I Want To See Your Eyes

I want to see your eyes.

I need to give a name to the irises that have haunted me from

scrounged poetry and forgotten words.

 

When I read, it reminds me of you;

a silhouette belonging to a soul I have never had

the pain of meeting. You are there

when I'm up at three in the morning, scrolling through the poets

who write with such lovely agony. And for once,

I'm looking forward to getting drunk on yours.

Chaos, scars; I can trace them along the

backs of my hands, in my memories.

They remind me that someone can love them for what

they are; dust smattered divinity forgotten in shambling basements, decrepit crypts.

But, unlike most who search for their treasures in their grandmothers’ attics,

I will wait for you.

Long before you, I chased lovers with my words, too blinded to see that

they never actually started the conversation.

So, I will wait for you.

You are not mine to find,

but for both of us to chance upon.

And oh, how beautifully we will destroy ourselves with

teasing touches and words of war. How else would we love the bleeding hearts we hold?

 

I have loved you from the broken hearts of poetry and

nightingales on rose-thorns, pieced my future from

the shattered shards of the end you would be for me.

I will wait for the eyes that have haunted me. I will build myself to

match the destruction you are and give you everything I am in return.

 

I want to see your eyes.

 

All I ask is that you recognize mine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Disruptive Mirror: Reclaiming Female Desire in "The Mirror"

In the male-gazed world of Indian cinema, female desire has long been a radical disruption -  acknowledged yet swiftly punished, fetishized yet contained. Konkona Sen Sharma's “The Mirror '' from the Lust Stories 2 anthology subverts this trope, unflinchingly holding up a mirror to the complexities of female sexuality. Through masterful visuals and searing performances by Amruta Subhash and Tillotama Shome, the short film demands that we not just glance but stare - at the raw yearning, the unabashed kink, the unapologetic claiming of pleasure. Right from the opening frames, "The Mirror" establishes the centrality of the female gaze. The first erotic encounter is staged not as a salacious reveal but an awkward stumbling - one woman catching another in a profound moment of intimacy neither are able to articulate. One woman keeping a secret the other doesn’t know. The fact that Ishita continues to watch Seema and her husband without their knowledge after catching the...
Read more

Apocalyptic Urbanscapes: Gigi Scaria's Multimedia Visions of Displacement, Ecological Devastation and Reimagined Habitats

 Gigi Scaria is an acclaimed Indian artist whose multidisciplinary practice has spanned a diverse range of mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video art over the past two decades. While his early career began with representational painting, Scaria quickly gravitated towards an experimental approach that allowed him to transcend the boundaries of individual artistic disciplines. At the core of Scaria's artistic explorations are profound inquiries into the phenomena of urbanisation, migration, displacement and more recently, the environmental crisis. Drawing inspiration from his own experiences of moving from a small village in Kerala to the bustling metropolis of Delhi, Scaria's works interrogate the intended and unintended consequences of rapid urban development. His oeuvre provides searing artistic commentary on the alienation, chaos and rigid social hierarchies that arise from unchecked expansion of Indian cities driven by policies prioritisin...
Read more

A Critical Background of "A Broken Sword"

Image
"A Broken Sword" is a collection of my writings which I transformed into my thesis for my Creative Writing Minor at Ashoka University, Sonipat. This essay explores why I wrote it, and the technical and artistic choices I have made in the thesis. You can find a PDF to the thesis linked below. A Broken Sword by Aryaman Kakkar (2023) I have been writing poetry since I was 11 years old. It started out as a way to deal with the separation from home, as I had gotten admission into a boarding school at the time. I started out like most kids, with rhyming poetry. Wrote some twenty-something poems over the course of two years. Until I was introduced to Spoken Word poetry through Shane Koyzcan's “To This Day”. It was in 8th Grade, in Ms. Priya Chauhan's English class, when she projected the YouTube video performance in a dark classroom and everything changed for me. Fortunately, around the same time, a new teacher joined school. Ms Malvika Kala was a teacher of German, having c...
Read more

Watch it Bloom

Watch it bloom. Lilies in the palms of your hands, their scent sickeningly sweet. You remember the slightest whiff could kill cats and they wilt, crumbling, falling, settling.    Orchids encircle your forearms, double helix thrones for the raat ki raanis that bud in the spaces between, where the finger meets the palm, meets the wrist, the orchids, the vines, the branches here. Breathe. Feel the winds of the oncoming monsoon storm here. Remember? The way the wind pushes your hand and you're flooded with the memories of all the times you did this before. The glee of an unsullied childhood, we didn't know so much about the world before.  Would we have noticed the heat then? How the rain comes quicker now, the summer blaze setting fire to everywhere, everything.  Breathe. Feel the wind holding your hand. Ventus meets flower meets epidermis, blood, bone. How it seeps deep into your being. The chill melding with the heat of life, clashing, waltzing.  Tornadoes happen...
Read more

It isn’t polite

  My mother grew up with silent tongues in a house she still divides between the in-laws and her own.  Brilliant, her words are the gales before a monsoon storm, what flight truly is: joyous. I am terrified of  becoming like you, who hides different versions of the same whole. How much longer than 21 years do  you need? It is not a home if you still feel the need to call it the kitchen ‘hers’ and not your own. These  silences teach me that sometimes joining them means beating yourself into submission, derelict and  wasted in your mind. This fear, this anger that you see comes from fear, mother. Terror that one day I will  be silent too long, and before long, I won't be the only one the beating myself up. It is a cruel irony of  sorts: my mother who never speaks at all, my father to roars his rage with every drive of his phone, his  free hand swords cutting down enemies in his path. You'd be surprised by the number of times I say  ‘hypocr...
Read more