Author: Kanika

She is nothing.
Nothing but a window
to your relatability,
‘cause you know
she leaves a part of herself,
in your jacket’s pocket
so you could keep your
hands warm a little longer.

She likes living on the edge.
A night with some satin dreams
and a drunken Sunday debauchery
dipped in the ink of suffocation
fueling her desire to drown or stay afloat.
It’s her ask that matters.
Like, the one who truly knows Art
has touched the highest level
of ecstasy or have swam in the deepest
oceans of melancholy believing
no one could save them
except maybe art,
maybe her.

She is a girl that deserves
Keanu Reeves of the world
but gets caught up in her head
after Jane Austen whispers
to get Mr. Darcy tattooed
on her collarbones
and then make her wear
buttoned-up, long checkered shirt
and she closes herself
like the last break-up
no one wants to talk about.

She wishes to travel back
to history so bad and become
an inspiration or a revolution
for Renoir’s ‘Impressionism’
or Gogh’s ‘Fauvism’
where the artist would run his
free strokes and strong colors
painting her aesthetic away.

Everything is a rhythmic
downpour of poetry for her.
Open trees passing by
from a train window,
pretty boxes of delivery,
crunchy pages of diaries,
an infant smiling,
green eyes of strangers,
tiniest grass sprouting
in her cemented balcony,
flowers on the sideways
pouting and demanding her
to be clicked. She listens to all.
She looks a little too
deeper in the eyes of her pet
just to understand a world
hidden beneath silent cries.

She can make friends
in a blink of an eye
but can’t handle the
awkwardness of the first meetings,
neither the discomfort of
visible distance with her old people.
So, she keeps jealousy in her side bag
existent but unnoticeable
and laughs louder just to prove
how their silly jokes
means world to her.
And she holds hand
just a bit tighter
announcing to her body
of the crime she’s about to
commit in keeping the ones closer
who are destined to leave.

In a world pressing to be unique
she becomes relatable
with every passing day.
The more she understands herself
the better she sees the human race.
The unprocessed, patchy race
whose thumbnails tell a different story
than they actually are.
In a world full of intellectuals,
she keeps looking for people
she can be silly with.

She dangles, in between
a timid Kdrama girl and
a badass one
not fitting fully in
either of the category well.
In between,
wanting to get on top
of everything and losing interest
in everything around
sitting in front of a fading fireplace
and singing ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’
in the faintest voice.

She wishes she could
erase the problems of all
When she can’t do
much for her own.

She is nothing special.
And if you will get to know
you will see either she’s nothing
or too special for the world.

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

Will talk
When your mirror will hug the dusty fog,
when the grief will not set with the Sun.
when your moustache be grey
and crescent under the eyes darker.
When thirty trees will grow around you
and you’ll be breathless running after the grandkids.
When the golden brooch will kiss the dust more in the cupboard than on your suit.
When not being loved enough will crush your dinner-dates.
When birthdays be knife
and birthday songs the passing clouds.

We’ll talk
When you’ll be seventy.
I’d love to know
how the distance treated you.
We will talk then,
Did you live or just survived?

You know how the storm comes and shakes you up without touching?

Your words do the same.

Not gonna lie,
I find you so unattractive.

When your mind-bending skills
of origami turn my apprehensions
into those little things that fly away.

When your plants come alive
with you in plain sight,
repaying your loyalty.

When you audaciously go
and bake the glow for the moon
after the day sucked your soul.

From collecting coins to quotes
you let your adult self color the life book
from the paintbrushes buried in your impaled back.

When you spin, knit, create
the shattered hearts or nearly
wilted flowers to either revive
or help leave/(live) them in peace.

When you write so authentically;
The way your sorrows and smiles
dance on the paper,
it made the phrase “paper hearts”
come out in the open.

When you be a generous witch
for summoning my lost soul
that parted long back and
forgot to feel anything.

What’s so (un)attractive about you?
That makes me pull from you
and long for you, all at the same time.
I am used to the ugliness
of drains, of brains,
of hidden corners, of tragic mourning.

I am scared of you.
People like you set
highest of expectations
of how a life must be lived.
And I am afraid,
Once, I would go past
all the criticisms and validations
I’d be hazardously free.
Like you!
And then I wouldn’t be able to
go back to a mediocre life.
Atleast not without you.
And they’d be no one to blame to,
not even myself because
you’d leave.
I know you will.

©kanikachugh

I write.

I write because nothing else makes sense to me. I write because everything I see speaks volume to me. I sit at the edge of the world questioning every celestial being of how they keep going with years old job without any complaints.

I ask a pigeon if it can hand over some scriptures of their language and the technique of their flight with nothing holding them down.

And then my lips utter some verses; of life, of death, of excitement, of quarrels that somehow withdraws as well as connects me to this world.

I talk to a bird. How we don’t share a conversation and yet feel happy in each other’s presence. I write about my old keys, the tea I like, the kiss I shared and the time I cried for my mother.

When the light around me mellows down and the blood flowing gets cold, words wrap me around in an old comfy cardigan. A candle lit table gathers my disoriented thoughts and sweeps me away from under the cold tongue of January.

And I write. Because I don’t feel it’s just a hobby for me. It has surpassed being a passion either. It somehow has become, close to, my reason to live. I started because I wanted to survive but my subconsciousness has now accepted it as a second-nature-friend, like your mood swings, the one who would never leave you.

I don’t wish to write only about the pain. I want to write about everything. I don’t want to use writing as a coping mechanism anymore but as an instant mint that refreshes my breath and brings back the confidence that I don’t always need rainbows or unicorns to feel better. I can fix myself before turning into ashes and rising again. Because believe me, the process is draining and exhaustive. And I just want to do better than how I did yesterday. So I write, to keep me fierce, to keep me grounded.

©kanikachugh