Poetry

• 

It’s a bedspread and a hanging roof,
Thoughts when I can’t hold my head high.
A bed of thousands rough hills and
hundred ways to crush them under thin ice.
Or I just write poetry
murdering their morale
sipping ugliness from
the hem of my skirt.

Sitting across the table
they mock the way I handle my butter knife,
or the depth of my blouse,
or the unnecessary forks I never give them.
I could easily mishandle my cards
and land that flipping knife
in their soft, filthy, world-doesn’t-need gut.
I thought they were bad people.
Is it too late
for me to not be
W-I-C-K-E-D?

I just wanna have fun!
One line, two lines and then three
all I see is boundaries.
Why there is a stranger on my face?
Why there is a stranger on my legs?
You no pretty,
You burn butterflies into
ashes with you stare.
My slap on your cheek
and I am a drunk
H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-E.

I sprawl across the bed
un-gently, motionless
sinking in Salem issues.
Orthodox minds and shrewdness
raises me every night.
The demonic presence in your heads,
work of evil on your tongues
incinerated fresh hopes, innocent fates,
begging hands, kissing lips
and you called us
W-I-T-C-H-E-S.

The roof hangs like a bodiless head
what does it want?
Want me to pick myself up?
Before the rage engulfs me
or be scared of a grotesque face
that makes me stay low.
But I am not afraid.
I am contemplating
fitting you in this bed box
as your forever tomb.

©kanikachugh

November is a wetty month
dropping it’s soul on the
last pages of my diary.

Tears corroding the page,
shrinking the size of my heart,
and changing its shape into
a small mailbox
functional only on weekdays
with no space for chocolates or ribbons
but for greetings from afar
then be empty for one-year eternity.

November is a wetty month.
It soon will end
All dried out
the rains, the tears
not sure which one is worse.

©kanikachugh

Too many noises around. None of the noise is for me.

What is this?? This fucking eternal sadness like it has registered itself to my name. There are deliveries at my doorstep I didn’t even order. Stacks of unwanted boxes. One on top of the other. It doesn’t go away.
You know, there are times I don’t like weekends. A little bit of free time and my brain becomes a giant black hole with everything and nothing inside. Swallowing me. And the heart so numb, ignored like an abandoned, dried, dead algae on the walls of a water body. This feeling crushes my body into crumbles that people mistake it for a little, sudden excitement episodes I have.

I make routines, time-tables, workout plans, and believe me, I adhere to it. And then one day, like an anomaly in my utopia, it enters. Stays, for a long long time. Testing me within my routines. I stand still, walk, being busiest in my chores that it suddenly splits the soul into two. One that loves everyone ardently. Other that hates the existence of a tiny strand of living. One that wants to feel every kind of love. Other that feels nothing. At all.

There is a big, ample amount of space where I stand, all alone, lost in thoughts, concentrating on the faulty lines in my hands and I hear someone roar. There is this conveyer belt I see in front of me. With a thud, a big suitcase starts to appear, coming towards me with a relatively fast pace. But I’m lost in the demographics I don’t know well. For sure, won’t survive there for long either. Then I hear a voice,
“Hey, You! Yes you, spaced-out girl. I’m your baggage. Pick me up.”
And I do. Quietly. Politely. Like a nameless slave.

I tread along with this baggage everywhere. I don’t know where to put it down. Too afraid to give it to someone else too. It’s mine, afterall.
Carrying it in a desert, on a spring day, at a party, under the moonlight. Manipulating myself to accept it as a part of me and because of it I exist. Just exist. Like in a file, as a name, a record, a record that won’t even matter after fifty years. And I swear, each time I walk hundred steps with it, two hundred steps afar I go from my home. It’s exhausting.

©kanikachugh

“Did you see that?”

“What?”

“How drastically the weather changed. It’s getting colder with each day passing by.”

“It wasn’t that sudden. Took it’s sweet time. Like always. Like last year. And the year before that.”

“But it feels different this time, isn’t it? This sudden chilliness. I don’t like it. Just like people, you know.”

“Umm, No. Maybe yeah.”

“Like they change drastically in one night.”

“Well, I don’t think so anyone changes overnight. There is always a drenched ruthlessness and crispiness in their voices, like leaves. You’d see dew drops of undisclosed emotions, dampness of their second guesses. A chilly reminder of their unintended forecast for future.
Just like weather, people drop enough hints, sometimes even them being unaware so.
A clear sky into the clouds of unapologetic behavior. We just don’t want to notice it. We think it’s a phase but it’s time for an entire season to change. Before we are ready we are thrown into a blizzard of no-answers. Henceforth, the shivering reaches our bones. And in the end we accept it. Voluntarily or involuntary.

“Hmm… But I still feel winters are hostile intruders. I’m never enough prepared for it or for any coldness whatsoever.”

“That is why we come to watch the sunset more often. To make the most of what we have :-).
So do you like it?”

“What?”

“This! The new sunset point I discovered for you.”

“Geez, all sunset points are beautiful. This one too.”

“C’mon! I know you wanna thank me a hundred times for this one.
What would you do without me?”

“Haha!! I can do better without you.”

Try and you’d know.

“Wait! I have gum. We can eat… Oh!! Where is it? I think I forgot on the park bench :(“

“You keep an extra one in the inner pocket of your bag.”

“Wow! Thanks, ya.”

“Yeah! You don’t need me”

“What are you mumbling?”

“Nothing, let’s move now. It has started to get chilly.”

“Yeah! I’m hungry too. Let’s grab something to eat.”

“Seriously! We ate before coming here. You know, the devil inside you keeps hovering over me for food.”

“Shut up and walk. I don’t….Ow!”

“Careful! That’s another devil that makes you keep stumbling at little stones or inconveniences. I won’t be here always to protect you from falling.”

“Ha ha! Why don’t you shut your devil-mouth for sometime.”

“Naah! Never. As long as you are around”

“Want do you think we should eat. I found another small eatery at the corner of……………”

Excerpts from my journal’s characters

©kanikachugh

I’m telling you, knowing yourself is the most typical and a complicated shit.
One day I wish add a particular dress into my wardrobe and the other day, just seeing my wardrobe stacked, makes me wanna puke.
The malls, the stores are filled with so much of stuff. Things that we don’t even need.
There is so much junk that it leaves me gasping for air. Then I think what is it this for? For whom?
A few days pass and an urge shoots up ‘oh I want this’. Instantly regretting about what I said.

It’s not easy being honest with yourself. There are so many levels. Humans are no less than onions. Layer after layer. Masks after masks.
And I am scared going to a level to comprehend my verified needs and wants. What if I want to withdraw from this world I’ve barely been connected to.

I dream of romanticizing with this life and own things, fame that makes me feel happy. And the other time I consider myself a hypocrite for wanting it. There is so much happening in the world. There are people who have nothing and I have so so so much. Beyond my need. I’m grateful but this imbalance upsets me. More, when I wish for sometime new.
The world is tilted because of an imbalanced proportion and I struggle to keep everything inside that I’ve ever used.
And I keep looking for the ways to give it back. Not because of someone else or it could be a good deed but because I want it. {Sigh} Here comes the wants again.

©kanikachugh

Normalise other people’s choices and opinions. The world is already suffering because of non-acceptability.

When it’s your birthday and Diwali in a foreign land and you try to make the most of it

It’s a pity not being able to find art in simple things.

©kanikachugh

• 

I cackled at 6:40 am on a Friday morning recalling your months’ old joke. When we laughed at everything on all the grounds we set our foot in. You took me to the younger days and non-disastrous moments in your faithful two-wheeler, twirling like in a Ferris wheel.

It was so hard to piece it all together, so difficult to admit. The breeze was chilly and my heart had taken a winter coat. It could see no one. Then your ‘Hi’ entered. The days I didn’t confess to myself were like disappointments sitting in a coffee cup trying to interpret your language with every sip I took. Till the cup was empty, and my heart wasn’t.
It’s unpopular how eyes can measure up some logical distance between two people. I remember the time when the corner of my eye campaigned and captured how much of remoteness I have to consider to avoid you. But as always, the calculations failed. I couldn’t shun you off anymore.

You are so close now that I don’t see you in my dreams anymore. You are here, right now. While I paint the house, while I walk in snowy hills, in tangled wires of my room, in ceruleans skies, in nightmares, in storms, in gardens, in last months of the year. I am not afraid anymore. I am fascinated. A kiss in my veins.
For everyone else, you are an exotic strawberry. For me, you taste like mangoes. The king of our land. And you weigh heavy on me. In a good, different way. Like your eyes on me or your tongue on my navel. My appetite is a royal highness now. Always in need to be served. I have come out of my greenhouse. My heart is untamable now and it wants to run wild. With you.

So darling, take me away. Again!
My heart’s getting cold.

Take me away where the breeze doesn’t kill me.

©kanikachugh