be lecturers who will produce a physical reaction of fear in most of the class with mere words.Life almost never turns out as planned,planning is futile,it just happens-for better or for worse.It's quite a struggle for me to just stop and try to participate,before it fleets away in the blink of an eyelid,leave alone trying to control anything.
Maybe my words and dreams are tainted in the very hue my arms are-rubella red,bold.Maybe they aren't for most people to understand and maybe,this is just a mere consolation I'm trying to get by each day on.It is good enough to make it with the lack of any encouragement,making a mark might be difficult for me,but I just might be a phoenix,reborn from ashes and I just might be Sisyphus,rolling a stone up a hill,that I know will come crashing down the slope,anyway.There is much grace in being either of them,I suppose.The most essential fact that keeps me afloat on rocky seas,however,is that I still write.I write for myself,I write when I'm rejected and feel inferior,I write when I discover I might be an average,first generation literature student,I write for my loneliness and I write for my joy.I write because I've survived and I try,each day to make a little more sense of my survival.I write for my childhood self and the broken home I grew up in,the stories that need to be told.Despite not having read cannons like my classmates have or being on editorial boards and having published lengths of my writing,I write.
Because that's the point,isn't it? Making the best of what you've got.Like Scout Finch understood of what Atticus said to her about the best kinda folks being ones who make the best of what they get.

Fountain Coke

Fine,silver hair like fluff on the crown of an old man's head,
a dusty notebook where he records mundane details because mnemonics have failed him
A couple of hours spent getting to know a fragment of ninety-three years of life.
The courage to finally utter a "hi" to a dreamy senior that makes me swoon,and that indelible feeling when her face melts into the softest,most genuine smile.
The soothing after effects of a glass of fountain coke sipped out of a long,yellow straw on a sunny day and all of these things remind me,it's getting better.