Substantial

a few silver strands

stand out amidst

the raven hair

as if they foretell

the spectral events

yet to unfold

in a life well-lived,

or at least lived

with sporadic bursts

of intense curiosity,

despite feeling like the salt

that has been left inside

a tiny shaker

for too long,

but a tender, little

idea did slip away

and kept bouncing off

the walls, floorboards,

and the ceiling—

I have been here

at the same time as you.

©Aaysid

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”
Lewis Carroll

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Impersonal

It felt right.
Not to need.
A person.
Our own person.
Both the rescuer
And the rescuee.
One person.
Us.
Same person?
What if?
Both quit?
No person.
It might still
Feel right.

©Aaysid

“It is one thing to lose people you love. It is another to lose yourself. That is a greater loss.”

Donna Goddard

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In the Skies (Retouched)

In the Skies (Retouched)

Growth

We have spent most of our lives

Lying low, secluded,

And holed up in ourselves,

But there were quiet moments

That would engender

A profound sense of attachment

Even though for a little while,

The moments for which,

In spite of ourselves,

We would always keep

The doors open

And earnestly make room for;

We watch the years go by,

But we still find ourselves here,

Consistent in our anguish,

A lot more cloistered than before,

But those exquisite moments

Do not show up anymore—

The world grows around you

Excessively and furiously,

Especially when you don’t!

©Aaysid

“Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”

Haruki Murakami

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Effervescent

I no longer know where

I am supposed to go,

but the world is still in motion,

and it feels inane to live

with a terrible, crippling feeling

of profound dissociation

that doesn’t subside even when

a strong dose of reality

hits the cubital vein…

I speak my mind

and it makes tiny ripples

in the placid waters

that on the surface remain,

and the heart behaves

like a wildflower-

it wilts in autumn,

acts coy in winter,

and blooms only in the rain;

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

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A Mercurial Swing

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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Embracing

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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Fading

I feel as if

I am not here anymore,

I am but a hole

In the space

That I used to

Occupy before,

And when a part of me

Feels around for

The rest of my being

In the great oblivion,

It finds nothing

To hold on to except

For profound nothingness—

I cannot complain.

©Aaysid

“Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.”
Michel Houellebecq

Free image from Pixabay

The Room

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

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Senescence

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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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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Wherever

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

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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

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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.

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Lavender (Retouched)

Lavender (Retouched)

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

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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

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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

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The Sky People

we have our eyes

on the sky,

at the clear blue of it,

at the sunset, twilight,

and the night of it;

our hearts forever

one rainbow away

from bursting into colours.

©Aaysid

“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.”
Tom Bodett

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Speechless

I am afraid that some day

I’d run out of things

to say out loud,

but every time

I begin to speak

I feel like as if

all the words

have been said before,

but I utter them anyway,

and feel bad

afterwards for speaking

against my better judgement;

maybe running out of

words to say out loud

wouldn’t be that

bad after all!

©Aaysid

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”
Haruki Murakami

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Quiet? Not quite.

there is no respite even when

the voices begin to fade,

for unsettling whispers

then replace the brutally

honest conversations,

and the incessant noise

in the head woefully remains,

oh, what a shame!

©Aaysid

“Don’t gobblefunk around with words.”
Roald Dahl, The BFG

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Perseverance

I.

I wonder when exactly

Everything became

An act of:

Packing your bags

And leaving,

Leaving your bags

And leaving,

Leaving?

II.

A smoke machine

Suddenly malfunctions

And black glitter

Shoots out instead;

Another pretty accident

That no one cares about.

III.

I do not want to

End up like

A lone lipstick

In my purse;

Persevering

In the face

Of utter inutility!

©Aaysid

“There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.”

Lemony Snicket

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Reality

The calendar has holes

Where the months

Are supposed to be,

And it feels like one

Big day ever since

This year began,

Or maybe the last year

Never came to an end.

Daylight and darkness fight

For the negative space,

And there seems to be

No other choice

But to calmly embrace

The sensory overload.

A moth is no match

For the hurricane,

But there are some voids

That you cannot

Avoid falling into.

©Aaysid

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
Philip K. Dick, VALIS

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