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.

Delusion

 

My fingers burn with the slightest touch of your hands and even when we are surrounded by personalities of guile and bodies reeking of obscurity, time somehow freezes. With every gaze into your hazel orbs and every touch that could’ve been something else, I speak to the stars about stories I imagine. They’re all beautiful, for they have you in them but it still doesn’t seem enough. Cracked smiles through silhouettes of the frayed doors and a poetic breeze that never blows, I mock myself for feeling something that didn’t exist. Anything that could go wrong did. The Earth has become The Sun for there’s only heat and it scorches and hurts. I see death in souls that claim they love each other and leaves that fall off trees lie there waiting for my tears to glisten their verdant veins. There’s destruction in gray buildings and the night sky makes me miss you. Songs at high frequencies drown the voices in my head but the aches just never leave. The heartbeats that were supposed to synchronize with symphonies died down and arterial bursts of love turned stone cold to leave fragments inside the ribcage. To find a haven in someone else is difficult. What’s more difficult is being left to decay in a haven you thought you had found. As I watched you leaving, I had but a box of abstract memories and the sound of your voice and old conversations to hold onto. I’m so glad you have found a haven now, I just wish you’d never left the one I made with dried petals and songs of the rain. Maybe you were right and I was wrong, for sometimes when you fall, you fall for the wrong one. I know I did.

Pulse

My peripheral vision is filled with sights of desks chiseled with lonely lines and ruddy penmanship. I’m starving but so are the innumerable children roaming the mean streets, so I guess it doesn’t matter. The blackboard is chalked with words aplenty but all I see is shapes of distant constellations sprawled across the cosmos. Ruffling my hair, I gaze passively at people who mean nothing to me. Subtle smiles and dizzy conversations float from the tip of their lips but it amounts to nothing. The trees stand still and as the sun continues to bleed and roast the earth, I wonder where I belong. It’s not here, nowhere here but then I’m as far away from the answer as the white clouds chasing each other on the canvas of a pale blue sky. It makes me worried that I don’t know things I ought to know. I had sworn to not let my guard down ever and I did the exact opposite of that. It pays to be endearing and it feels majestic to drown in love. But then, why am I sitting alone in the middle of a dusty room with faded walls and gloomy ceiling fans? There are as many questions left to be answered as the number of atoms swirling impatiently inside my flesh. My bones are weak and I’m not strong but I want to hold onto every speck of thought that crosses my mind because without them, I’m nothing but a shattered piece of whisky glass. I’m wandering in a maze and my thoughts are fleetingly transient but as the hot air rises and gushes through the window panes, I’m certain of one thing- I can never be alone as long as I have these thoughts in me, growing and dying as they may be, but they exist and that’s all that matters. Looking at the trees now, it is time for me to wander elsewhere, find another drab setting and get on with this monotony because the greens may be patiently still. I, however, am not.