A Highlight Reel of Every Thought I’ve Ever Had:

I

If I can’t lift my feet off the gravel,
I will dive headfirst into tarred roads,
chasing every cloud tethered to a puddle,
what’s one cracked skull, I have other bones

–this is not a metaphor.

 

II

I am tired of the weight of meaning,
of: this leaping toad is me,
I am the toad
and the moon is every possible thing I have ever loved
and the persistent buzz of the fly is the herding call
for all of my failures since the moment I slid out of the womb,
which rumble back from distant, foggy pastures into painful high definition
dragging me right with them
into the pit of endless despair.

 

III

Maybe if I talk to myself loud enough
I can drown out the high-pitched keening
from under my bed.

 

IV

‘This is not a metaphor’ I tell myself
when I accidentally send the last blob of toothpaste down the drain,
already ten minutes late.

 

V

sling chicken bones into the parched night,
an offering in return for the promise of rain
(–pass it off as successful witchcraft when it rains 4 days in a row, nearly 2 months later)

 

VI

You tell your friends I am still in love with you,
and I let you because it seems like you need that and it doesn’t hurt me.

A boy trips over air and I tell him I love him
unburdened of meaning
–and then the girl who sits beside me,
and the ruffled crow overhead as I walk home–
I don’t know much about astrology
but maybe Pluto’s in retrograde.
or was it Uranus?
either way, I fling all my affections onto whatever cosmic rock is willing to take them.

 

VII

Buried and planted seem like polar opposites
even though they’re more or less the same thing.
–and I thought I was the first one to ever think of that
but I saw a picture yesterday that basically said the same thing,
only better.
So. are we all ambitious colonizers
bumbling their way into exotic lands
claiming to ‘discover’ them before afflicting the natives of debilitating disease?

 

VIII

It isn’t comforting to be reminded
that things don’t just happen and then dissipate.
it’s all right here in pockets that I’ve given up trying to empty.
sand clings to things
and I cannot tell what grains I gathered at 12
and what at 19
I went to the beach and I will have gone to the beach for all eternity.

 

IX

if I hold my breath for long enough underwater
I won’t ever have to come up
but I can pretend well enough that my lungs crave the touch of air too much
for me to stay here forever
(–most days anyway.
on others, I stay away from the water)

 

X

Dear Raj,
I’m afraid we must cease our dalliances
for I have joined catholic school and am to become a nun
khuda hafiz.
-Simran

 

XI

I used to think I could be a fortune teller
Tea-leaves were the preferred medium;
I didn’t like tea, however.
A dilemma.
mum got me a set of stories from the stall next to the restaurant
whose name I can never remember
(it sounds like rose petals and kebabs, a hint of green)
I read about Musa (a.s) and thought perhaps tea could work the same way.
I hadn’t understood what sets magic and miracle apart
(faith, I think. I could be wrong)
For the longest time, I was afraid of getting into the pool.
the slightest of ripples was a potential miracle.

 

XII

Imagine getting paid to look at the stars.
(imagine getting paid to heal people)

 

XIII

This is my last year of feeling.
I’m afraid I’ll grow up and nothing will ever be beautiful again.

 

XIV

Perhaps I could grow to be a lighthouse:
always in possession of the safe way home;
but only the ships know of monsters;
there is no value to a home I never leave.

 

XV

I have moulded the fat that hangs from my arm
for maximum aerodynamic efficiency,
I could dive off a cliff and nothing could ever temper my velocity
(nothing would ever try to, I don’t think)

 

XVI

I don’t think I bruise easy
though you wouldn’t agree if you were to look at my forearms or hips or legs
I think it’s just:
every time I think I’m walking through doors (or walls or tall, metal benches)
I’m simply walking into them.
(where would I be if I were to keep count of every hurt)

XVII

On nights less gracious than most
I tell people you were born of fire
smokeless,
I am all the bitter brew I need to keep awake till dawn.
(clay hearts break easy)
Happy poetry month! This might not seem like it, but I wrote this over the course of the past month and I don’t think I have anything more to add to it. Also, the image is a sketch from a few months ago. That’s it. Thank you for your attention. 

alternative to googling the opposite of heartbreak

Step One:

sync your breathing to mine
kneel down into the water
drown the way this bee attempts not to:
floating over yellow, dipping into blue until some hand from somewhere
wrinkly and pale and happy lifts you gently, places you on the safe tiled shore
nudges you away from your attempts to fall back into the water you cannot float on

we could trade our glasses, grin into yellow skies now pink now blue now grey
we could float and forget about our bodies, we are nothing more than lazy smiles and burning eyes, the occasional spluttering cough

Step Two:

kick your legs faster once you’ve been quiet for too long
pretend it scares away the sea monsters lurking in the depths of this hotel pool
hold your breath and sink underwater.
boys are dumb and girls are dumb and so is everybody in between and we’ve never been in love whatever

Step Three:

borrow my shampoo and we can complain about how tired we are
we haven’t done anything all day
sing a little louder so I can hear you over the shower

the kids are all right

I got a face potion on, hair potion on, hand cream giving my formaldehyde-abused hands some much-needed reprieve and I’m taking a little study break.

Adjusting to this sort of a study routine and this vast a coursework is difficult, and I didn’t do the best in the series of tests we have every week, but I did pass in all of them so I’m hanging on. By my fingertips, sure, but still.

I had some bad couple weeks a week ago; I got sick one Monday and missed a test and an entire day of class and that gave me a lot of anxiety and it was just a lot of ‘hey maybe I’m not cut out for this’ and I felt like everybody else wasn’t having as difficult a time keeping up, but friends are good. Friends make you realize that you’re not in this alone, and everybody feels like everybody else is doing much better than they are and it’s normal.

There’s a learning curve to this whole thing because school was mostly messing around and now I’m studying things I actually want to be studying which means I have to put in an effort now, which is something I’d forgotten how to do, and I’m allowed to take my time. When things seem like they might be getting too much, I remind myself that grades aren’t everything and I shouldn’t place my self-worth on my academic performance. I could be a terrible, boring, untalented, unkind person and still ace the exams.

Another thing about college is that you can’t help but feel a little insignificant–just because there’s just so many people and the professors are still only getting to know you and it’s very different from the sort of atmosphere high school had where everybody knew everyone and you felt like you were heard. Not that the teachers aren’t always available and willing to listen if you do approach them, but I did feel a little alienated. I’m going to college halfway across the country from where I grew up in, and the kids here are different, and while I have a solid group of friends, I still do sometimes feel like a stranger on the outside looking in. But I felt that way when we first moved in the 8^th grade as well and then I made some of the best friends I’ve ever had and we’ve stayed together for 5 years so I’m guessing that feeling will pass.

Speaking of things that will pass, time is going by so fast. I haven’t painted or really written anything these past two months even though I keep telling myself I will on some weekend. I have classes 6 days a week, and then Sundays off, but I have a test on a different subject every Monday so the weekend feels more like a study leave but I’m managing. I pulled an all-nighter this week and then got maybe 3 hours of sleep for 3 consecutive days because I had an Anatomy part-completion examination on Friday and all the tests are held alongside regular workdays so you have to keep up with the daily portions while studying for these, and even though the test didn’t go very well, I’m okay with that because I did as much as I could and there’s always the next test to do better in.

I then slept for a solid 8 hours last night, so this past week has been good.

We have our first semester exams just before Christmas, and then I get 3 whole days off where I don’t have to study anything before we start with the second semester and I’m very excited for that. I’m also super excited for the 3 months long break we’ll get at the end of the first year after the university exams as well. Its only like 7 months away.

So, yeah I had a rough patch briefly and I’m kind of struggling with time management and someone gets yelled at, at least once every day, but there are also girls who swoop in and put your hair up before the teacher notices when it comes undone while you dissect, and frantic, collective, last minute gross anatomy diagram prep an hour before submission that makes you feel so good once it’s done on time and you can all laugh at all the silly panicking, and hanging out with people you don’t even really know post-exams on the top floor, laughing and bonding over shared sleep-deprivation, staring at the trees and blue rooftops and feeling like the only people in the entire world.

The only thing I’m really worried about is feeling like all my youth is going to be spent on tests and classes because and I’m not going to be drawing or painting or writing until I’m suddenly 32 and wondering where it all went. But I’m sure once things settle down, I will learn how to juggle academics with my more creative pursuits (which currently have been relegated to the occasional hurried verse at the back of a notebook between classes, and sub-par pencil sketches) and everything will be okay.

Getting all that out felt nice. I shall now go and shower and then prepare for the biochem exam I have tomorrow.

 

betty smith, the youths, and disjointed journals

Dated: 5th September

I have this book I’m reading right now. I started it properly on a flight to the city where my college (!) is and now I’m on a flight back home and I don’t want to finish it. It’s happening just a little too fast and it’s not a small book but it feels like it right now in my hands with the clouds within grasping distance and the distant, waning cries of an infant settling itself into my skin, the seats, my knees.

Dated: 10th September

I didn’t read the book at all this past week and now I’m on a flight to what will essentially be my home for the next five years again. I finished the book. I love it. I feel a little bit like sobbing.

Dated: 4th September

I look at this one blue building, yeah? And I wonder if I’d disappear right now if I could. I don’t know. I knew a couple months ago, but I don’t now and that.
That’s good, though.

There’s a woman in the car beside mine. She’s holding her child’s head up to the sky and they’re both grinning and something blooms warm and golden and happy and I know this, I’ve known this forever.

Dated: 17th July

Or maybe the metaphor hacks and coughs her way onto a bed, falling just shy of profound coherence. Maybe it’ll slip through the cracks and everyone will heave a sigh of relief.

The hyperbole flings itself onto oncoming traffic.
Or. More peacefully. Sinks into blue on warm evenings, deeper and deeper till its elbows rest alongside colossal mammalian corpses teeming with life

And the sibilants draw on the backs of each other’s hands and one hums, and the other chokes on splintered spoonfuls of syrupy joy.

Maybe it’ll fall into the chasm and everyone will dance all night.
Maybe it’ll never return and it’ll whoop for joy.
Maybe it’ll go to sleep and take a shower on awakening.

Dated: 4th July

Today was a good day.
I think I’m slowly losing my mind.

Dated: 9th September

I feel old. That’s silly, of course, I’m only 18. Still, being 14 sounds awfully young.
Maybe I’ll be 70 one day and think of being 65 as awfully young.

Dated: 10th September

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is a heaven sent.

Dated: 6th August

you make me laugh but it’s not funny (II)

Part I here

The newest people believed some of the stars ought to get lonely all alone in the dark, miles from other souls.

But the stars don’t have souls, you see, the Sad would interject. They can’t feel anything, not happy, not lonely–there’s no one to do the feeling for them.

Who does the feeling for us, then. the Desperate would ask. Where do our souls come from?

The Happy told them they were born from a laugh. A person would laugh, and birth twenty-nine new souls that’d whiz about, looking for someone to claim. That’s what the breeze is. Twenty-nine new souls grasping for a heart to ease. Can’t you feel them? And the Happy would stretch out their palms.

From war, the Angry would say. People would wage wars and kill children and sob and each tear would bear thirteen new souls that’d splitter and splatter and fracture and catch on coat-tails and shoes and glistening pearls and seep under our skin over the years until there’s a respectable enough ocean sploshing out our rib cages and we drown in every song we sing for the children we killed. It’s why we still wage wars. In the hopes, we might grow a soul at the end of it. Of course, they sighed, there is no end.

The Sad weren’t very sure but they thought perhaps a soul sprang forth at the touch of a hand that lays you to sleep, along the curved edges of clay pieces you sacrificed sunrises to mould, from the first drop of ink that spreads across the page.

The Desperate thought perhaps they didn’t have souls at all.

 

A Break

I will be taking a break. From blogging that is (and just social media and writing and anything that brings me joy in general? except going biking at the local national park because ey monsoon’s here and everything is green–i saw a fawn playing with a baby monkey and a peacock dancing during a light drizzle and a turtle maybe communicating with a bird and okay so maybe I’m not giving up everything that brings me joy).

Not that very many people would care or even notice but in case some poor unfortunate soul stumbles by for the first time in a couple months and wonders why there isn’t any recent stuff, this blog isn’t dead just resting. Feel free to click over to some of the older stuff while you’re deprived of any new content.

Not like doing this will even make any difference, seeing how normally I posted maybe once in two months anyway (barring the last couple recent stress-infused months).

But yeah I’m taking a break, albeit reluctantly, but I gotta keep reminding myself this is all in favour of achieving something I want to do. Which is to go to med school. Which I hopefully will next year if I work hard enough.
I’m taking a drop year to prepare for the pre-medical tests and I’ve been known to be distracted by this platform instead of studying so it is probably for the best, even if it will take some getting used to.

I won’t enjoy it but hey this something I want to do so gotta make sure I do end up doing it instead of, to quote internet sensation, faniel towell, “procrastinate on our one shot at existence”.

Whoop-de-do.

 

Yours Truly,
Simran

p.s. rice has the prettiest of the plant scientific names: Oryza sativa, as does the sweet pea: Lathyrus odoratus 

p.p.s. rice + Arabidopsis thaliana were among the first plant genomes to be sequenced before the Human Genome Project.

p.p.p.s. carrots were originally purple.

And that concludes your botany lesson for today. Tune in same time next year for some juicy deets on the rich and famous from the sorta-journal I will maybe kinda hopefully keep while away.

god is a woman

Death isn’t something I think about very much. It’s inevitable and a normal part of life, so really what’s the point? There’s nothing I can do about it, just like there’s nothing I can do about the Universe expanding or the fact that our sun will eventually literally blow up in all our faces (and to think the Beatles wrote a song about you, ye ungrateful wench) and the Earth will become a flaming pile of destruction (metaphorically though, we’re already there).

I do, however, think about getting old. Which also happens to be inevitable and a normal part of life but the difference, in this case, is that I know what it’s like. I have physical, documented evidence of what it’s like to grow old, i.e. (from what I’ve seen) mostly bad hips and saying, “I’m too damn old for this”. Maybe shaking your fists at rowdy teenagers, I don’t know.

Point is, growing old bothers me.

What will I do when I don’t have my entire life ahead of me. What am I when I’m not young and idealistic (lolololol maybe idealistic isn’t the word. what do you call people who are disappointed about the glass being only half full but also intensely fearful of the glass breaking, leaving dangerous shards all over the carpet? what do you call them? losers? idk)

What am I when I’m not simply potential?

I suppose what I’m really asking is what am I when I’m not allowed to make mistakes anymore. What am I when the things I set out to do have been done or irreversibly not done depending on where life takes me. What am I when something I do wrong has consequences that reach far into the future (because everybody knows you get an entirely new identity once you turn twenty and your past is more or less erased and so nothing you’ve done till then matters. It’s why the underworld is crawling with pre-pubescent crime syndicates).

wHaT AM i.

A bird? A plane? Two bipedal cats in a trench coat trying to sneak into the opera?

lgbtq+ icon whom no one knows and whose orientation is actually represented by ‘+’???

Growing old under protest? (she says at eighteen. which, as you all know, is positively ancient.)

 

~fin~

About the title:
She’s not, actually.
He’s not a man either.
He just is. She doesn’t subscribe to the gender binary. It’s just some translation problems, from what I understand.

Just like ships aren’t women. But the Titanic still broke your little adolescent heart in history class, didn’t she? (the ship, I mean, not the movie the movie THERE WERE OTHER PIECES OF SUITABLE DEBRIS HE COULD HAVE FLOATED ON IF NOT WITH ROSE THAT SELF-SACRIFICING LITTLE OLD STYLE STEP DANCING EARLY GATSBY FOOL)

~fin2~

gif used.

~fin3~

Every Story But Mine

i am 23 and singing to a girl
who does not love me-
-but that’s not true i am only 18.
a pretentious witch
who has never fallen in love
but can pretend
and shamelessly exploit
the theoretical heartbreak anyway.

i am 48 and clawing at a nicotine noose
that only seems to cling closer-
-but that’s not true i am only 18.
and smoke may look good in black and white
but cigarettes make my eyes water.

i am 34 and burning the slippers
of a husband who left me-
-but that’s not true i am only 18.
and the burning plastic would
only serve to poison me.

i am 9 and aboard a train
and the man kisses my hand-
-but that’s not true i am 18.
and kindness can be a disguise.
 

yours truly,

[idk man do I even need to sign-off? why am I making this harder than it has to be]

Hairy Fingers

We all have those days. The ones where you can’t find anything to write about because the voices inside your head are completely silent (the voices inside mine are rarely ever silent—quite the boisterous, bickering bunch if you ask me, but they don’t always talk sense and I find myself, as I am right now, somewhat lacking in the ‘legit posts’ department and I do want to write something because, well, because I have the time)

I have a notebook. It’s a nice notebook. It’s a nice notebook I write down ideas in. I flipped through the nice notebook with the not-so-nice ideas and there were a few blog ideas I wrote down. Clearly I never actually got to them. But since I have nothing else to offer and I fear posting this infrequently will cost me quite a few readers, here they are (some of them truly are terrible, okay fine most of them):

An extract from the above mentioned notebook. It’s from the few entries that were journalistic-like in nature. It’s okay to cringe. I cringed the hardest.

• Birthdays: Celebrating the countdown to your death…speaking of things that don’t make sense: I’m In the Eleventh Grade! (?) [this was way back in January when my birthday was nearing and I had been an eleventh-grader for a month and yet it was still only sinking in]
• Favorite Past-Time: Turning Water into Wine
• A Woman Without a Man is Like a Fish Without a Dream Board [I think this one was after I saw another mind-numbing movie where the girl’s sole purpose in life was landing the guy]
• Dawn of the Dread [don’t even know with this one…]
• Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day
• The Older You Get, The Greater You Were
• All the World’s a Schrödinger’s Box and We But Mere Cats [Happen to quite like this one, to be honest. Wonder why I didn’t write anything…]
• Criticize. Condemn. Complain [Always did like alliterations]
• It’s Not the Bullet That Kills You, It’s the Hole. [Aren’t I a clever little thing?]
• Shaolin Soccer [Actually a review on the movie by the same name, but I didn’t really write a “proper” review and so decided to not actually post it]
• Smell Flowers, Look Around For the Coffin: The Average Cynic, De-mystified.
• A Closed Mouth Gathers No Feet

And on that note, I shall bid adieu.

Perhaps I should try actually responding to the Daily Post prompts instead of writing crap like this…

Yours Truly,