Are you human?

Some times,

Some things, 

don’t have meaning,

and that’s okay,

for ‘the whence’ and ‘the hence’ are sometimes mere thieves looking for hearts within us all. 

And I’m sure, they don’t find many, 

as we have evolved habits that keep our hearts safe from thieves.

We have made lockers of our own veins, they camouflage.

But I’ve seen cages loose their disguise,

as why, when you step out of your home and walk among strangers to get to a place that you hate, you feel all the strangers around you are doing the same.

Why, you can’t help a limping old lady because you’re getting late for office, but then you smile at the stranger who stops and helps her.

Why, the old lady will never know of you but she’d smile at you anyway.

Why, you’d smile too while screaming inside your head “take care of yourself”

Why, smiles are essentially hearts talking in codes.

Why, some situations demand a thousand words to describe when they could be detailed in just three or less.

Why, you can remember the exactness of the curves of someone’s smile but not the colour of their t-shirt.

Why, homes made of flesh and bones never suffocate,

‘cause some humans were only meant to be felt.

Boy, I’ve seen cages break their veins,

so every time you’d keep yourself from saying ‘I love you’ to the people you love, I hope they’d understand. 

Why, some people write,

while some choose to read. 

Why, a cigarette in one hand and a pen in another provides enough numbness to write down poetry about what was it like exactly at this hour last year.

Why, putting words to moments feels just as good as reading them from books.

Why, Bukowski failed well and thus wrote well.

I’ve seen the glance shared by two people reading the same book in a book store, so I’ve seen the wreck they can do to our cages.

Some times,

Some things, 

don’t have meaning,

and that’s okay.

So, keep searching for the meaningless,

that’s exactly where the humans are.

Let’s know how all of it feels like

Staring at the walls, 

we've laughed on each other enough.

Now, let's speak out loud instead.

Let's not look into poems and songs anymore. They speak of old drunk men and women, too high to be us.

Let's speak out loud instead,

Of what our brains know,

and what our eyes have believed,

Of bad faces and good quotes

and white rocks and red leaves. 

With sound waves carrying such words,

we'd do better than the drunkards did.

Staring at the walls, 

we've laughed on each other enough.

Let's speak out loud instead.

Tell me about the place where you go each time you read a metaphor.

Tell me about the black outs on watching the morning light.

Tell me about that word whose literal definition just doesn't seem right. For when that word drops by in sentences, you always tend to grab a different meaning. 

And I'll tell you that your interpretation is much more beautiful.

Tell me what you don't want to know.

Tell me about that regretful Yes and that guilty No.

Tell me how you'd feel when you'll see a little child smiling on your face with cannula on his hands and tubes around his body? Will you smile back at the child or look sympathetically at his mother's tear-filled eyes? Or do both? 

And I'll tell you that we would do none at all.

Tell me how villains have been more inspiring for you than superheroes.

Tell me how 'good' is defined and how 'bad' is ignored.

Tell me how you'd feel to hear bullets nearby and know some men are dead.

And I'll tell you 'dead men' is supposed to be nothing if they're enemy and to abide this isn't a sin either.

Staring at the walls, 

we've laughed on each other enough.

Let's speak out loud instead.

I'll tell you how it feels to be loved by everyone but the one you choose.

How the shadow lingers among every true flesh confessing love.

How it stabs you and yell 'You lucky girl'

You'll tell me how it feels to be loved by the one you love.

Tell me how good it was.

Tell me how bad it was when it finished.

Tell me how you're still haunted by the memories.

Tell me why sips of your whiskey alternates between someone's memories and your future.

Let's know how all of it feels like.

Let's close our eyes, stretch our legs, loosen our wrists and feel. Feel it together.

You and me.

No one else.

Let's sit together with a white flag hoisted on the table.

And let's explain it well.

In the end, I'll stare your eyes,

you'll be staring mine

and we'll laugh on us.

Wet-eyed Contemplations

It feels like I am a Wednesday - present in the middle of every week, existing, breathing, contributing equal minutes to sapiens as Mondays and Saturdays do, but am never talked about.

I am that odd kid in the classroom who's always quiet and whose absence weighs just equal to the weight of an 'A' written in front of her name in the attendance register. I know nothing of young bloods claiming to be Saturday nights, which is to say that I don't know about people who feel themselves as Mondays either.

But then I do know of throat lumps and how many gulps, on an average, it takes to shoot their heads off to not let tears win the war. 

I shoot my throat lumps in afternoons when everyone's around me. Nights are covered all alone in my room, so I let them live and let tears fall like confetti on my pillow. Sometimes this leads to insomnia, which is to say that sometimes my wet eyes get tired of staying shut while I'm not able to sleep, so I open them instead and stare at the walls of my room, which is to say - I think a lot at night.

Sometimes I wonder whether insomnia could ever be kind enough to wish for getting itself diagnosed. But then insomnia is (as I am) a Wednesday too.

Here, but still not.

Perhaps insomnia is a novice that's trying to stay and evolve into cancer, which is to say that everydamnthing in this world has someone to get inspired from, which is to say that everydamnthing includes me as well and this whole wet-eyed contemplation has bucked me enough to make people born on Wednesdays as my inspiration.

There’s more to us

Don’t just tell me you love music.

It’s not enough.

You don’t simply love anything until it does something to yourself.

So, tell me what music does to your mind.

When listening your favourite song, does relief creeps in your veins and makes you close your eyes sometimes? Or suddenly opens them wide instead?

Does it make you travel time?

Does your mind keep music and weed in the same category?

Do mountains give you rhythm? Or do they provide you peace? Are rhythm and peace even different things in your mind?

Tell me how often you keep your headphones with you. 

If your answer is “all the time”,

is it because you like zoning out from the crowd ?or do you love to watch the world around yourself with a background music all along the while?

How often do you realise you had been humming tunes? 

Humming are like dreams, you see!

you’d never know when they started. Sometimes, you’d not even recall that they existed.

Don’t bring me hefty music instruments,

Tap on the table and show me you know rhythm.

Sing me the truest lyrics you know of,

I’ll understand.

So yeah,

the favourite colour is blue.

Nothing can replace Chicken tikka masala and pizza and tunde kebab. 

With no better reason, I love Harry Potter.

God just might be there. Or maybe not!

Hills over beaches. 

DNA is the secret. 

World peace is a myth.

But do they matter? 

Insignificant

There are men dying.
There are men dying.
There are men dying every day.
There are men dying every day for you.
There are men DYING every day for you.
Strikes a cord?
Nevermind, cliches never will.

There's a girl you see. 11 years old. She's standing before her Dad's dead body. Her Dad is wrapped around with the Indian tricolor. Tears meander out of her eyes and reach her cheeks when she decides to lift her right hand up and salute the brave officer her Dad was. Her hand shakes as she salutes and yells out her father's regiment's battle cry. Soldiers scream along with the little girl in unison, a total of 3 times, as if the war cry was a way of weeping for their dead leader.

She knows!
The little girl knows how important she is.
And by 'how important', I mean 'how unimportant'.
We're not brains, flesh and bones. We're meat, ready to take bullets till nothing remains of us.
How unimportant!
How insignificant!
How mere!
Just like fireflies in daylight,
just like night shifts in small towns,
just like 'there are soldiers dying for you' has lost its meaning with repetition,
just like 'there are kids waiting for their Dads to come back home alive'
just like 'kashmir's situation is sad'
just like 'I'm proud to wrap my country's flag around my dead body.'
Every tear dropped for a fallen hero has been puffed away into smoke in this land of 3 million Gods.

She knows of fabrics colored with safron, white and green. She knows of olive green uniforms and the ranks they carry.
Each time she holds them in her hands,
she feels like an infant placing her little hands on her mother's arm as if making herself aware,
of how protection is what she'll get and in turn shall be responsible of,
of how trust will always lead to lethal levels of submission,
of how with every touch she'd be taught of patriotism as a moral from a fairy tale she must believe in.

She's never been to battles.
She's never held a weapon.
She never killed.
She never took a bullet.
But she knows of combat.
She's not her Dad.
She's the one waiting behind.

We've always been the ones waiting!

O' dear men of the higher seats who make boundaries out of people and play war, you have made victims out of us and all I seek to know is
"How proud are you to be an Indian?"

The Notebook

I have a notebook. I call it smoke.
It lays down on my room's table, like a corpse,
ready to be rescued
but
scary enough to wait for some brave hearts to carry itself away.

The corpse narrate tales of its life
and if you flip hard enough,
maybe,
just maybe,
you'd find the most beautiful poetry you'll ever read in your life.

But the truth is you're not a brave heart. The corpse scares you.
It carries with itself realities of the wordsmith's world which is no less different than yours.
And you don't read realities.
You read words.
Just words!

The world inside that notebook, to you, is like the enourmous ice-laden mountains of our country that have been named as field postings,
beautiful,
yet untamed,
not ready for the general public,
only a few brave hearts.

I have a notebook. I once called it 'reality'. Now I call it 'smoke'. Those words are nothing else.

All of us and #you

1.The "Be happy. Stay sad" generation that smiles and smokes is us. Smoke harbours happiness and the air around us is sad. We're blowing puffs of smoke into the air thinking that the sadness around us will wither away by those little hazy pretences emerging from our mouths.
But pretences don't submit. They never will.

#I've learnt from you that there will never be a situation from where I can't get myself off. Some circumstances might look scary from afar. But they only look gruesome until they reach. Once with you, they are the easiest goddamn things to deal with.
*Jabh hota hai na, sab ho jata hai"

2. A,G,T,C had the audacity to come in numerous combinations as DNA codes and forge the living.
So does, happiness, sadness, fear and anger.

#There was a day, a terrible one, when your dad didn't come back home. Lifting such weight with yourself, you've time and again said to me :
"Sonali, your Dad never said goodbye when he went for his duty,
for he knew he'd come back.
And you understood that he might not."
That sheer beauty of thoughts and mind! I can never be you.

3. Rains don't feel like rains when they arrive daily.

#You've changed.
In this world of *be yourself*, *know thyself*, *first priority must be me" "never change" "fuck everyone" generation, you've chosen to be kind and showed that we can change without knowing ourselves in the first place (for what is there to know in this temporary mortal existence?) and that can be the most beautiful thing one can do for oneself.

4. Men and women have made their  feelings into toys and played war.
Some have kept quiet for far too long and then there are some bragging of their naked brains.

#You've showed that love is all about the "I", not the "you". Love doesn't come from another person but it comes from within.
You've proved that the love we seek doesn't reside in the man we love but it blooms within ourselves and to understand that means to never letting men hurt us.
While most simply gives it a bad name and swear to never fall for anyone, you've had the nerve to love all over again.You didn't let one man decide your defination of love.

5.Every imagination ought to be first named, classified, then thrown away into sealed boxes.

6. Naked feets of men have walked on flowery roads without bleeding. They now know nothing of rocks.
Meet us.
The generation of the weak.

Debika, you're the answer to why people should speak of themselves more often.
People should speak of them.
We must speak of us.
You've showed we're all weak until we speak.
Thanks for letting me know I'm strong.
I know you are too.
We all are strong.
We were just quiet.