I saw my skin as clouds of creme in coffee,
As the caramel within a toffee,
As the swirls of detergent in a bucket,
I love my skin, I remind myself lest I forget.

I saw it as an imperfectly mixed pasta,
As an unstirred Irish creme liqueur,
It reminds me of the side of me that’s a gangsta,
Like the work of a passionate newbie restaurateur.

It is mine, my own
No different than my blood or my bone.
I don’t need to alter it,
Let the others adjust as they see fit.

It took me quite a while,
But my skin too began to smile.
The efforts of a village it took,
So, lest you forget, love the way you look!

There once was a family of clouds,
Blue were their noses and blue were their shrouds.
Amongst them lived 3 outcasts, though
As though through the blue, someone had brazenly run a plough!

Blotchy, whitey and marbly let’s call them,
Of the big blue sky, they were the beautifully botched hem.
The smurfy blues didn’t think so, alas!
And neither did the the puppets on the ground, peeping through the looking glass.

Rain was their saviour,
For amidst those tears, no one would notice their stark behaviour.
The smurfy blues covered them up,
Lest someone see their erroneous turf.

Then shone the sun one fine day,
And like rising phoenixes, the castaways came out to play.
For a thing such as beauty, ever so fickle
They were a miraculous honey-hued trickle.

The puppets on the ground too swapped their loyalties,
And soon the alleged drops of milk were favoured royalties.
The sky too embraced the cotton-ous hue amidst the smurfy blue,
And just like that, their fairytale slowly came true.

If loneliness were a drug, may I never overdose,
If solitude were a dream, may I soon wake up.
I long to find my ‘I open at the close’,
If only in the social sphere, I could find my luck.

I thought I was an introvert, and maybe I am
I too need companionship though, and not just my fam.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re my closest friends,
Although, I too need someone who’d take me with them to run errands.

I see people in my age group having fun,
In that moment, I’m lonelier than the sun.
If intimacy were the limit, may I pierce the sky,
Heart filled with loneliness, may you never die.

We yearn for companionship, but can’t force friendships,
Who said I needed what costal cartilages are to the ribs?
Someone to spend a day off with is all I seek,
I want nothing more than to end this monotonous streak.

Oh to be awoken by the sun and not an alarm,
To be surrounded not by robotic schedules, but by oceanic calm,
To go to bed without counting the hours of sleep I’d get,
To have the option to watch every single sunset.

Oh to be fuelled into a deep sleep by stories etched on dead trees,
To remember the cause of every single book crease.
Oh to be free from viciously scrolling reels - All day. All night.
To catch a break from our screens and actually enjoy natural light.

To eat when I’m hungry and not just when I have time between classes,
To drink water, to ***, to rest when my body wants to, and not just go along with the
masses.
I want to be what I know I cannot.
And yet, more than anything, I want to BE.

To BE is to read with no pressure.
To BE is to experience true leisure.
To BE is to look at the night sky and have the stars look back at you.
To BE is to fall asleep under that very sky and be awoken by a bird’s coo.

Amidst AI and robots and technology and the swarm of 21st century ‘Super Brains’,
When did we lose control of our own lives’ reins?
In the war for the title of ‘Smartest BEings’,
We simply forgot to BE.

Someone once said,
When death finds you, may it find you alive,
How brainwashed are we, with the conspiracies we’ve been fed,
That we end up making both partners and enemies out of time, all through our life?

From the first alarm you snooze,
To the one you set while gulping down the *****.
From that half-hearted morning grwm,
To with every chime, wanting nothing more than to flee.

We used to read once, remember?
Cant even hold a book the right way up now, through its dying embers.
How desperately we wanted to grow up,
If only we knew how much it would ****.

We wanted independence, though
To do things in our own time,
Yet here we are, mere extras in the puppet show
Grinding our bones raw, just to earn a dime.

With the never-ending turmoil that is adult life,
With the vicious cycle of cancelled plans and meet-ups,
When death finds you, may it find you alive
And save you from the prison of ‘I don’t give a ****’.

In the peak summer season, on a bright blue morning,
I saw 2 worlds as I travelled to my calling.
I saw a man sitting dehydrated in front of the sparkling blue lake,
And a man defecating right beside the cow dung cake.

I saw an ambulance sitting idly by,
And a son driving his sick father, unable to let out a cry.
I saw a girl with her head out the sunroof, enjoying the cool summer breeze,
And a little kid trying to hold down his kaccha house, down on the ground scraping his knees.

I saw a woman tending to the roadside hedge,
And another throwing an empty bottle at its edge.
I saw a bungalow’s water tank leaking,
And a man straining gutter water that was positively reeking.

I saw 2 worlds,
One with a necklace of stones and one made of pearls.
Under that same bright blue sky,
I saw 2 worlds - one that waited to be buried and one that longed to fly.

I used to read so much, people thought I was a bore,
Over the years, their words became true and reading became a chore.
The sacred feel of reading I don’t recall,
I lost my one true love and now there’s nothing to break my fall.

Bags under my eyes would mean a late night date with a paperback,
The old me might never return, even if life cuts me some slack.
“I am a voracious reader” used to be my favourite line,
A sad, stable career over the love of my life seems like a pretty hefty fine.

CRYING, BAWLING, LAUGHING, LOVING, HATING,
There was always a pure emotion waiting.
Life struck as unexpectedly as a fable,
And now even crying requires a time table.

Those stolen glances at the pages while your mom called you down for food,
Reading was never an activity based off of mood!
A book and a bookworm - a bond as close as old monk and ***,
Why then, have we grown farther apart than the moon and the sun?