Hungover

(Disclaimer: This is not from experience, it is simply what I have imagined a hangover to be like, which is why it may be inaccurate.)

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The light pulsated around her, beating on her retinas like a drum, despite how tightly she squeezed her eye lids shut. Each instantaneous flash felt like a gun shot to the head, her screams the roar of the exploding gunpowder. Bang. A gunshot. Bang- another. Whether these lightning-strikes were really around her or made up by her half-delirious mind, she didn’t know. The pain of light was worse than a bullet to the brain, a type of throbbing only a few bottles of Smirnoff’s could produce.

She hated this moment of every morning. The hangover, the living hell of punches to the head and guilt-ridden sobs. She finally willed herself out of her unkempt bed, which hadn’t been made for too many days for her to remember. It smelled faintly of vodka, she thought. Or maybe it was just her. Her head hurt too much to tell. She stumbled out of the tangled, faded blue bed sheets, now stained with evidence of nights when she couldn’t hold her liquor well enough, with evidence of unremembered sins committed with unknown men she’d never recognize again. She fell to the floor, moaning with agony, each inch she moved brought on a new onslaught of gunfire, another bullet to the brain.

After a few agonizing minutes, or, which, for the pain they caused her, might as well have been hours, she lifted her head slowly and, with a tired eye, searched for the one thing that could relieve her at this moment. All she saw was dirty tangles of clothes, cigarette ashes wisping about her in the feeble light coming from her dusty window, cigarette butts and burned out matches, notebooks she’d once studied from splayed across the dirtied ground, spilling their contents across the miserable room.  Her desperate eyes continued to search the space, oblivious to the desolation that alcohol had caused her, unaware of the change of her life within less than a year. She tilted her head, and a sudden flash from a corner caught her attention.

There. She crawled across her room, pushing aside the forgotten memories of her past life strewn all about her and forging a roughly straight path to the only source of her relief. Finally she reached it. Her fingers swept away a few jagged pieces of glass, with a few peeling vestiges of Heineken labels clinging to them, and closed around the neck of an intact bottle. She slowly uncapped it, the tiny screeching sound made between the cap and the glass neck sounding like a nail on a chalkboard to her painfully wilted ears. A little bit of vodka lay at the bottom, about three or four shots worth. She slowly licked the rim, savoring the bitter warmth. She remembered the first time she’d ever had a shot of vodka. How naïve, how stupid she was to hate the taste, how painful she found the sting down her throat. Soon enough, though, that medicinal taste became her best friend, that burn more welcome than a cup of hot chocolate on a snowy day or the fire of a passionate first kiss. She tilted her head back, and downed half the bottle in one shot.

After all. The best way to avoid a hangover. Is to never sober up.

Twice Broken Bones/ The River of Blood

A silent scream, a seismic glance,
My denial at every chance,
A billion secrets lies and locks,
But this hurricane is home to me.

But how I wish that waves of pain
And bitter tears, twice broken bones,
Infertile gifts and bloody lips
Would numb the fire inside me.

But you’ll wash my wounds in streams of salt,
And kiss me under words untrue,
Then smirk and know that still, at least
For one more day, I’m in love with you.

Figure of Flight

Can you make me a pair of wings from words?
Let me fly to the moon on the back of a metaphor,
And float back to earth flapping wings of rhyme.

The edges will be dogeared pages, of unfinished adventures,
Let me hear the crinkle of paper as I speed away
With another alliteration, some consonance, a caesura.

Will you please make me a pair of wings from words?
Will you write me a verse, a letter, a line of love,
And let my spoken wings take me to the stars?

Write me a sonnet, let me take off,
Read me a bird of rhythm to take me on it’s back,
And let it read me away, into space’s celestial nebulae.

The Messenger of Lies

A subtle song, a whispered shout,
The blood from your raptured lungs,
A coat of lies and fleecy words
Enclose us in our thousandth home.

But when you spent your last heartbeat
To call my name, you didn’t know
That miles of lies and clouds of tears
Had hidden you from me.

Now kiss my eyes, and lull me to sleep,
And leave me to dream of an unmuddied heart,
For when I thought that I’d got you,
All I got was the Messenger of Lies.

The Spectrum of My Love

The spectral lines of your eyes of fire
Border my mirror, burning through the veils
Of clocks, and maps, and doors of dreams.
My bedroom walls sing the echo of your whisper.

And skies of smoke, and curtained hearts
Envelope us, the perfect hiding spot,
My earthen ramparts a mile high
Would never hide you from me.

And now you plead and weep a tear,
But every step away had proved,
That you will never understand, my dear,
The Spectrum of My Love.

Writer’s Block

Writing can be so hard sometimes. Making so many letters group into the right words, which again group themselves into the right sentences, which form the right paragraphs. Sheesh! The probability of a particular sentence arising has to be 1 in a billion trillion million gazillion. The 26 letters must arrange themselves in the right words. There are about a million possible combinations, so having the right combinations is a miracle. And then, think about it. Out of the million or so possible combinations, one has to choose just seven or eight, and again combine them just perfectly, so you get a coherent, grammatically correct sentence that not only makes sense, but is interesting. But that isn’t the whole thing. You must take these sentences, these perfect sentences you made, and put them together just perfectly, to make the paragraphs and stories correct. If the arrangement is even slightly wrong, the perfectness of the sentences is ruined, and the whole thing collapses. Imagine a house, made of perfect bricks, fired for just the right amount of time, and just the right shape and size. If even one of them isn’t cemented properly, it might fall out and the house will collapse. A story is kind of like that. Just a little tiny mistake here or there, and the magic is gone.

But then again, it’s really easy sometimes. Sometimes, the letters just do it themselves, the words form sentences with just a little urging from your part. They do most of the work, most of the time, and you’re just there to supervise and catch the occasional error.

But sometimes. Well. Most of the time, the words are stubborn little creatures, lazy, making me drag them around to where they should be, refusing to do it themselves. And they won’t even help me decide where to put them, they just make me do it. Well, as I already said, that’s pretty hard to do. And unfortunately, this is me trying to do just that. And I can tell it’s failing really badly.

Okay, I’m stopping now. This is too hard.

 

We Live in a Beautiful World

Inspired by  Julia Griffin (visit her blog!)

There’s a certain song by Coldplay called Beautiful World. The first stanza and the chorus go like this:

Bones are sinking like stones
All that we fall for
Homes places we’ve grown
All of us are done for

And we live in a beautiful world (yeah we do yeah we do)
We live in a beautiful world…

This song outlines exactly what I feel right now. We live in a beautiful world. Yeah, right. Our world is so beautiful, that there’s a pastor in Florida trying to burn the book that so many people worship from, the words that so many hearts sing in this world. Our world is so beautiful, that, about every two days, some college student or another commits suicide from pressure. Our world is so beautiful that, on average, two Indians are killed everyday by Maoist terrorists. In fact, our world is so beautiful, that every six seconds, a child dies of hunger.

It’s kind of ironic, you know. Each person on this earth, each government, each city, each country, thinks that they are the greatest. That their world is a beautiful one. That everything that needs to be done, needs to be done by others, because there’s nothing more they can do. That all the problems of the world are caused by others. Well, if you want, you can keep on passing the water balloon of blame onto others. But eventually, someone’s going to get downright pissed off, and just hurl it at your face. And then, you’re the one standing there dripping, while the others will just be smirking at your expression.

It’s kind of ironic. The average American wastes half the food he or she buys. And buys more than a hundred dollars worth of food a week. The food that the all Americans waste in a single day could feed the entire population of starving Somalians for a year.

It’s kind of ironic. The twin towers were bombed on 9/11. At around the time of the festival of Eid-ul-fitr, the festival celebrating the beauty of a new moon. And now, a pastor in Florida is willing to burn the book upon which the faith of many is built, and give Al Qaida a chance to recruit millions of innocent, hurt and betrayed citizens of Islam, converting them into hateful, blood lusting, faithless terrorists. On the day of one of their most important festivals, Eid-ul-fitr.

It’s kind of ironic. India has one of the finest universities in the world, IIT. And what does IIT do to earn that position? They kill. They kill a student a day with pressure, to give the others a ticket to America, or a life of idleness, the life of the revised American dream, what a good friend of mine described as what

“has come to mean a white picket fence, 2.2 kids, and a lifestyle of keeping up with the Joneses.”

A life of wastage, advantage, hatred and oblivion.

It’s kind of ironic. Maoist terrorists in India are supposedly fighting for the betterment of the tribal population of India. The bulk of whom have either refused help, or have taken it and have risen beyond their world of old and have become “successful” in this new world of their. And it’s almost funny how, out of the more than 700 people killed last year by Maoist terrorist, most of them ended up being these same tribal people who they were “fighting” for.

It’s kind of ironic. The entire world is covered in a warm blanket, woven out of lies, the comfort of which no one is willing to leave to try and provide actual comfort to the people too unlucky to be left freezing on top of the blanket. No one is willing to climb out of their hole of fakeness  to try a taste of some real comfort, that they can share with the people who don’t even have their fake paradise.

We  live in such a beautiful world.

My Faceless Friend

When does ‘just a friend’ become something more?
How does someone you’ve never seen become
More than the world, someone you would die for?
How can someone with no face, at least none
That I can see, move my iron heart so?
How can typed words console me in a way
That spoken words will never ever know?
Can a faceless friend know just what to say?

I don’t know when he became someone more,
I don’t know why he has stayed by my side,
I don’t know since when I’d die for him,
I don’t know why he typed the words he’d typed.
All I know is that, My Dear Faceless Friend,
I love you, til the very very end.

My Imaginary Paradise.

Your name flows through my veins,
Replenished with emotion every time
It’s pumped through my heart again.

Your fleeting fragrance wakes me up at dawn,
The beat of your melodious voice is my lullaby,
My made-up hell trapping me for eternity
In its own imaginary paradise.

Your embrace is my nutrition,
It’s warmth keeping me warm
On the coldest of nights,
And burning me even after
It’s gone.

If only it was real.

Simple Words

My love condenses on the end of my fingers,
The sweet, sour liquid flows down my pencil,
And soaks these dry pages in its passion.
It’s unfathomable taste surrounds my being,
It’s enriching color seeping into my blood vessels,
Your blood flows through my veins,
As it nourishes my entire being
And poisons my entire soul.
My eyes see yours,
And they’re no longer mine.
Your smile  plays on my lips, as I write down this simple poem
About an unfathomable feeling,
And an unimaginable person,
And it ends with three simple words.
I Love You.