Of love and more

Seasons that dwindle on, leaving behind fragments of who I used to be. Heartbreaks at home and tea rituals forgone. To understand acceptance. To travel back into your own soul and stare at yourself- to the mess you’ve made and how bravely you continue to wear it on your sleeve. Hearts on display in the biting breeze of a December that awaits. In my mind, I go forth. Streets of Shibuya glistening in the wake of a soft spell of rain. The 1975 plays from across the room while the smell of some old perfume wafts in, a nostalgic overdose. I am learning, I am becoming. Not quite sure what though. Somedays, bitterness crawls through and settles in the dusty old corners of my heart. Despite it all, I reek of love, I bleed affection. To consume it in small doses, like a rat nibbling on leftover bread. Sanity must be honored. Thankfully, I lost mine years ago. Maybe that’s what allows me to go through seven stages of grief and come out of it both unscathed and destroyed. Dualities and paradoxes. Maybe this is what life amounts to- battles and victories. With your own self. As I continue to travel further into my subconscious and live with my reflections as my alter ego, I wage wars and there’s blood. I don’t really know what to call it, so I call it love.

Phantom Phrases

The tryst between comfort and chaos. The cowardice at choosing the former. Wanting to embrace the symptoms of your own delirium but being so disconnected from the self that you observe your own madness as an outsider. Finding shelter. In words. In humans. In dreams. The seemingly same sequences and how the brain refuses to be fooled into accepting them everyday. Singularities that you once breathed. Now you watch them perish. Not because they have ceased to exist. But because you have. Discourses with the body and the soul and how the world reduces it all to mere dysphoria. Disillusionment doesn’t happen when the world fails to replicate your ideals, it happens when your own reality crumbles into fragments of futility. I am no sun but pessimism doesn’t run through my veins either. All I am is a collection of my multiple lives- all lived through during the course of one single day. In life, I suffer but in my own death, I’m reborn.

LIMBO

The dichotomy of distance. To have but not hold, To want but to be helpless. Bones that ache for they aren’t being held. Longings at blue midnight hours that slowly melt into lonely sunrises. They all want me when I want myself the least. To desert one’s own shadows and to search for someone else’s. Someone who can bring back smiles on soft bruises, someone who can light matches to dispel the darkness within, someone who can take my sorrows far away or maybe sit by the riverside and watch me weep so that we could go home with no tears left to cry. Memory is hazy, time is money, heaven is a heart and two arms and nostalgia is an old friend that fancies long visits at strange hours. What’s one to do? Old cities, old lovers, old stories- I’ve left them all but they just can’t let go of me and so I hold onto fragments of ashes of an era so ancient; so ancient that remembrance serves as a questionable cocktail that leaves nothing but a bitter aftertaste and a smile etched by the hands of sadness herself.

Adrift

I feel like my days of rabid journaling have become a thing of the past. Constant re-invention. They gulp down drinks while I swallow the skies in their entirety. How come everyone’s words feel so crass and bitter lately, like rattling trains and construction sounds. Ever so jarring. Sometimes, I think of myself as an eternal passenger which is ironical because all that surrounds me is four walls. Plush prisons masquerading as warm homes. No home for me though, none. I feel, almost behave like a vagabond now. Pink Floyd and an evening breeze. Noir movies and bitter coffee. Fighting. And sulking. And dissolving into thin air. Smokescreens everywhere. Comfort costs a little too much, misery piles on free of charge. This world, this life, it goes from fireworks to extinguished fires. All I want is to swim in blue estuaries and drown in love. Wishful thinking. Or maybe it’s just a shadow of a glorified existence that I wish I had. Shadows. Plato’s allegory. Thoughts and how they never die- just like life and how it goes on no matter how tedious it gets. To slip into intimacies, to descend into anarchy, to befriend one’s own angst- there are rewards to be savoured and battles to be won. For now, I’ll just mumble my daydreams out loud hoping for the birds to hear them and take them away to their picnic spots of migration. Correction: to their alternate “homes” that help them survive.

Dog Days

A sweet mouth reeking of bitter coffee. Probing questions about life. Am I killing time or is Time killing me? My bones seem to be recovering from wounds I know nothing of, for my slumbers are long drawn and deep now. The sultry sky changes colours without even wanting to. Yet, there’s neither heat on my skin nor warmth in my body. Metaphorical meanderings, sigh. I crack open a Lager in the dead of the night and watch the city lights come alive. My brain is a brazen organ, it loves to flash erotic images and poignant memories simultaneously, a little too earnestly. To be alone from your own self, can that really happen? Thoughts continue to chase me without me asking for them. Where does one desert them? I keep scraping my skin, my face, my lips- an act of defiance, I mutter. Strange acts we do to lend meaning to our ever-growing insanity, I suppose. I go back between wanting and not wanting. It’s already difficult to operate in dualities but to be a highly functioning human at the same time? Well, I’ve pretty much deserted my old productive self now and there are guilt pangs from my actions. Or the lack thereof. Days melt into nights and it all seems like a never-ending ordeal. Too bad I’m a routine lover and a change hater? Or is it my blatant disregard for almost everything in life now? It feels like I’ve lost the sight of who I am. Or who I’m supposed to be. And so I’ve decided to cling onto anything or anyone that makes me feel remotely alive. Some would call it my road to self-destruction. Like I give a shit. All I care about right now is the granola bar I’m going to devour at 1 am before surrendering to the seductive serenades of sweet ol’ sleep.

Of daydreams, desires and dances

 

Daydreams of the most sensual kind, with breaths that linger and passions that never die. These afternoons have become too sultry for my liking and awaiting rain before the onset of an arid summer is the only optimism that seems to run through my veins. There are far too many things to do with you in the day and far too many things to do to you in the night but such is the burden of the boundaries between us- when this reality gets too much to bear with, you take a dip in my daydreams and so the endless cycle of this love-sickness begins. What wouldn’t I give to taste you, to feel your warmth, to fall so deep that there’s no way out, only in. To slip into an intimacy of this kind takes eternities and to sustain it takes epochs and yet, every time we talk, it feels like new galaxies are being birthed inside my tiny heart. Maybe someday, not far from today, we’ll dance the night away, tipsy from a love that happens only in movies and yet, the Gods were kind enough to make sure we found it in each other and now that we have, the only thing left to do is to hold onto it till we close our eyes forever.

Beyond The Boundaries

 

There’s philosophy and intellectual discourses. But none of it compares to the treasures hidden in our minds. If we could see the entire universe, the celestial bodies we see now would be reduced to a mere light at one corner of the sky and it would be a light that’d hide the earth. This is the reality most of us don’t even know. And yet, we go on rambling about the multiplicity of our complexly spun lives. The stories of our births have tiny feet and now they’ve set foot on the moon. But that’s as far as you and I can go. It is our dreams that play the songs we like to hear. In them, we fly away to the galaxies unknown and taste our feelings. Ever-glowing everything. Let’s never yield to the illusions of our realities, for the real world can best be seen when we close our eyes and drift away into the realms of outer space. Fantasies, let’s dare not to desert them. Breathe in the worlds you create for their death may be inevitable but their span depends on how much life we feed into them. I don’t care if our dreams and realities collide someday because there’s no way that the aftermath would be ordinary. Far from it. As far as the space between the two worlds themselves.

You’re the Light

 

“Sleep, my love, reawaken the optimism in you.”

I see you with my eyes closed, it’s not a dream.

Wordless whispers travel in the air,

a whiff of white lilies to comfort the senses

and yet, we remain, quietly gleeful.

It’s a skill for our bipolar selves,

we rise like the waves of the sea

the pathless skies we meet, our wings are left free.

But the inevitable fall, like the Black Plague

death screams in our longings, our deafness-the shield.

A whirlwind carries us somewhere far

among the blue hills, you walk noiselessly.

When disappearance takes forms in you,

your flowery scent remains with me,

I carry it in my heavy pockets, for my heart’s too full already.

The breeze returns but brings your absence to me

I taste my tears under a starless night,

the pain of our parting is too much to take in.

I close my eyes, now it’s a dream.

I have slept, my love.

My optimism spells your name now.

I can’t think of another word for ‘Insanity’

Words like condensed crystals in the hidden crevices of glaciers waiting for yet another avalanche. There’s caramel coating and space dust in our mouths and yet, all that comes out of it is bullshit. Smelling the daisies at night time, my blurry self regains the lost throne of a drunken majesty even as I sip the flavor of flowers that others can only inhale. Music in my ears, I waltz around with a vibe that can only belong to the 1970’s. And that’s the dream. I imagine puny people smoking on boulevards with a wild dog howling in the backdrop. Talk about a non-classical muse. They were never supposed to be the scum of the Earth but such is my tantrum throwing frozen skull carving bloodshot wounds on my visual imagery. I suppose that’s the price you pay for losing your sanity. Makes me wonder if I ever had it, even in the beginning. Devouring doughnuts at odd hours and watching the television on mute, a soft spell of rain falls outside, which I suppose is Nature’s way of coaxing me, seducing me, begging me to pay attention to her. I wonder if she knows I had married her way back when I was in the womb, blissfully unaware of the devious charms of a world that had awaited me.