Author: Kanika

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

You always used to wonder
what book I’d be reading at the moment.

And I always had one answer
‘An interesting one’

If only I could have gathered courage
to admit your company was as interesting
as any book I held.
If only I could tell that
sitting beside you,
under the shade
of our big banyan tree,
and kissing through glances
I rejoiced my existence

Then today, you wouldn’t have left to
be a big writer in the city
whom I could touch only through
the spine of his best books written.

©kanikachugh

My vision isn’t only in my mind but in all the things I’m surrounded by. It’s in the teacup of words I use to describe myself, it’s in the cardigan Monday wears to give Discover Weekly warm songs in my Spotify playlist, it’s in the band-aid my lump spreads over the anxieties brewing in the stomach to pacify it, it’s in the idea of saying goodbye to one piano key to peacefully move on to another and creating a gentle music for myself while remembering the past
It’s like each day, each moment I reach to my mature yet childlike self that teaches how to calm myself and be clearer in my ask from life.
And be grateful. It’s time to manifest 2022.