Love Birds (but like the Love is real and pure)
Kabir walked after death,
Walked his own body to a grave.
Flowers bloomed and plucked themselves
Out of their homes,
Placed themselves in the middle
Of life and a walk to the grave
To let a man leave in peace.
Kashi born,
He walked with the conviction
He had in his knowledge,
Challenged the Orthodoxes,
Challenged the convention;
Kashi born guaranteed a place in heavens
He gave it all up,
Got himself cremated and burried at the same time,
Got himself fights throughout life
And even afterwards,
Got himself a piece of satisfaction,
Got himself legends and disciples
And angry purohits,
Got a piece of logic and equality of castes
When there were no such words
And Brahmins were gods.
Man dead already,
Looked at his funerals,
Looked at the burial
And felt his head turn towards Meccah,
Could hear the verses ring in his ears
As the soil washed over the lack of his body:
"We created you from it,
And return you into it,
And from it we will raise you a second time";
Looked at the cremation
And felt his soul return to the gods
As they proceeded with the Antim Sanskaar, chanted:
"When thou hast made him ready,
All possessing Fire,
Then do thou give him over to the Fathers,
When he attains unto the life that waits him,
He shall become subject to the will of gods".
Bless the hands that fed us, and may there be scars on those who harmed us. May we never become the things that hurt us. -Anika
We kissed and fought wars
With our tongues,
You seemed to taste an awful lot
Like the lull after a bomb;
The quiet after the storm
When there is nothing more left
To break apart, nothing more left
To get undone.
We tore limbs and rearranged parts
Of our own selves-
Like the Jenga tiles
We never seemed
To arrange right.
We crumbled there on your bed,
And never could hold each other again,
Could never hold our own selves again.
There are things we do not talk about here.
Do not mention the lines that once
Ran along the length of your left hand,
Carved by you trying to play God
When you were barely a person//
Perhaps that was the point.
Half a year trying to make the scars disappear,
The other half spent convincing your own damn self not to.
Listen.
There are places in your head
You could disappear off to,
The ones which will make you so, so happy
And perhaps even a maniac,
But aren't maniacs just people
With enough conviction
To want to live in a world
That was their own mind's doing?
I am proud.
When the Earth tumulted and collapsed on me,
Trying to throw me off itself,
I held on with bare hands.
I dug my claws into the brown soil,
Trying to become one with the Mother,
Trying to grow myself some roots to stay.
I have already been here longer than I had imagined,
To have a place at all is magic in itself.
I have so much life left to grow roots out of.
There are moments
Bad and hard to comprehend, mismatched;
I do not know how to
String together an entire good life
Or a person
Out of so many broken things.
What I mean is
The Cat gets pissed
And he yells
He’ll smash the Dog’s skull
And there is so much rage in his body.
I do not know
How to tell the men
This fury is not something to be proud of,
To carry or pass on.
There are children who have shrunk themselves
And swallowed their own being
To fit into houses filled with so much rage:
Children who are too loud or too dumb,
Children who will never be enough,
There is no time;
Children who would rather
Sleep on the streets
Than be here.
Children who cut out parts of themselves,
Make themselves smaller, be appropriate,
To belong here.
Children who rebel,
Grow tired of waiting, grow weary;
Grow up
And then cry for their mothers,
Gulp their own tears.
Children sitting on floors
Of good houses
And full families
And have never been more alone,
More annoyed at themselves
For not seeing all the good,
For noticing the wreckage,
For not smiling through their own slaughter.
Children who move out
And do things they weren’t sure
They wanted in the first place.
The Cat screams and scratches everyone
Trying to help him,
The Hamster yells of how her life was ruined;
The Parrot bites me, claws at the Cat and
Keeps breaking things, so many things,
Screams of his entrapment.
I am small:
A rat in a big world,
I have never been alone.
The sadness made a home out of this body
And there wasn't enough space for the both of us here
I could feel myself become empty,
Feel my body become things it never has been;
I felt the sadness seep in when I was already done getting out of myself,
I wasn't there anymore.
The sadness made a house out of my bones
And I collapsed into things that did not resemble a person anymore.
I am still trying to look for pieces in the rubble
And create a whole person out of all this mess.