Do I have a podcast now!? Announcement and Updates!

Goodness! Hasn’t it been so long since we last had a heart-to-heart conversation? Literal months! 

I want you to stop reading this post right now, head to the comments section and tell me how your day was/ has been so far! Come on… Let’s chat!

Now, since you have commented (I am assuming) and you are back to reading my post, allow me to tell you what’s up! *Happy screaming*

I JUST LAUNCHED MY FIRST EVERY PODCAST!!!!! (Here is the link) 

Yes, you read that right.
No, I am not kidding. 
Yes, I am freaking out. 

Oh my god! Isn’t that a dream come true!? 

I am going to be honest with all of you, I had been planning to give a voice to my work for the longest time, but for some reason or the other, I just couldn’t get myself to do it. This was primarily because I was just too afraid to underperform. 

Gladly, today I found the strength to step out of fear and go ahead with my dream. I am not even exaggerating, I feel like such a free bird right now. There is something so liberating about winning over your inhibitions- I don’t even have the words to express my joy and gratitude right now. 

Coming back to the podcast- It is a pleasure and an honor for me to be able to announce my poetry podcast, ‘Yet Unheard’. This is where you will find the spoken versions of the posts I put here, and also some additional content pieces exclusive to that platform. Do take some time to hear what I have to say and let me know what you think about it!

That being said, I really want to take this moment to pause and thank all of you. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to be able to gain enough confidence in my writing and turn it into the purpose of my life if I wouldn’t have had your lovely support. I remember putting up my first post on 13th December 2018, and my life has changed in miraculous ways since then. A very special thanks to Sid (Here is his blog, go check it out! He is magically talented) for being the first to follow and comment on my blog. I literally cried with joy when I received that notification. 

This blog is literally my second home. My heart resides here, and it always will. All of you are a family to me. I can’t even thank you enough for the time you spend here, reading, commenting, and engaging with my posts. I hope I have been adding some value to your lives with the content here. I strive to achieve just that! 🙂

Once again, thank you for everything!

To the one who is yet to bloom

To the one who is yet to bloom, 

Sketch Credit: Gauri Walecha

I see you…You have waited! You stood your ground when the Earth began to shake, you swam through the roughest of waters, you held your home when a storm took everything away… you waited through all yet never yelled a single curse!

I see you… and you are the strongest I have ever seen!

Now you have begun to run out of patience. Little things don’t dawn smiles over you anymore but leave you behind with risen haste. 
You have lost faith. 
You have lost strength. 
You have lost hope. 

The thick skin that you once grew, is now into ruins and you… you know you can’t take the pain anymore. 

So, what do you choose now? Defeat?
I don’t blame you… Neither do I blame the darkness. 

But I do blame something…
I blame those mouths who kept telling you how you must have achieved glory by a certain age. 
I blame those minds who came up with a structure to confine people’s lives. 
I blame those hands that had the audacity to strangle you into these chains.

But you? No, I don’t blame you!

Instead, 
I am standing by your side and cheering for you, making sure that my voice is louder than the taunts yelled at you.
I am waiting for you, on the other side of the finishing line with my arms wide stretched, ready to pull you in an embrace the moment you reach.

Who am I, you ask? 

I am the one meant to show you the right path.
I am here to hold your hand and guide you as you walk.
… and, as long as you follow me, I promise everything will be alright.

Just don’t stop! For me… don’t stop!

With love,
Your heart.

When silence dawned over…

It’s not very often
yet just enough,
when my tongue glides
elegantly so,
To put ballet to shame;

Its rhythm 
sings poems
rich with lore, lure, and lies.

Lies 
have only proven kind to the truth, 
until they are silenced;
No sword kills
half as gory
as the one forged
behind the veil of secrets. 

It’s not very often
yet just enough,
when hearts don’t waltz in love
just like they are known to-
rather,
they run to dig a scar
deep into each other. 

How unfortunate
is love supposed to be
to have fallen prey
to its very own flames?

There are times,
when I lose hope;
I lose hope on the slim occasion
of ever being able to hold my lover’s hand,
and smile to my truth,
not to mask my miseries. 

And hope, 
no matter how powerful, 
often loses me;
I happen to walk down 
the prettiest of dark aisles
ever known to my feet.

The day before was beautiful;
I saw you basking in the joy of our story. 

The very next Sun saw us
drawing swords to the most tender parts of our souls. 

Today, 
we fought like we hadn’t ever loved. 

I will wait for silences to dawn on the morrow;
A silence long-awaited; 
One that we had betrothed our peace to-
I wish we hadn’t!

You will love…

Four walls, a number of bricks, and here you sit in the middle of this room finding solace in your own flesh and love in the mirrors. Mirrors, though, seldom lie. They may lie about a few harsh truths, though ‘lack of love’ stands high on the list.

You stand in front of this silvered piece of carefully cut glass, staring at every part of your scarred silhouette, yet the light shining on those marks somehow sells them as beauty spots.
In that moment, you smile, promptly looking at the delicate curve that your rose tainted lips have arched into; a careful moment of comfort, though you may only find it meandering away from your glistening eyes.

Why, you ask?
Because mirrors seldom lie; eyes, though, don’t!

Those two gleaming curves of crystal, sitting on your face, are windows to the truth-
You know it.
I know it.
We know it.
So, we shy away from glances!

We shy away from the mere idea of taking a look down those merciless voids, because we know, that the glance, if made, will hurl our entire existence into this gigantic spiral of a never-ending truth trail;
and you, being nothing but a mere speck of consciousness, will have to learn, not most, but all that this infinity loop has to offer.

You will have to learn why you desperately try finding hearts to love you because you deny believing how loveable you are, unless someone sweeps you off your feet.

You will have to learn how you deny yourself your own embrace because you are a little too scared of the thorns you planted in your own skin.

You will have to learn that you love your mirror because it is the sweetest of all the liars and the most innocent of all the sinners.

And lastly, you will have to accept how your scars are yet not dead and they still need love, regardless of how that silvered glass makes you believe otherwise.
——
You fretted and you still fear that moment of truth, so much so that it has been an eternity since you last stared down your own eyes. 

Now, you have forgotten their mystical shape, and it takes you a minute before you can remember the hue that danced in them.

You feel estranged; you feel endangered, from the very own treasure of your heart.

But, my love, I can’t sing it enough;
I can’t sing it enough…how direly you need to step forth on this path of serene oblivion.
Beyond the doom, has forever lain, a rose drenched dawn; the day you begin to love again… waiting for you, to dance under its skies!

 

You will heal…

Glass boxes don’t sing lore to the warriors of freedom when the skies fall and the waters rise. But, skies don’t fall and waters don’t rise in vain; they sob in vile.

There are a number of things that may conjure disdain into this world, but no other blade yearns to be struck with thunder as much as the one sitting on the hilt of heartbreaks.

Sword hilts, I believe, are haunted; rather cursed.

They hold power, enough to crown a head; they hold sin, enough to behead a crown. The hands which happen to hold these swords may either bring freedom or threaten it; regardless, blood is shed and scars are left to taint hearts for ages to come.

Ages; since ages, men have been driven to worship their own strength in the name of blind pride;
and pride, though may seem like a forbidden ally to the sung masters, is nothing but a thirst;

A deep unquenchable thirst sitting at the edge of our tongues, making us blurt rage and breathe revenge.
Pride is nothing but a cry for help; a veil hiding our scars ever so elegantly.

But veils fall and masks rot in due time; what is hidden can’t be hidden forever.

One day, you will see, you will see for yourself.
When the skin on your bones will feel too plastic to be alive and the heart in your chest will feel too alive to have gone dead.
When what’s whole will seem broken and what’s broken will feel safe.

Then.. you will hear, you will hear for yourself.

You will hear how beautifully you may have chanted the prayers of freedom if you wouldn’t have dug graves for your own tongue.
You will smile at your flaws and you will kiss your own scars.
You will sing in the chorus of joy and pray for peace in the choir of blatant hatred.

And when that day arrives… You will heal!

Hiraeth

Water flows through creeks and crevices of withered mountains when it rains over their pride ridden heads.
Heads, as they say, are meant to be held high; necks, as we have seen, break under the curse of ego sometimes.

In the end, if you don’t step over this grandeur and pay courtesy to love, a weak neck will make you fall into it someday.

Such are the tales of love gone rogue.
Such are the tales of life.

—
In life, we wander; we walk through the fields, we smile through the hearts, we fly through the skies and we swim through the waters; regardless, we wander.

Our skin hides behind rags; we sleep on dirt, under the dirt. We wash faces with the stream of our own tears, we feed on abandoned hearts and we gather memories; hand-picking charms and feathers on our way to nowhere.

—
Nowhere… is a place. An empty void, hanging somewhere in the middle of the air. It has walls, they are dark; so dark that they surpass the physical possibilities of darkness; so dark that they are mere shadows.

Nowhere… is a halt. A refuge away from the dank fluidity into the deserted narrow lanes of random oil strokes; the strokes are sharp; they stab sometimes and you may fall, but you will fall into nothing but comfort.

—
Journeys are like stories, and your footprints are like splattered ink, left behind by a broken nib. The writer, though, is fate; and it’s no less of a clown who knows magic.

You are the reader, more of a dazed one. You follow the plot, and by each passing metaphor, you age.
But… it is not before the evening that you begin to see your clown’s folly.

It is not before the evening that you have read these metaphors well enough to spot when they repeat.

By the night, though, all of it makes sense to you-
You were going around in circles.

You were running around like a lost child, looking for her mother.
Alas, you would only find yourself at the same place at the end of each hour.

Why?
Because… that place, in the middle of this huge endless crowd, was the last place where this world felt safe to you.

That was the last time when you held your mother’s hand, and each time you get closer to this tiny piece of land, the feeling of ‘being home’ washes all your exhaustion away.

But… Do you ever reach home?
No!

Hiraeth brings along a sense of unquenchable insanity, and you have no choice but to drown!

“Hiraeth- a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past”

clichés.

It is a fresh sunny day. You are strolling on this narrow street beside a park, listening to children giggling, riding high on their summer spirits.
The grass is tender. It is like a newborn baby that just made its way out of its mother’s womb; too scared to face the world, but too pure to feel the fear.
It is the peak of June. You are at the noon of your life, and if you were to paint this scene on a vacant white canvas, you would call your painting nothing but ‘Nostalgia’.

I am a poet, and I have been writing for as long as I can remember. Through my rendezvous with the tunes of Mozart and the legends of Shakespeare, I have found art, but not so much so as I have found ‘homes’.

Homes of all kinds and virtues. Some were simple; naked bricks on the outside and stained whites in their hearts. Others, though, were grand; they poured charm with their stature only to lure people into the shenanigans of their discomfort.

Regardless of what I say, these were ‘homes’. More so, these were the voids that were ‘once homes’. They were the clichés which we often find scattered like loose glitter; metaphors that decorate our poems.
Their residents left them to mother sentiments in the due course of history; what happened was just that!

Humans, of all things, have always been fascinated by clichés.
Why?
Because clichés make us feel safe. They take us back to a world that was once our concrete paradise a few heartaches ago.

People often denounce poetry to sing lore for the clichés; they call out poets to be lazy and frugal.
But there’s a lot that the world fails to understand about poetry.
There is no poem half as beautiful as the one woven by our memories. There is no metaphor half as endearing as nostalgia.
Clichés don’t need a poet’s pen to flow through a poem; they are exquisite poems all by themselves.

my childhood speaks in these scars.

Trigger Warning: Child Abuse

A few days ago,
My lover had my hands in his;
I loved the way his eyes sparkled
And his lips curved into a stunning smile,
As he brushed his fingers
At the back of my palm

There we were,
Living the blissful moments of
Our once-in-a-lifetime romance;
But then,
All my metaphors came down crashing
Falling into a white scar,
Leaving my poetry naked

He dug deep into my eyes,
With an unsaid question
And all my charm
Went splurging into tears

–

I was seven
When one of my uncles
Burnt my hand
With a scorching hot iron

I still remember how it felt
Having my skin stuck to that piece of metal,
And then,
Later
How it broke my heart
Into a thousand tiny pieces,
Looking at those tiny boils

I froze;
Didn’t scream at all;
Not even a cry for help

It felt like all my sentences
Had strangled my tongue
Into a paralyzed piece of flesh;
Unworthy
And too coward
To move

I looked at my hand,
And then I looked back at him;
With eyes as empty as a black hole

He was smiling;
A very crooked smile;
One that sent chills down my spine

I took a few steps back
And ran out of the room
Only to be followed by a mocking smirk

–

I have it all
Still alive
Still breathing in my head

Just as vivid
As a thing of yesterday;
Just as stale
As rotten bread

–

I whimpered as I cried
Coiled up in my lover’s arms;
All I wanted
Was for him to hear
My childhood speaking in those scars //

Cages…

Our history has known cages;
Of all kinds and characters.
The one with bars of gold
And the others with floors of dirt.
The ones which held the innocent
And the others which freed the ghouls.

But not very often,
When you walk through the pages
Of your own history,
You land up
Imprisoned.

Imprisoned behind the walls of
Some doomed silvered glasses.
Imprisoned to a cage of mirrors.
Imprisoned to yourself.

Up until this moment,
The clock hands never echoed louder.
Up until this moment,
The questions never sent shivers down your spine.

The clock now,
Is running on a timeless retreat.
The questions now,
Come for YOU,
From yourself.

Who are you?
Why are you?
Where are you?

You run to the mirrors,
Banging at each one of them,
Hoping to
Either knock the glass out
Or make your hand bleed the answers.

None happens.
Nothing shatters.
Nothing bleeds.
All fall silent.

Then,
You begin
To hear
Clearer than ever.

You begin to hear your soul hum,
As faint as a whisper,
But as clear as a woman weeping
On a dark moonless night.

Your soul hums to you,
How
You
Are a handful of Earth;
Fertile, magical,
Yet forgotten.

You
Are a waterfall;
You fall down
The damp rotten roof
Of an old cave
Standing right in the middle of an enchanted forest.

You
Are a gentle breeze,
Flowing through an Orphan’s hair
On nights when he misses having a Mother.

You
Are a ball of fire
Burning inside an old lantern
Lighting up someone’s dark world.

You
Are the limit of the skies;
Unknown!

You are a poem
With all the five elements
Entwined in your heart.

So,
When next time
The world asks you
To introduce yourself
Tell them;
“I am life”

i have felt alone.

Often, in life, you spend your lazy Sunday afternoons staring at the ceiling and missing… Someone. Something. Everything.
These are the times when you can’t help but fall down an abyss of old and dusted picture albums. The pages turn so fast that this show seems like an unending retro movie titled, “All the times you failed to live a smile”.
Scenes are hazy, you can’t remember those faces anymore, and the dialogues sound like a violin instrumental being played on a grotesque gramophone.
What’s not strange though, is the fact that you get to waltz down an alley of broken photo frames every time the violin begins to play.
And, why is that not strange?
Because that’s your home.
Because, out of every and any name given to a home, ‘strange’ has never been one.
That alley, oh dear… that’s your home. You moved out of your dreamy castle a few years ago.
There, the linens used to rub against your skin; they used to peel it off like a coarse sandpaper, and you have never liked to keep your bones naked.
There, you felt alone.
As alone as a smiling corpse lying in its coffin, deep under the Earth, waiting for death gods to take it away.
You felt alone, and anxious… without the gloom.
So, you ran down the stairs and moved into this alley.
Here, the ceilings weep,
and you wander around in a drenched silk gown;
But, you are at peace,
and never alone.
But… Is that the way to be?