Everything

There is no way to put down

The crushing weight

Of everything I am forced

To remember,

The sharp images,

Searing fragrances,

And crisp sounds

Play in a loop,

And my mind wanders,

At times,

But does not dare

Leave the confines of

Dark, imposing memories,

For it knows

That if I’d will myself

To forget everything,

Everything will forget

Me in a blink as well,

And a mind when empty

Might scream louder

Than when it is being

Weighed down by everything

It remembers!

©Aaysid

“I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
Franz Kafka

Featured image from Pixabay

Crumbling

The room around me

Begins to disappear

Ever so slightly,

The warm glow

Of the lamp fuzzes out,

Gets bigger and lighter

And impossible to ignore,

A chair in the corner

Casts a strange shadow

On the floor,

There is a gaping hole

In the wall where

There used to be a door,

And I am not there either,

Outside looking in,

Or inside looking for

What isn’t there anymore—

A mind needs no excuse

To fall apart,

It readily fragments

With the crumbling indoors.

©Aaysid

“That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

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Backgrounded

We invariably choose

To wear a frown,

And never feel the need

To straighten it out,

For it does not hurt

To have this air

Of subtle fury about you

If you are pulling

Out all the stops

To melt into the background.

©Aaysid

آگے آتی تھی حال دل پہ ہنسی”

“اب کسی بات پر نہیں آتی

“Once I was able to laugh at the predicament of my heart
Now I am unable to laugh at anything”

Mirza Ghalib

Featured image from Pexels

Real Games (Retouched)

Real Games (Retouched)

Poem It Out

The poems spill out

When everything else

Is being held in

Against our will,

Our words leap

Into action when we

Are too tired to think,

To seek solace in rhyme,

To find freedom in ink.

©Aaysid

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
Robert Frost

I am thankful to Spillwords Press for publishing my poem, A Bonfire. I shall be really grateful if you could spare some time to go check it out there.

Featured image from Pexels

Scrambled

Three short poems about loving too much, and loving wrongly:

I.

Her collapsed-self rebuilds itself

A little every day

Around the bright smiles

On the faces of the people

She keeps falling apart for

Only to collapse all over again.

II.

She had been putting herself

Into the pies she bakes,

And every time someone

Refuses to take a bite,

A part of her dies.

III.

If you are forced to put

Your heart into things

You do not want to do,

Those things shall get done,

But in the long run

Neither love shall prevail

Nor shall you!

©Aaysid

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”
Ernest Hemingway

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Chronically Distracted

I begin but I

Never finish anything

I get distracted,

But it takes courage

To quit which I

Don’t seem to have,

So I write

What I can, what I am,

In order to flee

From myself,

Self-deprecating words

Like a drug I detest

But cannot stop taking,

An obligatory poison

To lose myself,

To sink, to drown,

To be curled up in a ball

Tossed out

To never be found-

I begin again.

©Aaysid

“It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in the thick of thin things.”
Stephen R. Covey

Featured image from Pexels

Quiet

I have written a lot less

Than I did last year,

And I had often woken up

With a crippling fear

That I no longer had

A single rhyme left in me

In spite of being crushed

Under the weight

Of worries and troubles

That could only lose power

If expressed poetically,

But I had persevered

By letting suffocating silence

Be symbolically lyrical

For a while,

By letting blankness

Of the pages in my diary

Be the voice for everything

That I couldn’t write,

And it had been all right.

I have been all right.

©Aaysid

“Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.”
Oprah Winfrey

Featured image from Pexels

Trapped Within Itself

My unseasoned heart

Wakes up

With new year’s sun

Only to sip winters

From huge, chipped

Coffee cups,

And to chew green

Jelly beans with uncanny

Flavour of summer,

And to feel alive

In spite of itself

Even when all it knows

Is how to fall

As it waits for

The promised joy

That is taking forever

To spring out.

©Aaysid

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.”
T.S. Eliot

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Ancient

As the years

Turn to dust,

The folded scraps

Of yellowing paper

Safely tucked away

In the pockets

Of worn-out coats,

Missing a button or two,

Become fewer

And farther between,

Until no memory

Of discrete moments

Can be retrieved

Without being consumed

By the history

Of almost everything!

©Aaysid

“With each passing moment I’m becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.”

Haruki Murakami

I wrote this poem last year, and it is scary how relevant it still is.

Absurd

I.

I buy myself flowers

Only to end up

Sneezing all over

The place;

How can an act

Of kindness,

Turn that easily

Into an act

Of hate?

II.

Everything deserves a break

So one of these days

I shall take my thoughts

Out for a walk,

And then I’ll make them

Go back without me.

III.

You can send me

An empty box

As a present

For I can love it

For the things

That will be there;

I’ll make paper planes

Out of the gift-wrap

And scrunchies

Out of ribbons,

And use the box

To store them in.

©Aaysid

“I live in my own little world. But it’s ok, they know me here.”
Lauren Myracle

Featured image from Pexels

Enough Said

It seldom worked…

Disagreement.

Felt unreal.

Resentfully shoved aside.

Thoughts held captive…

Indemnified.

Too late.

Nothing was forgiven.

Grim words penned…

Misspelled.

Made sense.

Left at that.

Every you knows…

Someone.

Like me.

A small world.

©Aaysid

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

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Off Course

I.

Whispers have replaced

All shrieking attempts

At communication,

I wonder when

Silence will be

The only thing we’d use

To communicate

To be actually heard?

II.

I pretend that I

Know where I am

Even when all I do

Is dream about

Sleeping with a fan on

In December nights

Only to wake up

Feeling like I did

Last summer.

III.

I see your outline

And try not to

Fill it up with rainbows

For I am still

Quite bad at colouring

Inside the lines.

©Aaysid

“I’m still in bed writing this, lying on my back like an omelette in a pan.”

Alain Bremond

Featured image from Pexels

Unuttered

Not all words

When they touch

The solid ground

Can bounce back up,

Some of them stay

Huddledtogether,

While only a few

Dare break away

To wait for the ones

Still.

©Aaysid

“The unspoken words trembled in the air.”
Iris Murdoch

Featured image from Pexels

December Eyes

She sees you with December eyes,

The sleep-laden eyelids,

Frosted lenses and an inkling

Of fog all over the corneae,

That way she can only make out

The shape of your face

So if she’d ever have to conjure

Your image up from a memory,

She wouldn’t know where to begin,

But she wouldn’t make any mistake.

©Aaysid

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever.”
Alfred Tennyson

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Freezing Over

Somewhere a version of you

Is finally able to fix

A broken violin

As the night outside

Turns emerald green

And the fire grows cold

In the fireplace,

And you wonder

If throwing silent,

Winter nights into disarray

By sending out notes

Of a newly repaired

Time-worn violin

Will be a huge mistake?

For life may be full

Of trivial affairs,

But something colossal

Is always at stake.

©Aaysid

“and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks.”
Douglas Adams

Featured image from Pexels

Tinted

The world is more pink

Than grey lately,

But those who never

View it without

Rose-coloured glasses

Can hardly appreciate

The salmon glow

Brought to it by

The sluggish demise

Of their very own

Cherry-red consciences!

©Aaysid

“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Lost

She has lost

Her sense of direction,

Wherever she goes,

She is already there.

©Aaysid

“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Featured image from Pexels

On Edge

Finding yourself rummaging

Through piles and piles

Of discarded memories,

Far removed from present,

Not wrapped in fancy boxes,

But oh so casually thrown

Into trash cans stuffed hastily

Into brown paper bags,

Seems like a dangerous

State of mind to be in,

But when they say,

“Isn’t it like one of those

Baffling things that happen

To you for no apparent reason?”

You cannot help but say,

“I have never heard of those.”

©Aaysid

“Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.”
Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

Delusional

Sometimes, love is found

In the weakest hellos

And indifferent goodbyes,

For anything that plunges

A heart into the depths

Of that abusrd a denial

Must be akin to affection.

Sometimes, all you need

Is a delusional mind.

©Aaysid

“Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”

Tony Kushner

Hypothetical

If I were to see myself

In a light that wouldn’t flicker

Would I feel the air

To be unrealistically thicker

Will there be a heart

Aflutter, suddenly beating quicker

Would the nagging world

No longer be a cosmic trigger

Will I finally stay

Despite being a habitual quitter?

©Aaysid

“Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.”
Donald Miller

Featured image from Pexels

Bitter

she became her own

personal shade of blue,

at war with the dusky,

almost-angry

glint of his

prussian blue iris,

and dreamt of a day

when she would

be immune

to that cataclysmic sky

in his eyes

which ends up

infecting her like a virus!

©Aaysid

“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Featured image from Pexels

Unfaltering?

Neither a ghost

Nor a memory,

But like a drop

Of blood

That is thick,

And pungent,

And repulsively red,

We are as unabating

As the thoughts

You keep crushing

In your head!

At least for now.

©Aaysid

“Out of my ignorance I called you a homeland, and I forgot that homelands are taken away.”

Mahmoud Darwish

Featured image from Pexels

Mediocrity

We could have been putting

Our souls in a mesmeric trance

By dancing like whirling dervishes

In cold, November mornings

To let our thoughts somersault

Out of our heads to appear

As glistening beads of perspiration

To evaporate into nothingness,

But we are far removed from all that,

For mediocrity has slowly devoured

The fire that was supposed to

Burn within our hearts forever!

©Aaysid

“I know you’re tired but come, this is the way.”
Jalalu’l-din Rumi

Featured image form Pexels

Cutting Corners

Three short poems:

I.

When we decided

Never to talk again

We did not know

What that entailed;

It has been three days

Since I have heard

From you but it feels

As if it has been forever-

Never’s not forever!

II.

As I

Fix a snack,

I let it vibrate,

You’re calling my phone,

Hoping that the pedometer app

Would count a few extra steps that way,

Everyday I cheat my way through exercise,

And wonder why my back refuses to have my back!

III.

The solitary chicken

Crosses the road

To run away from the coops,

Don’t you realise

That nothing brave

Can ever be done in groups?

©Aaysid

“One bulb at a time. There was no other way to do it.”

Jaroldeen Asplund Edwards, The Daffodill Principle

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