For once, I would like
To be a piece of paper
At the mercy
Of the wind,
To stay somewhere
Only for a few seconds,
For I am tired
Of being a tape-person,
Sticking to places
For way too long,
And not leaving
Until I am yellow,
And often not leaving
In spite of that.
©Aaysid
“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind – you are the one who hears it.”
Michael A. Singer
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I watch it blow up
Into smithereens…
The air pregnant
With awkward syllables
From words that exploded
When forced into a rhyme
Without a good reason,
The only justification
For their plight
Being the sudden shift
In the weather outside
That had dressed up a bit
To impress a few hearts
That notice such things,
And maybe the day
Called for it, too,
For only once in a while
You get consumed
By an overwhelming urge
To celebrate those
Who leave lasting imprints
On multitude of souls
With one indelible verse
After another, and only once
In a while (not quite) you end up
Miserably failing at that!
©Aaysid
Happy World Poetry Day! ❤
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on an overcast day,
in one clear moment
amid so many ill-defined ones,
something held together
by a makeshift adhesive,
breaks within you for good,
and you cannot see
the world around you
the same way anymore!
afraid of the loneliness
that such an occurrence
begins to whisper into you,
you run screaming into crowds—
finally entitled to your own madness!
©Aaysid
“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
Maya Angelou
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Do not look down
On me if I don’t
Manage to sleep tonight,
Let me toss and turn
In peace tonight,
If the book that I
Have brought to bed
With me does not hit
My face tonight,
Do not assume that I
Am deliberately reading
The night away,
And if in the morning
I show up for you
In spite of what is
Happening to me tonight,
Do not dare comment
On my bloodshot eyes,
For a sleepless night
Should not get to define
A person who sleeps
Like a log otherwise.
©Aaysid
“What hath night to do with sleep?”
John Milton, Paradise Lost
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I laugh hysterically
At my own madness,
At the audacity
Of a flimsy thought
That had risen
Like a phoenix
From the ashes
Of my archaic ideas
That had caught fire
Without provocation
Many moons ago,
To throw the outside
World into disarray—
It is utterly ridiculous
To be governed by
Your weakest thought
And to make
More sense than before!
©Aaysid
“Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?”
Sigmund Freud
Free image from Pexels
you called me
to let me know
that you were fragmenting,
and I, being someone
who can fall apart
unprompted,
retrieved the sweeping brush
from the pantry
of horrors-
not even an ounce
of sanity
was salvaged
from the brokenness.
©Aaysid
“We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.”
Mark Lawrence
Featured image from Pixabay
We had barely glanced
At the glorious menu,
Before deciding on
A meteor shower,
And to wash it down,
We had ordered
Some fluorescent rain,
But after only a few spoonfuls
We had felt quite full,
For it was more than what
Our subdued lives could contain.
©Aaysid
“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”
G.K. Chesterton
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the rugged, old desk
in my room
is a proof of a life
lived hunched over it,
and my window
stays jammed
on most days
as if tired of ushering in
the outside life
into this quiet room
that has no choice
but to pretend that
it is a world
of its own,
and my shelves
contain places that I
have broken into,
escpaed from,
and have been
banished from at times,
but they keep
gathering dust
as if this room
is a lot bigger
than all the worlds
they contain within
their glorious pages,
and I am here too,
outgrowing the room,
but just like the desk,
the window, and the books
on the shelves,
I do not leave.
I cannot leave.
©Aaysid
“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Featured image from Pixabay
from living
in the moment,
and being right
in the middle
of it all
to staring
at dried paint
getting drier,
chipping off,
from making
paper boats
when it rained,
and paper planes
when it did not
to never
setting off,
from wanting
to be someone,
to mean something,
to not being
here at all;
we let a heart
believe it is past
its prime,
we let a heart
die way before
its time.
©Aaysid
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
T.S. Eliot
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We wait
For small joys
With our backs
To the wall
As we sit out
The Spring season
To recuperate
From the Fall.
©Aaysid
“In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Featured image from Pixabay
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
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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You believe that you
Are supposed to travel alone,
For only you know the way,
And a journey makes more sense
If embarked on one’s own,
But what if after all the trouble
You found your fate scribbled
On a moth-eaten parchment,
And your destiny engraved
On a moss-covered stone,
Would you burst out laughing
And come back home?
©Aaysid
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
Arthur C. Clarke
Featured image from Pexels
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
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
I am enamoured of
the eerie silence
that follows
the booming fireworks,
the vacant grounds
after the carnival leaves,
and the phone call
that meekly ends
after a silent pause;
it always comes
as a pleasant surprise
when the loud world
hushes up
for the innately quiet.
©Aaysid
“When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.”
Philip K. Dick
Featured image from Pexels
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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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
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
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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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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.
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
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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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
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
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Outrageously Erratic 