Blue, Pink, Grey

Blue, Pink, Grey

The strangest thing I’ve seen her do is build a sky on her own. She took a piece of paper and a blue crayon and started coloring from the top left. She colored diagonally, and when she was half-way through, I thought she’d stop and pick up a different color to finish. The sky’s never all blue. Sometimes a little red seeps in and it can look beautiful and at other times, it’s white, full of clouds, as if it is a clean slate for you to look at and reboot. It blushes pink sometimes because there are so many poets constantly flirting with the sky. And sometimes, the sky sees people for what they are and goes grey.

Artbreak

Artbreak

You say you’re falling in love with me
and that’s why you need to walk away now
before I break your heart into two.
Of course, I’ll break your heart. I’m an extrovert.
That’s what we’re famous for doing.

Keyboard warrior

Keyboard warrior

There are twenty six alphabets
strong enough
to make someone’s day,
or make you fall in love,
maybe even hold destruction by the scruff
of its neck and save the planet.
You can raise toasts, gods, hell
and sing them lullabies.
You can turn humans into life-savers.
There are twenty six alphabets
at the core of every soul.

Self-love or otherwise.

Self-love or otherwise.

Your first attempt at love
teaches you true love.
The ‘I’ve got to make this work’ kind,
the innocent, ‘vanilla is the best’ kind,
the unconditional, ‘always? always.’ kind.
For me, the girl was a reincarnation
of everything I had ever loved.
There were no terms and conditions,
no warnings,
and we didn’t take steps one day at a time.
Our bed was a cosmic sky of fairly dust
and we didn’t need hope.
There were a few fights
here on text messages
there on WhatsApp statuses,
but all was good forever
till one day it wasn’t.

limitless.

limitless.

Someone said to me,
“the sky is just a glass dome
shielding us from a cold world where we
wouldn’t survive
and when it’s dark outside
you can see the snow collected on the sky,”
and there are three things about this snowfall sky
that I have a problem with,
personally, globally, creatively.

One.
I’ve always looked up at the sky
no matter where I am.
I’ve looked up
from grass, sand, rooftops,
even the deathbeds of my friends.
My backdrop keeps changing
but the sky has always been my
go-to repeat binge-watching show.
I draw inspiration from it
and you’re telling me that something
that makes me so strong
also shatters?
I don’t believe that.
If you do that to me,
then my knees will give out
and buckle so bad
you’ll call it an earthquake.

Two.
Humans are so strong,
I am so strong
that I’d survive a god-made apocalypse
made of just broken hope stories
where finding love is like solving
an eleven by infinite-eleven Rubik’s.
The girls I’ve loved
were so brave
that even after breaking down,
they would always stand back up,
heal themselves,
help others,
and love again and again.
The cities I’ve known stand so tall
that sometimes they break through the snowfall sky
and even then,
they never look down
on me or my billion friends.
The gods I’ve loved are so human
and the humans I’ve loved are so god,
that you should trust me when I say,
we would survive anything.

Three.
Maybe I can picture a glass dome and
a weird, cold, unknown world
but I refuse to creatively believe
that if this world is a home that science couldn’t find
then gravity works there the same way.
In that world,
snow goes up,
people fly but want to walk,
and everybody rises in love.
The bad people go further up to hell,
and the good people fall through their soil
and our sky
into human lives.

And so,
I will not believe
that we’re the heart
and the sky is just the ribcage,
no matter how nice that sounds.

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Into stories? – Strip-poetry
Instagram – @myspirals