Paper

All these people.

So much love. So much subconscious fear, that I might die without having shared enough of my thoughts with the external, that this unique experience of having been ME, that all the words that swim frantically through my thoughtstream, would curl and wisp away in the fire of my pyre.

This irrepressible need to express. To live. To love.

So I share with people I love. Pour myself into them. And urge them to pour into me, and bind, and be bound. I spread myself in all these pretty, pretty people, who I call friends.

...

And you. I wanted a partner, one person I could do all my pourings into, optimize this process of exhibition. I started defining the experience of reality through sentences that I constructed in the smithy of my mind, and gift-wrapped them for you; I occasionally sent them to you in summer night conversations, and texts sent in the dead of night under the influence of exhaustion.

But this exclusivity is dangerous. If only you were a boy...

And we fell. 

...

And now we dance again, slightly older, slightly wiser. And the old smithy of the mind is whirring up its machinery again, softly humming your name in interstices between family and friends and work.

...

I am so exhausted from this pouring. I don't have time, I'm ruining myself, I'm spreading myself too thin.

But you're all so interesting. I love you all.

So do I pour myself in all of you? I would die from the effort. Oh, if only there was one who could be a placeholder for my experience of reality. If I had one, I wouldn't need all.

...

Or perhaps this whole idea is flawed. Why should I define my life in sentences wrought for someone?
But then who do I talk to?

A piece of paper.

But paper doesn't talk back. I cannot love cellulose pulp. And it cannot love me back.

...

Go lightly.

Perhaps I should not want to love so much. Perhaps I should stop thinking about this process. Perhaps I need to learn detachment. Happiness surely has something to do with !thinking.

...

I need to learn detachment.

...

Hello paper my old friend. I've come to talk with you again.

The Old And The New

दुनियाँ जो प्यासा रखे, तो मदिरा प्यास बुझाये 
मदिरा जो प्यास लगाये, उसे कौन बुझाये?

This Shirazi wine, quenches the thirst that the world ignites, but
the thirst that this wine ignites, who will quench that?

...

हम हैं कि हम नहीं?

Are we, or are we not?
You told me once, but I forgot.

...

Ah, Bollywood. Imparting poetry to the emotions of a billion hearts.

Patterns (#personal)

Everyone out.

Raqs

"Dance so that all of me dances with you
See, by experience, who gets tired first, I or you
You and I are a boat just facing a storm, dance
Imagine I am drowning and the ocean is you
What happening sweeter than this?

For me, who has no escape, except for you
You'll become blue and calm tomorrow
And the island is so beautiful, and tomorrow you
You being moored besides the quay and I
Ask you what you did, what did you do
That I, who didn't dance to the song of destiny
How danced without withholding with you, only you."

- Amineh Daryanavard (translated by Niloofar)

Doost

"I'm back."

And just like that my structures and my heart go out of the window.

...

Go gentle into that good night.

We need to learn, doost-e-aziz.
We need to learn patience.
I need to learn to temper my greed for you.

We need to learn of lightness.

I want to consume you whole, fuse the pulsing energy that burns in our cores, be a scream ripped from my teeth by the ferocity of my affection, that you can hang, bloody, on your bedroom wall...

We need to learn of lightness.

...

Amar shonar maturity.

...

"I've missed you."
I've missed you.

Young

At what point did we become young?

When did we start
Meeting in cafés and restaurants
And bedrooms and for brunches
With mutual friends?

When did we outgrow our mothers
And our fathers, and start
Having our own silences?

The young all suffer
From a generational
Imposter's syndrome.

And we pretend to maturity
And adulthood, with
Our poetry and apartments,
And we cry when our hearts
Are incapable of feeling any much more.

What do you know?

What do you know?

Of early mornings spent
Paralyzed at dutiful desks
Unable to move, to think,
Overwhelmed by this unbound liquid
That collected and expanded
Without an end in mind, existing
For its own sake,
In the well of my chest, demanding
Screaming, to be felt, to be felt, to be felt.

To be given, to be poured
On someone, on something
Anything, (and yet nothing was worthy enough).

What do you know of that terrible yearning
That inarticulate hunger
For subsumption, of being consumed,
That would shatter my breast if I but
Gave it
Half a dozen inches.

What do you know?
Safe in that remote icy corner
That you carved one night in your heart,
What would you know?

...

I'm not even angry. I'm just curious.
Do you know?

Hayat

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

...

I want to rip
your softly pulsating loneliness from
your breast.

Consume it whole.

Creep in the holes
of your tightly-knit skin
and inject the universe of
my red-shifted affection
into the pools of
your quiet days.

...

Happy Birthday, Hayat. You deserve the world.

Aabi

Say lah! We.

...

My eyes had ants in them
from exhaustion, when you kissed me.
And we spent the hesitant night
painting a lonely stairwell
Blood red.

...

"Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. 
All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red."

...

Your face is now an entirely divorced dream
I keep in an envelope, and it's interesting:
in your absence, I have fallen in abject love
with the extreme aestheticism of
the corners of your mouth.

What a funny love. A love that began last night
when I happened upon a photograph of you - when
your face hit me, and settled
somewhere in the pit of my stomach -
and a love without an end.

A love that can but meet with hate and pain,
but a love that I cannot help.
I do not want to help.

...

Urdu?
Tabeez bana ke pehne tujhe.

...

I am done being strong.
If I can but ever be in love with an idea, so be it.

Bearable Lightness

I see him
diffuse into
you.
I see you
beautifully stretching to the limit of what it means to be
you.

Your affection floats like foam
and this simple frothiness becomes you;

...

Your innate heaviness goes well
with his 
helium love.