I.
Asking me for directions
Is like asking someone
With chapped skin (also me)
About the trending moisturisers;
How lost can you afford to get?
II.
I trip over the thought
Of tripping over
And begin limping
To trip over something
A little less
Abstract than that;
“Let’s take a trip,” you say?
©Aaysid
I.
some people try
to make good use
of magic
by choosing moths
over butterflies.
II.
I stick my tongue out,
and roll my eyes
in a nod to the riot inside,
and pretend to enjoy
a quiet life;
not a word, not a fight!
©Aaysid
“When life gives you lemons, squirt someone in the eye.”
Cathy Guiswite
Photo by Elle Hughes from Pexels
I am not sure if this qualifies as a concrete poem, but it sure was fun to try! 🙂
©Aaysid
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
If you take yourself
Off the shelf
With the price tag
Neither chipped nor torn,
And the expiration date
Still on, not gone,
Is this how
You break the norm,
Is this enough
To justify being born?
©Aaysid
“The stars up there at night are closer than you think.”
Doug Dillon
Three short poems on being borderline unhinged:
I.
What we cannot write
Begins to write us instead,
And seldom does
A good job of it-
We sound even crazier
On paper!
II.
I respond to every rhetorical question,
And do not understand any metaphors,
I ignore the signs from the universe,
And getting jinxed is my favourite obsession.
III.
There are no secrets
Between us,
There is nothing
To hide anyway;
We are
An open book
With pages falling out.
©Aaysid
“People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk…”
Stephen King
Image by Barbara A Lane from Pixabay
the rain that falls on you
colours you purple,
serves its purpose,
and draws to a close,
symbolising what every
grey thought in your head
ends up doing to you —
it colours you wrong
and then leaves.
©Aaysid
As you set
The oven timer
For a loaf of bread,
You have enough
Time on your
Hands to think ahead…
One of these
Days you shall
Be free without any dread,
You will not
Have to reason
With the voice in your head,
And you shall
Not have pasta
For breakfast in bed,
You shall be
In your element
More neon, less lead,
There will be
A lot more
Heard and a lot less said;
Don’t wait for
It to happen,
Happen to it instead…
Is that the
Oven timer beeping,
Have you burnt another bread?
©Aaysid
“Maybe the truth is, there’s a little bit of loser in all of us.”
Ann Brashares
Image by Prabath Gunasekara from Pixabay
I love trying my hand at blackout poetry (also known as erasure poetry)! When I am reading in bed after a long day, and have trouble focusing, certain words on the page pop-up. I used to think it was weird before, but ever since I found out about this form of poetry, I have been underlining the words in my books to later turn them into poems. It is fun!
something shrill
woke up everything
in my memory-
darkness full of fumes
hovering over me,
seeking an outlet
utterly remote.
©Aaysid
It is all new
and disturbing-
there is a raging fire
inside my head,
and it feels as if
the quiet electricity
has joined forces
with a thunderstorm
that has somehow arrived
at the predicted time.
This feeling has a name,
they say, but I
do not want to call
it that, it feels
so much more than that,
and I am shaking;
terrified of being
at the mercy of it,
scared that it might
never leave my head.
How can life work
for someone
perpetually vexed,
when the entire world
is a trigger, and you
are already full
to the brim?
How can the world
be kind to
a furious woman
after driving her
to the brink?
©Aaysid
“Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.”
Maya Angelou
Image by Here and now, unfortunately, ends my journey on Pixabay from Pixabay
I have seen the world
On my television screen,
And I know a thing or two
About what is actually real
And what is only a ruse;
Pretty and ugly pictures
Are one side of the truth,
The rest of it is in outlines
And you don’t get to choose
Neither the palette nor the hues!
©Aaysid
I receive another
Letter from myself,
But once again,
This is not
The right time!
I have a lot
On my plate,
And a lot
On my mind.
I write back
Of course;
I am not unkind;
I do it every time!
©Aaysid
Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay
“Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?”
Bernard Malamud
You ask sceptically,
“Are you glad to see me?”
Taken aback by your inability
To recognise visible glee,
I tell you in a way
That I know makes
The most sense to you and me,
“I am as happy as I get
When I see a bookstall
In the middle of nowhere
With a sign that says “Free“!”
©Aaysid
“The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.”
Patricia A. McKillip, The Bell at Sealey Head
I.
To be out of love
With love itself,
May become
An act of love,
If you can love
What can’t be loved
Just to save
Your love for love,
And to fall back
In love with love.
II.
The ones who smile
With misty eyes
Have so much
Love inside;
It spills out of
What they say,
And what they
Choose to hide.
©Aaysid
Image from Pixabay
“We love the things we love for what they are.”
Robert Frost
It had begun
Six twirls ago;
Stop mid spin
To take it slow,
Make another turn,
And let it go!
There are no stars
In a failing show;
A phosphoric life
That does not glow,
It may liquidise,
But shall not flow-
A few things that
We finally know.
©Aaysid
Image by andresilva5 from Pixabay
“Time doesn’t heal emotional pain, you need to learn how to let go.”
Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
You may not be going anywhere,
but still some things are in motion,
and it looks insane to live
with a terrible, crippling nausea
which only subsides when the medicine
hits your cubital vein.
You talk the talk making ripples
in these placid waters
that on the surface remain,
and your heart looks like a wildflower-
it wilts in autumn, hides in winter,
and blooms only when it rains.
There has to be a cure for
such madness somewhere
for not a thing here lasts forever,
not even the chronic pain.
©Aaysid
“Forever has no meaning when you’re living in the moment. I wasn’t ready for that moment to end.”
Ellen Hopkins
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
It is difficult to separate someone’s personal tragedy from their art. You cannot be oblivious to the darkness that peeks out from their masterpieces, especially if they were not even trying to conceal it in the first place. I remember struggling with The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath a few years ago. I had read it for my virtual book club, but I couldn’t bring myself to show up (virtually) for its discussion. Simply put, it had left me feeling wretched! The book had such a melancholic tone throughout, with no hope of anything getting any better. All I could do was empathise with the protagonist as she kept going deeper into throes of depression, but I also could not help but get frustrated by things getting bleaker with every turn of the page. I have a habit of reading books more than once, but I have not been able to pick up The Bell Jar again. No matter how much I want to.
A few days ago, I discovered a Sylvia Plath’s poem that made me want to read more. The poem is called Daddy and is quite famous, but somehow, I had never heard of it before, even though I was familiar with some of her poems. I discovered her collection of poems titled, Ariel, and immediately purchased it from the bookstore. Her poetry is as melancholic as her prose, maybe even more so, but boy, is it exquisite!
Her words are a cry for help and a reckoning at the same time. You feel her pain and despair but get taken aback by how observant she was of everything around her! She has written about everyday little things of life, vices of the society, and feminism with such shocking clarity that it makes you realise how deeply she had felt everything she wrote about, and how insightful she was! In every poem of hers in this collection, the flow is effortless, words are spellbinding, and in spite of palpable despair and a lingering feeling of impending doom, there is ethereal beauty. My favourite poems from the book are Ariel, Lay Lazarus, Daddy, Tulips, A Birthday Present, Getting There, Kindness and Edge. I am sharing excerpts from Lady Lazarus and Tulips.
I.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
II.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
(Excerpts from the collection of poems, Ariel by Sylvia Plath)
If you find The Bell Jar gut-wrenching, this collection can completely crush you, but it is worth it. You get a chance to see the world through her eyes while you, along with her, try to make peace with the tragedy of it all. You cannot.
Image by Patou Ricard from Pixabay
Hops out.
Breaks a window.
Loses a life.
Starts over.
Lies low.
An error.
Loses a life.
Restarts.
Boss level.
Wrong weapon.
Loses a life.
Fights back.
Last life.
Saves progress.
Mistimes.
Game over!
©Aaysid
“There are no winners in real games.”
Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
When life decides to make
A few unexpected turns
To avoid being swept along
An everyday landslide,
You should think of it
As nothing but a fair trade,
For not all these wars
Inside your tumultuous head
Are supposed to end in truces;
You should march out of time
In your own victory parade!
©Aaysid
Image by Angeles Balaguer from Pixabay
I do not want to fall
For anything not worth
Falling for, and I do not
Want to be on the top
Of the world if peace
Is where the roots are;
It may be my call to feel
The things I feel, and things
I have never felt,
For I do not want much
Out of life, but I still
Want the life to want me,
And I may have found
Some answers, but there
Has been a question left;
“If I keep living where
It never snows, how am I
Supposed to melt?”
©Aaysid
“You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.”
Mark Twain
A few short poems toying with the idea of uncomfortable solitude:
I.
If being like you
Wasn’t a norm,
I, too, would
Get quiet
After raising
A storm.
II.
They laugh at us,
And we laugh
It off,
And there is
Nothing less funnier
Than this.
III.
She needs applause
To live,
And it does not matter
If she
Is the only one clapping.
IV.
He collects another smile;
The photographer in him
Has an eye for such things,
But the person in him knows
That he has not captured
Any real ones in a while.
©Aaysid
Image by claudia martinez from Pixabay
The first (in)sane thought
that takes form in my head
when I am half-awake
in the morning,
and smear jam
on the burnt bread,
is that of it being the night,
and I being back in my bed-
comfy, stretched-out,
tranquil and overfed,
and dreaming about the things
from the book
that I would have read,
before slipping out,
leaving all my worries
for the dead…
My productivity for such days
always hangs by a thread.
©Aaysid
Photo by Dương Nhân from Pexels
Outrageously Erratic 