poems

Things That Are Violet

shubhangiadhikarlaLeave a comment

Of all the things I know, my blood is the first that comes to mind. My blood is violet and doctors hate me. My veins are deceptively blue and my skin a sad shade of purple. I’ll tell you I was born this lilac hue, but I’d lie. It wasn’t until i met your crystal eyes, that my heart fused blue and red together.

The sky in my hometown is a soft purple at dawn; it looks misleadingly beautiful. As the sky slowly becomes brighter, the heat envelopes me, and the dry air scrapes my skin leaving angry red splotches behind; to think 18 years would have made me more tolerant of the sun’s assault. The skies here are fake, they look warm and inviting but there’s no room to fly; boxed-in pretty birds are all we can be.

My grandmother’s voice when she sings feels like I imagine heaven songs do. Its familiarity makes me adore it, but the neighbours next door think it is too pitchy. She sings of lost love and family, she sings of dreams forgotten. She sings about marriage and customs and the trees back home in kharagpur. Her voice is lilac; cocooning me in it’s nostalgia.

This house is violet. On the outside it’s painted a warm yellow, with brick red accents, but the inside is lonely, the space between the silences yearning for your presence again. This house doesn’t feel like a home, without you, or maybe it does and I need you to complete it. I need you here, to dance around, and be my twisted sister. The walls are painted colours I could name, but this home is shrouded in a violet daze, till it feels your presence again.

Of all the things I know, my emotions are what should end this miserable list. Not sad or happy, they’re just a lavender feeling I can’t describe. I exist in a vacuum where the only world I see is a shoddy movie; it plays on and on, and I feel nothing but pinpricks here and there. I have lost all emotions, and I don’t know what to make of it. Every day that passes, I fear I’ll lose what’s left of my mind, because I keep thinking of where I went wrong; with him, with her and with me. I’d like to know the answers, but only you could give those to me and right now, ashes in my mouth would taste better than listening to your lies.

Window Pane

shubhangiadhikarla

Everytime I think I start to like you again, I climb out the window.
It’s not that high, I only live on the first floor.
The curtains are pretty, the wood old, the glass shattered and the window pane crumbling.

The glass on the frame is stained red,
because I’ve done this too many times before.
I made my bedroom into a shrine –
I have all your notes,
your cologne is in the air and
sometimes I sleep on the floor because the bed is too lonely.
I think once I leave that space,
I love you a little less.
I love the sky, the puppies and the flowers when I’m out of our world.
But I end up plucking a single daisy on my way home, because you said i was yours.
You said your home wasn’t a home without one of those, and I’ve long since dried up –
no longer your daisy, i’m poisoned ivy now.

For all this time, that window has stayed like that – broken.
Because i wondered if you would come around, and fix it.
Don’t you see I’m hurting?
I come back home after classes that suck my soul, and the room is freezing – frozen.
That should tell me you don’t care – but all it tells me is I gave you too much power.
Once upon, I would’ve fixed that window myself. I need to let you go; I’ve let time freeze like my room.

I think last night when I woke up shivering,
I realised the broken window pane was me.
Cold and lifeless – waiting to be made whole again.
You said I reminded you of a victim at a shipwreck, begging to be rescued.
I was stuck between endless waters and rubble.

I thought of you, I went to climb out again – that pain hurts less.
But I just stood there, thinking about you for the longest time – hurting.
My final goodbye, the last of what I gave to you.
Because I wasn’t a shipwreck,
I was a salt water river, and you a fresh water lake – never to be.

The next time I walked into that room,
I was happy.
Someone asked me out, and it didn’t hurt as much.
The next time I walked into that room,
the window was boarded shut.
I’m fixing it, I think.
For now, I’ll think of you, and I won’t hurt myself climbing out the window.

legacy

shubhangiadhikarlaLeave a comment 
i write massacres now;
poetry is too pretty, too easy.

my legacy is lukewarm
like chai left forgotten on a Monday morning;
gulped down in bitter swallows
and not sipped like i intended.
you meant for it to soothe,
it burns down the walls of your throat,
the bite from ginger is too much for you,
you’d prefer honey coating your lungs.

i write grey words,
they shackle your limbs to truth,
bright hues which spell out lies,
are what you crave.
i have nothing left to give,
my fingers have a thousand cuts
and my art is soaked in blood now;
i don’t have metaphors to throw at you
there’s police that monitors worth now,
i’m afraid i murdered illusions
and my poetry is evidence.
i write massacres now,
poetry is too pretty, too easy.

you’d remember me later i believe,
like paying homage to ashes;
for my art is dead;
my words a coffin for the questions i bury.
so I’ll leave my name on a napkin,
i hope it floats through your mind
when you drown your tears in stale coffee,
you chose over my morning chai.
i’ll leave my name on paper plates,
hoping you like the taste of it.
there are lemons squeezed in there,
i know you’ll tire of the saccharine lies.
I’ll leave my name in places
where you like to go alone,
so i can creep up on you
run you over and drive off, no headlights.

there’s madness that runs through my blood;
it seeks to possess a place in history, in art.
i want to leave a piece of me behind,
something that survives the cruel summers;
art that talks of trauma and jagged cuts,
and not just love and pretty flowers.
art that survives the tribulations of time.
time is liquid, slipping through crevices,
which mar my being.
time dampens my life,
like a hungry wolf trailing it’s prey,
time pulls me over,
i need more of it.
i need time,
for my legacy is lukewarm;
it begs for me to water it’s hungry roots,
it begs to blossom to life.