Tomorrow will not be better

I'm trying so hard,

but I'm just a kid,
Thanks for listening,
when nobody else did.

Papa popped his pills,
it's always so easy for him,
It's hard to stay,to be me,
when the tears exhaust themselves.

I hear bird cries out side,
the bathroom floor is cool and firm,
I close my eyes,lie down,
a slow song to reaffirm.

I am a mistake,
a lie is my life on repeat,
same shit,different day,
I tell myself to wait.

Nowhere to run away,
and nobody to talk sense to,
no sleep in my eyes,
and no sunshine in the sky.

Reverse Reverence

The last day of school,
orange tinted tongues from ice lollies and conversations about all the lovers we never had,
that's how all my summers seemed to begin,uneventful,inconsequential,
but this time's a little unusual.
It involves getting stuck in rain clogged streets choking with traffics and noticing flowers in colours I had only dreamt of in grey streets,and the first green mangoes so inviting.Getting sucked into a spiral of the freshest pale pink and aquamarine leaves,almost missing out on a board exam,burning up the object of my pain,physically,a question paper set aflame.Watching my anguish rise in sparks,then flames,diminish,disappear.
 Hospital corridors painted in hues of lavender and yellow,
falling asleep on metal waiting chairs that are not old or uncomfortable,the austere glances of other people,the uncomfortable shared silence of  strangers in the  elevator that makes you want to have taken the stairs.floor 5:Nephrology and Urology,words that send an instant shudder down my spine,
pierce like needles under my skin,I can feel the the first taste of soy milk at the back of a throat,in a hospital waiting room,aged 7,putrid.

I set fire to my insides,and relish the acidity of it,
eat leftover angel hair noodles from last night,you cooked with such love,
as you lie in some strange hospital bed,in a peaceful trance,
Somewhere.
And I remember the times the beer was cold and the afternoon blazing,
and the food orgasmic inside my mouth.
and the nights when the rain poured soft,the bonfire  felt warm and fuzzy
and I never wanted to come back home.
Like a marshmallow,I wanted to let my interior walls soften and shine
but I refrained from happiness,returned home,
my existence is refrain,
like the lines of poetry on repeat.
Liberate me.

Fuck you,please.

She decorated her walls with stickers of birds,
and a string of lights,old photographs,post cards from New York.
She embellished her walls with all she could,because she was not allowed to paint them the colour of her choice when she had been 8.
She more than made up for it.

Decorated her walls inside a shoebox,a cage,
a construct that wasn't her own creation,
a cage where she was told who she was,
who she should want to be,the choices to make,
which dreams to dream,
Where she got told,her whole life.Got told
she had to study harder because she was a girl,speak softer,
give up on visible signs of angst,try harder.Where her value was
based solely on the length at which the hem lines of her clothes ended
and whether her hair was cut in a particularly modest fashion,
and the number of piercings on her ears.
Told she would never be good enough, just by virtue of being female.

Her walls never told her if she was good,
or good enough,They never told her good girls don't question and
good girls don't go on treks,and good girls don't stand up for themselves,raise their voice
against violence or dare to leave,walk away,walk out.
What they told her instead,was that good girls don't exist,
that the very phenomenon was as phony as the ideals
that a patriarchal society raises its boys to expect out of women with.
Only reminded her she shouldn't have to fight
for things she ought to have been born into.
 They never told her she couldn't dream in colours
other than pink.Never told her she couldn't be queen
or conquer the world.Never told her she couldn't
hand pick stars out of a galaxy and
weave them into a wreath to wear as a flower crown
in her hair, rule over the cosmos.Never told her she couldn't
grow a garden of daises instead of roses in her lungs,
choose to create the fragrance that her evenings breathed in.

Walls only reminded her she was bigger and better
than the rusted iron shackles of the cage,
and that she need not to have to be more to matter.
She did not need the validation to be her own person.

So,she decorated her walls with everything she was told
she couldn't be but wanted,and wished for.
To be free as a bird,and enlightened in this darkness
with no name and harbour dreams foreign to
those who expected their washed out ambitions to take
shape into her would-be aspirations.

The cage was meant to crush and quell her,a pure construct of obscure condition.
force her to curl back into the regressive position of
a murdered foetus and shrink into a thin
film like the body of a dead fish
 floating upside down in a tank,
with their weapon of retrogression.

But she built her walls so strong,
they began to crack through the ribs,
of the cage,like a massacre in cold blood.
The only thing they did not forbid her from was building walls,and she did.

That girl was me.

Ides Of Youth

The song on the car radio sounds like freedom,and growing up is as abstractly bittersweet as nostalgia.Sitting in the backseat of the car,for once,I feel like I fit in like a piece in a puzzle.
It's not a march that we can co -ordinate,it's a whirlwind asking to be lost in.
And some of us have had to grow up before we knew how,and no matter how many and how much people tell you that it makes you better at ''coping with stuff"',it still sucks.So we carry that old-ish air about us like dead weights on our shoulders and pretend that we don't feel the pressure of it weighing down upon us.
It's only some moments that we own.Those that can't be taken away from us,when our youth can't be robbed of us despite having to act old.Can't be ruined because they are so completely ours.For a day,we get to be giddy and act all silly and be the youngest and silliest and wildest we can get.These are the moments that might make a montage in the final ensemble of flashbacks before death,if that really happens.Not just because they make you feel the most alive you can but also because they can transport you to a place noone and nothing can alter and you don't need a physical reality of .Some of us wander without being lost,finding a home in everything despite having no need to and some just forever longing for a home they won't find but feel the need for.If you identify with the longing kind,maybe,just maybe,home rests in these moments.

Just for one day

"It's funny how time can make a place shrink,make the strangeness of it all seem ordinary"

Half a butterfly wing buried in gravel,
An empty bag pack and the last lunch box ever.
The last one minute of silence spent  staring at OMG carved out on the wooden desk top.
The day feels infinitesimal and infinite at the same time,which is kind of symbolic of how school feels on the whole,maybe.
The waking up- and -sulking about it being Monday morning,always running a second too late for assembly,scribbling a few sentences at least of last night's home work,dancing at the end of last period on Friday,loving the contents of your neighbour's lunchbox more than yours,struggling not to giggle in the assembly line,making up intellectual quotes for the thought for the day,Bullshit-ing through the tests and bunking in the hide out.Oh,and special mention to all the lost stationery that strangely disappeared each day.It all seems so stretched out it becomes normal.In the end,it always seems so surreal and the finality never hits you on time.
And all the hurried scribbling on t-shrts and notebooks on how much you'll miss your class mates can never come close to describing that feeling of knowing there is a definite end,and awaiting it but not quite a anticipating the swiftness at which it seems to have arrived.You'll never wake up groggy at 7 am running for the same kind of normal anymore and you'll probably not see a lot of the same people again or have the chance to know them better and that's overwhelmingly bitttersweet.

Roller coaster

We held hands and ran through the crowd,
and that's the happiest blur I remember feeling.
The ground never felt lighter beneath our feet,
as we ran towards nothing,away from nobody.

There are no pictures of us,sitting by the bedside,
only stories we keep telling ourselves,
pieces of the past,for,memories,songs,and words
cannot be preserved in a couple of frozen frames.

Remember when it was dark,and we whispered,
under the covers,and fingers  against faces,
delicate as the tips of a paintbrush,caressed,
the next morning smelled of the salt in our tears.

And then,

you left me,like a stale,late Sunday morning,
The heavy sigh smelling of alcohol,
the emptiness,that of a house where nothing
was ever good enough,nothing ever would be.

We were always a time bomb,waiting to explode,
it was only a matter of moments,seemed like centuries.
who were we kidding,we were born volatile,
and losing a part of yourself is never easy.

Days then dissolved into a void in time,
I counted each of them like a domino falling,
floated like a feather on an autumn afternoon,
Because I knew I would never find myself again,

Never find you.

Hair line fractures

       Broken bones reveal themselves in x-rays and we just let them be,heal with hours and days
But why can't people and places just be,too?Why are we not immune to change yet?
Maybe the fault's in us,we live off the cheap consolation that  it'll all come to a stand still in the end,
that today matters just as much as yesterday.
Somebody said to me recently,what's the point of living in the past?Well,what's the point of this pointless plot?It all flies away the same.

But we care anyway.
And you can never change the things that change you,you can only live with them.
You can never change how looking into someobody's eyes for the last time feels like,
or the first time someone made you feel special with a couple of words,
How it felt to be small and helpless in a world spiralling out of control
and how sometimes,broken hearts only heal only into empty cavities,bearing bullet holes holes inside your chest,
Stitches on old wounds always stay for keep,faint reminders of pain that teems.