what if my centre of gravity
starts to interfere
with that of the skies and the seas
and can no longer be explained
by the proven equations,
would I still exist?
would you as well?
©Aaysid
“Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?”
“Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.”
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
I thought
it was time
to make up
with the woman
in the mirror,
so I uncovered
the rusty old
full length mirror,
only to find out
that she still
was not there,
but I could not
bring myself
to mirror her…
I stand there,
year after year,
and wonder if
she, too, waits
on the other side
of the mirror!
©Aaysid
“Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
Image by Wolfgang Claussen from Pixabay
Another you
By day,
Flautist by night.
Briefly a song,
Now this.
Full moon,
Not a soul
To howl at it.
A white flag,
Phantom itch.
By the river
A sound’s amiss.
Not ever that,
Always this.
©Aaysid
“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”
Stephen King, Joyland
Three short poems centered around my favourite punctuation marks. ☺
I. Interrobang
Should you be alarmed
If a question mark
Openly declares war
Against an exclamation mark‽
II. Colon
I like to make lists,
And explain myself,
But there is always
A subtle warning
Before I embark upon
Such expressive discourses—
It is the subtle inflection
In my voice
Along with the audible,
Anxious rumble
Emanating from my colon.
III. The Full Stop
He is not writing
His own book of life,
Because he erroneously
Believes that he only
Has one job—
To put the very last
Full stop.
©Aaysid
Image by Daniel Roberts from Pixabay
to lose yourself
in the pages of a book,
someone else’s strange,
immortal world,
is not that unusual,
for the real
magic happens
when you find
yourself in there.
©Aaysid
I captured the featured picture today while enjyoing homemade dalgona coffee and reading Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevesky, translated by Constance Garnett.
I went out for a walk today, and was taken aback by the strong smell of cigarette smoke in the air. It reminded me of all the sufferers of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease I had encountered during my short time as an intern at a Pulmonolgy Unit. Smoking is one of the many things about this life that I have a hard time wrapping my head around, but then again, we all have our slow poisons, and maybe this isn’t any different! We can always try to counsel and be supportive though. While consuming our own poisons we forget how much it hurts to watch the ones we love drowning in theirs! We could be hurting other people. The poem below is my attempt, feeble at best, to try to make sense of it all.
I feel it spreading
within me,
a cloud of thick
black smoke;
what a privilege!
to be sitting
on the rooftop,
away from the eyes
that judge,
and yet be exposed
like a nerve!
the shame
that self-destruction
is supposed to
bring is masked
by the agony
of one organ
dying a painful
death, and its misery
spreading unlike
a wildfire, slowly,
a little too slowly,
consuming everything
in its resolve
to not be
the only thing that dies-
I light another cigarette.
©Aaysid
A little update.
It rained here yesterday. Rained a lot actually. To the point of it being scary.
I finally bought a good cell phone. It has nice features, and was not too expensive. The old one was even out-slowing me, and had developed battery issues. I decided to spend a little from my savings. Isn’t that what we save money for anyway? For good phones? My conscience tells me otherwise.
I took a day off work to study, but did not get much studying done. I cooked, cleaned and organised a few things around the house instead. It was a productive day so I decided not to beat myself about not achieving my study goals.
Chocolate, coffee, and popcorn have officially made it back on my grocery list. Just another reason to be grateful for the changing weather!
It is beginning to feel like Fall here, which means that it is hard to stay awake for long. Naps in this season are the best kind of naps. Somehow. Dreamless and restful, all thanks to the nice weather. You wake up feeling refreshed, and then a few hours later, some part of your brain begins to slow down and you stand there looking wistfully at the bed you had just left a few hours ago. You cannot sleep all the time, but fantasizing about it can be equally rewarding. So when your friends ask about your plans for the season, you can happily reply that you’d just be inside napping, and encourage them to catch up on sleep too. We are not supposed to have raccoon-eyes all the time!
Have a great season everyone!🙂
with all the means
to over-share
at our disposal,
it is no longer about
the first person
you tell a good
news to,
it is all about
the person
you save from
the bad news now,
by choosing not
to hit “upload”.
©Aaysid
I find myself
Uncurling my fingers
To release
The imaginary butterflies
From my
Quivering hands;
The locked drawers
In my mind
Rattle with unease,
Clearly disturbed
By the very act—
I am letting go
Of everything
That was not
Even there to begin with.
©Aaysid
“There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you meet your antiself, don’t shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.”
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Two short poems:
I.
I am glad
that there are
things that money
cannot buy;
what if we
could buy memories?
some of us
wouldn’t have many;
not the ones
that would last anyway!
II.
I try to imagine you away
but you are too real
so there you stay;
it is awfully nice
in my rabbit hole anyway.
©Aaysid
“The only problem with seeing people you know is that they know you.”
Brent Runyon, The Burn Journals
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay
Milk.
No more.
Moved on from white.
Candies.
Neon.
Little, sweet, sticky memories.
Soft drinks.
Down.
Grew up with effervescence.
Cakes.
Brown.
Chocolate; a way out.
Cheese.
Uptown.
Money was finally around.
Coffee.
Morns.
Found solace in black.
Tea.
Mature.
Green; fix things now!
©Aaysid
I may not be
a great friend,
for I don’t know
how to rescue you
from self-doubt,
but I make sure
that you never
feel invisible
in the crowd
by being the one
who is all ears
without you
having to shout-
you never do.
©Aaysid
“I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.”
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Image by JackieLou DL from Pixabay
I am folding days
As one folds
A bucket load of laundry
On a hot and humid
Summer afternoon—
Not careful
With the creases,
Too detached to look
For the missing
And the matching pieces,
Yet trying to make
Peace with the tedious
Rhythm of it all,
While disregarding
The growing pile
Of washed,
Unvaried minutes and hours
That could crumble
Any second;
With no end in sight!
©Aaysid
*Reposting because it never stops feeling like this!
I am friends
with September—
to gaze
at the lilac sky
just before
the sun comes out,
and to feel
the afternoon air
getting thinner;
to stir
ginger and honey
into the evening,
and to scoop out
hazelnut ice cream
for dinner,
to toss
and turn at midnight,
trying to retrieve
a tender moment
I don’t
quite remember.
©Aaysid
Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay
“Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
When you feel
Like you are
On a train
Nowhere near
Its destination,
As it goes through
One unlit tunnel
After an unlit tunnel,
Yet somehow
It puffs out smoke
That smells like
Melted butter,
You can’t complain.
©Aaysid
“You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.”
Mary Tyler Moore
Image by anncapictures from Pixabay
Three short poems toying with the idea of being or feeling disconnected:
I.
my heart’s aflutter
as I knock on the door,
and it resonates
like never before;
he might not be there,
but I am not sure,
for a knock this sturdy
should be hard to ignore,
unless you don’t want to
be friends anymore!
II.
I shall have to miss
her yet another call
I am, after all,
lost in the rhythm
of this drawn-out fall.
III.
as I clean out my desk
I can hardly gloat-
most of the people
in my life
have been nothing
but a number
on a post-it note!
©Aaysid
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
The musician leaves
Without a note
And nothing ceases,
But his presence.
Maybe there was
A lyrical warning,
Or maybe it was
Just life which
Kept happening in
The guise of the way
Of the world,
Or stopped happening,
All of a sudden,
Without any reason.
©Aaysid
This world
Keeps an eye out
For all those apples
That tend to fall
Too far
From the trees,
And lets them believe
They’re good enough
For the pies,
Well, at least
For a short while,
But then bottles
Them up,
Only to put
Their then reduced
To shoddy
Cider-selves
On the shelves!
©Aaysid
The sky gets murky every afternoon these days. A few heavy, grey clouds appear out of nowhere; stay for an hour or two and then disappear into nothingness. Rainfall has been scarce in our part of the world this summer. It is hot, humid, and quite difficult to breathe with two masks on! Yes, the virus is still managing to find hosts here on top of everything else! It turns out, our personal-grey-clouds, unfortunately, are not great at pulling off disappearing acts – they have been here for quite some time now.
I am beginning to lose sight of the bigger picture. With so much going on, and nothing going on at the same time, the void is becoming difficult to avoid. It had begun as fear for life, not particularly your own, but of those you love, but has now turned into a strange, apathetic feeling. You want to rid yourself of such a feeling, but you are not quite sure what that entails. Maybe we already had enough on our plates, and now the contents are spilling over. Maybe we are not giving ourselves enough credit for trying to go on despite the raging pandemic. When they say, “there are worse ways to live,” they forget that this, if not the worst, is not an easy way to live either! There are days that I cannot recall at all, and I have heard a few people say that this had been happening to them too. When all you can remember is: being sick, hearing about people getting sick or dying, looking after people getting sick, sanitising desktops, doorknobs, sweating through masks, canceling plans to go out, and working twice as hard as before (because the workload keeps on increasing), the individual days do not matter! I can feel myself passing through time, which for once, seems to be standing still.
You can pick up the broken pieces with an intent to rebuild only when the storm is over, but how do those with perpetually stormy skies find it in their hearts to keep going on against the winds? How can people manage to hold on to hope even when the cloudy skies above their heads forget to rain? I think I have not made peace with the altered circumstances yet. Is this realisation enough for now? I am sure it is not. I have to do better to feel better! I hope I get there. I hope we all do.
“Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?”
Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
the world has found
a home in me,
the last place
it should have been
comfortable in,
and I am stuck here
like everyone else—
none of it feels real!
what I do not understand
chooses not to
understand me either,
I cannot get it out,
I cannot get out!
©Aaysid
“We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.”
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
we fill in the gaps
in our memories
with lucid depictions
of who we are
supposed to be;
it saves us
from slipping into
a premature stupor,
it keeps us
from letting go
before the right time
to let go…
©Aaysid
the cloud
that I am on
wants to drop me
drip, drip, drop
into nothingness!
©Aaysid
you remind me of snow,
precipitation at its finest,
and subdued winter sun
at the same time;
you remind me of things
that work well together,
but make perfect sense
even when they don’t.
©Aaysid
Image from Pexels
Outrageously Erratic 