Month: March 2022

Dreams doesn’t have to reside
up in the clouds.
It could be in smiles or pictures,
in tinkling of wind chimes, or guffawing thresholds
that announces the arrival of someone your eyes awaited this long.

And when the great souls die,
they die of diminishing pride
and a meek voice
after being unheard for years.
They die of missing days of splendor
riding along with the wind on their best horses
and the next moment of grief,
by digging graves of their friend.
They die of frustration,
who once always held the steering wheel
now sit at the backseat
whose opinions do not matter anymore.
They die thinking how sunsets are real
and everything goes down because
it’s a beautiful fantasy only
at the peak of life.
They die of unending winter every night
and spring escaping from their clasp
when the sun doesn’t shine the next day.
The great souls die every day
when their madness is killed or curbed
with a ginger-lemon tea in hands
and “washed-up artist” or
“not good enough” stamp on foreheads.
The world says “You are too much”
but they remember what Nietzsche will say
“There is always some madness in Love
But there is also always
some reason in madness.”

They die, while breathing,
after losing their muse who guided
them how to love and live this life.

The blank pages are my sin.
Bookshelves my cemetery
and poetry, the way I die.

I sit down to carve the most intricate lines my paper had ever felt. I follow and follow the long tunnels of my imagination where I have this artistic light locked in my fist yet I run as if it’s too far from my reach.

Every time I set my eyes on a yellow leaf, cerulean sky, or a half-baked moon, I hoard all aesthetic souvenirs and dump them in my side pocket only to rush back home and draw all I can through my pounding heart.

In a world full of despair, distress, and stone faces, I wish to reach hearts through art. I wish to capture unlimited sky on a tip of my pen that sends everyone home with each word they read. I wish to tell a lonesome canvas how it can attract the attention of million eyes by letting me in. I’d be proud if I could turn a war-leftover stained glass into an essential part of an incomplete sculpture. I wish I could mix colors in the pouring rain and with every droplet touching them, igniting the power of love instead of hatred. I wish to create a fine masterpiece persuading people to live and die only when they are granted a grave. Never before that.

But when I sit down to produce such a knockout craft, I fail. It feels it’s never enough. There is always something missing. A single piece hiding in the corner, smirking at my quarter-poems and smudged outlines. Probably one day when I am older and freer like a child I will cover the world in my canvases.  

“When I am an old woman I shall let my art paint me through their mysterious strokes.”

©kanikachugh