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Priya Devi Nov 2015
We founded our lust on a smokey addiction
On an amity affliction
On the planes of the world we were yet to ponder

We based our feelings on a mutual agreement
A fleeting arrangement
Of live it don't feel it

We ripped our hearts from our sleeves
And left our clothes on the floor
And consummated a love that would never last

And as soon it left us
We lay stranded,
Tension averted
Replaced with anxiety crawling into our pores


Now we walk past eachother and smile innocently
Small talk and pleasantries
Pretend naively
That it was a one night thing

And that there isn't a hunger in our bellies
A thirst that needs quenching
I want you
But I don't know if you want me
Priya Devi Aug 2015
I lost and found myself that day,
when the world came crashing down.
A time planned for happier endeavours.

It was as if my fate caught up to me like a fever on the coldest of nights and I was left stranded,
bobbing in a sea of uncertainty,
lost in a world familiar,
but unattached to any aesthetic.

My bed became a life boat,
and the floor was riddled with sharks and broken glass,
walls whispered me back to the the darkest corners of my mind and I tried to get out of bed I promise.  

The curtains were pulled on my ruin for days
and I lingered in the kind of sadness you feel you will never recover from.


Now
I sit in the earth
amongst the lungs of the world,  thinking of how we became degenerate beauty queens.
Constantly reverting back to how we moulded our antics from the atmosphere and dirt.
Recovering from watching you brim with adolescence in the city,
marvelling at the women we have become.

Because these are the good old times.

the lightness of living in a world revolving too near a black hole.

learning to live
again.
Priya Devi Apr 2015
I'll find you your answers in the bottoms of your cocktail glasses
The solution to whatever keeps you up all night,
I know the poison that plagues you, you know mine.
I know your words are locked behind jail cell toothy smiles and smokey eyes, I know you don't remember I exist when you're not ******* me.

"Get me drunk",
you say.
As if I'm your favourite bad influence. You love priya pressure like I'm a guilty pleasure...

Like I'll teach you how to stray from pruned paths
and get your hands and knees *****
and how to get stains out of cotton dresses
Like I'll teach you ******* yourself slowly
Like I'll teach you to be the person your mother prayed you would never be
Because you think you like ***, drugs and gold toothed gangsters, you think you'll want to stick with me.

I know this isn't who you really want to be.

I know this isn't who we are.

Our hands may reach for each other or others or paraphernalia or liquid lovers,
but both know we're reaching for some thing further.

Out of reach and out of our time.
Out of the circle that came from a line.
Out of the room when you're out of your mind,

out

out

I need out
Priya Devi Jul 2016
The morning was blue
And the world was endless,
The moon and skies watched from their fiery oblivion
And I sat on a porch drinking lemonade in the sun

The walls were blue
Claustrophobia and comfort
Tumbling into each other
Blurred and slurred
Forced serenity, forced to reminisce the sky
And fairy lights for stars in the dark


His eyes were blue
Filled with wonderlust and the heart beat of a hummingbirds wing
Ethereal sunlight hiding the smirk
Deception and beauty
Satisfied, spoiled and bored

The song was blue
A hopeful sadness too obscure for me to know
Marking the moment
Gathering the seconds among the staves

Those bluest of halcyon moments
Made up the darkest day
Whist the unsuspected turbulence
Lay offshore
As a storm at sea
Priya Devi Apr 2015
I'm trying so hard to forget you

To be angry

To not feel the space between the sheets

To not feel alone

To not notice, suddenly

How empty I feel

And how hard I fell
Priya Devi Apr 2015
The day I got birds tattooed on my hips was the day you inked cages into your wrists  so you could capture me.

Whether you intended to catch me falling off the top of a tower or to drag me to Heidnik's basement

I'll forever be unsure.
Priya Devi Jun 2015
My inability to translate my struggles  past to you in a way in which you will be able to relate them with your first world problems is pulling potholes in our love.

When we originally established that we were from different worlds I fooled myself into believing that this was a matter of race or class,
not an issue of I'm 'too damaged' for you.

The unifying characteristic of people who've felt inexplicable pain is their undying desire to drop anything to help the ones they love.
In times of need, those who have bled are separated from those who have not.
This is our day of reckoning,
whether to forgive you or forget your existence is yet another painful decision I will have to make
in order to bleed for another
In another life
Priya Devi May 2015
While they sit and watch comfortably,
Baltimore burns.

They use dollars as tinder and the starving and hysterical ancient scream of: 'help us', is nothing but black noise to them,

They sit and watch you like ally rats running riot bruising your own city.

Baltimore.

Hear me when I say
You have every right to be angry.

You have the right to want better for yourself
To not be pulled over for the crime of having a nice car and skin that matches the leather
To have a 'black sounding name' and still have a chance in getting a white collar job
To be represented as humans and not savages.  
To be emancipated from the steel eagle claws of the media.
To not be abducted, beaten, publicly shamed or killed by the police.

Baltimore I hear your crying
I feel your pain like 6 'warning' shots to the back.

One day it's MLK.
One day it's Trayvon.
One day it's Freddie.
Executed by the state without a word of repent,
without a snippet of change.
It's been this way for as long as we can remember
and they can't seem to forget that they were never better than you.

There are only men with anger
and then men with authority.

While the rich live in their charm and picket fences, they let the poor decay
in dens and gangs with **** poor education and no chance at all.

I can't offer you arms, but I can offer you heart.

Baltimore;

I feel your pain
But don't be their slaves.

Don't let them turn you into monsters on the streets

Don't let them say: this is what they're like.

Don't let them play chess with your city.

Because this is no more than a game to them.

Don't back down,
Play them back.

Win the freedom and equality you should have been granted in 1863, in 1954, 1960.

Scrap that.

The day you were born.
Priya Devi Mar 2017
You showed me to create life from dirt,
how to hear the Earth's heart beat
and how to devour life in every breath.

Its been a year since I saw you last.

Cold and lifeless on a table.

The reaper was waiting for you to leave us,
waiting in the fake grotesque comfort of a cafeteria
for you to join him again.

You avoided his company for ten years.
Deteriorating slowly.
Laughs fading into the creases of your skin.
He dimmed the lights in your eyes
slowly,
so we could watch.

I remember you in flowers.
And coriander,
and crushed mustard seeds,
and by the mini liquor bottles you collected.

I remember you in car journeys,
and in stories.
In the walls of the house you built
out of blood
sweat
and hustle.

I remember your lessons
and the jokes
and the blue clouds of smoke
that separated us then
and now.

I remember your fables,
the guiltless line of where to go,
and how you showed me to not be afraid of the dark.

I'll carry your fire and perforation,
I'll carry your name and nationality,
I'll carry your pride and persistence,

with everything left in me.
Priya Devi May 2015
First things first
I'd like to apologise

I'm sorry I'm not the good Indian girl I was bred to be
I'm sorry I don't make round rotis
I'm sorry that the tongue I use to speak punjabi is broken and hides in my mouth unused until desperately needed
I'm sorry that I don't cook and clean efficiently enough to be wifey material
Sorry that I love who I love and don't hate who I was told to
Sorry that I can't follow gods blindly and not try to sneak back stage to see their shining gold adornments and blue body paints and multiple arms in full and bare glory and scandal

I'm sorry that I'm actually not sorry for any of this
I'm sorry that these are false and empty apologies

I am unapologetically whole
A human not just a race
A female not a trust fund or business transaction

I filter out the good parts of the culture I'm from and the ones I identify with
I'll wear docs under my saari no apologies
I'll grind on dancefloors and do the best Bhangra dance you'll ever see unashamedly

Hareems and hoodies
Bindies and pin up eyeliner
Hedonism and head in the clouds

My ambition is Ambedkar untouchable
My drive is a salt march surging silently non violently through cities
My hometown pride is built in concrete and rickshaw dust,
Prejudice and Bollywood lust
More of a rant than a poem
Priya Devi Mar 2017
I found myself walking through tea stained sunsets,
Among the less extraordinary,
Through the puddles and shadows of sky scrapers,
And feeling bare.

As if I lay all I had to the world,
As if i were a car boot sale,
And my stock was used up and never replenished.

As if i were tea that was brewed too long
And became too bitter for public consumption.
Thrown
Down the drain
And through the rivers that run beneath the streets.

I found myself with a belly gorged on a litre of reused ideas,
Watching a sped up time lapse shot of the traffic by night on the Spaghetti Junction,
Losing and changing focus,
The silent hum of a city heaving.

As if I’d never seen the city,
As if I’d never lived and breathed it’d dreams,
As if my lungs weren’t full of it’s potential,
As if each time you travel through its kaleidoscope it doesn’t feel like the first time.

And everything that was or could have been was possible in this space,
One million heart beats in union,
Proletariat minds and gold lined pockets.


I found myself on a train to God knows where,
45 minutes of travel and a bagel later,
The other end of the world emerged from underneath a railway bridge,
In the watercoloured city,
The streets that made me,
Industry born and silk bred,
And street lights are at the ends of tunnels guide me,

Home.
Priya Devi Oct 2015
I've found myself
Lying awake at nights
Looking for the stars

But my ceiling is off white
And the lighting isn't great in here.  
And the photos on the wall don't hide
The growing sense of unfamiliarity
Of the place I am now meant to call home

For a year.

There's a hole growing inside me.

I always knew it was there.
It was merely a dot but sometimes it consumed me
But for short periods only
And I found myself with a swollen belly
Unable to birth a growing sense of distaste twinned with despair
And the anxiety is driving me crazy.

Now
it's closer to a black hole

Over due and exhausting.

No man can fill it

No amount of own brand tea
Or *** noodles
Or substances can tame it.

I'm wondering if my wandering through the night
trying to get a quick fix
is getting me anywhere.

Because I search in the wrong places
And I don't look further than the brand of his jacket
Or the size of the baggie.

I keep looking to the sky
To provide me with some kind of guidance
Or a sign

But all I see are stars and pollution.
Dying nebulas
Or the energy saving lightbulbs
On the ceiling of my dorm room.
Priya Devi Apr 2015
I am the cultivations of civilisations and cultures
pulled like skin over a drum across oceans and continents,
An amalgamation of nations,
a mosaic of traits and tricks of the trade and familiar faces and swirling DNA

I am a product of my time,
a member of the wasted youth, existing in the chasm between philosophy and mediocracy, democracy and demolition, truces and the truth

I am a night thinker and a daydreamer, I have flowers in my hair and demons in my heart,
I'm a chain smoker;
a broken individual at best

I'm a money chaser, a risk taker, a pretty little heart breaker, a liberal, a time waster, an anything but what I should be.

I am here and now,
gone by tomorrow,
a hedonist at heart,
rising and falling like a setting sun
Priya Devi Sep 2015
Alumni of 2015
Sit back and allow me to shed some light on life

Because while you were sitting in the back of lecture halls, I was sitting in the bow of a pipe getting a pHD in life.

Your existence has the potential to be nothing to the world.
we are but parasites,
The reality that pamphlets and professors ignore.

The whiplash of our adolescent enlightenment will hit us
and we too will be mere machines to corporate Britain
The tide of the premise you walked against in marches will soon be your every day mundane
9-5
Decent pay
Earn a wage
Live another day

But when we are old and lie in our death beds
Our last breaths will not be wasted on:
'Im so glad I paid off my student debt'
'Im so glad I got a masters in something I never used'
'Im so glad I got a job and married and had kids and a house in the suburbs'
'Im glad I was mediocre'

Our existence,
Minuscule as it may seem  
Will produce shock waves in the atmosphere of tomorrow and 20 years from now.
Our existence is a miracle in the sense that your genetics coded you perfectly,
doubting your own greatness is to refuse to pay homage to the mosaic of DNA that connects us to the earth we were born from.

Failure? Fear not .

We are the generation of **** ups, back wash of a dumbed down society,
Fed narcotic lies of fame and fortune.

Van Gough and Piccasso died vagabonds
Anne frank in torture
Cobain, Gandhi and MLK with a bullet
Hendrix with bile

The greatest die in the most foul ways
And this is how you must strive to end
I beg,
No
I implore you to seek the most outright yet not immediate destruction your perfect heartbeat can manage,
Only then will the  memories you bring to your deathbed be stories worth telling.

They will of course will be tainted by the impure things that you did *
No other experience will suffice
Filth and glory and gore and ***** and endless **** will be your legacy. Calling your side man for a ride home,
Travelling the world with your whole life stuffed messily in your back pack
The men and women who wrote sonnets in your skin with their eyes alone,
Getting a one way ticket to a place you have never been before and watch your gold skin become tinted orange in street lamp sunlight,
Couch surfing and trainhopping your way through consciousness

This will stand as your testimony of existence.

And you will pass on this following message,
Be it to the family and friends you have acquired,
Be it to the nurse who's not paid enough to listen to your ramblings,
Sing it to the grim reaper himself:

You will say:
'This is your enlightenment:

Stop trying to live

And learn to be alive'
Priya Devi Apr 2015
You wrap your arms around your waist as if to silence the doubts and pains in your belly, screaming louder than the creation of the universe.

Your eyes, once alive with the galaxies of far away universes glinting in the blacks of your pupils, seem dulled as if your sun is dulling rapidly.

It seems the rivers of silver running down your arms and legs, cut short and interrupted, have leeked out all the life left in you

I want to take your sense by the scuff of it's neck and tell it to crumble. Crack. Explode.

Scream your sorrows to the skies, the stars will understand, they once too we're young nebulas who imploded but now they guide the wanderers and guard the secrets the night keeps,

So crumble, "this is not your destruction, it is your birth"

I will pick up every piece of you from the cold ground and fix you with molten gold and silver, make you're exterior as precious to me as your soul and mend you forever.

I will soothe you and make you feel as precious as you are to me my little star
Priya Devi Jul 2016
When you learn to live directly under chaos,
To exist on the edge of a perforated sunrise,
To scatter your anger amongst the pebbled eggshells you walk on,
And silence the screams caught in your throat,
You learn that life treats no man or woman with favour.

When your mornings blend with your evenings and daylight become too bright,
When you trust the alignment of the stars over yourself,
When the small flames of doubt play in the back of your mind,
You learn that solace is a myth- there was never a truly and entirely happy man.

When you learn to play the game of survival,
Pretty smiles and well articulated nothings become armour and the world is a battle field
When your arm yourself with everything in your arsenal and emerge screaming battle cries in suburbia
You retreat a wounded and silenced woman
Because this is what the world wants you to be
Do not be what the world wants you to be.
Priya Devi May 2015
We sit in silence
and every once in a while your face changes expression with the train of thought that you have become lost in like a silent pantomime,
or Film Noir at it's finest.

We communicate best in these spaces,
you hear my voice the loudest when I say nothing at all,
when we let the table between us speak and creak bitter apologies for words that tumbled out of our mouths before we had a chance to stop them.

Coexisting passionately,
both alone and together.
Behind smoke walls and bone marrow,
bound by silent spiderweb silk tethers.
Priya Devi Aug 2016
How

Can you say you love me

When you know

I have no reason to live

Other than you.
Priya Devi Aug 2016
You never close doors behind you,

You mind is a watch
A compass
Awash with
beauty and dread
You haunt me in the day
And wear my skin in the night
And flood me
With lust

And you leave me
Adrift
Priya Devi May 2015
Dear girl who dreams of my  manic pixie nightmare

You are the one I never expected to meet
I am the one you have met a million times before

You're the girl obsessed with film craving invasion on television screens, propagandist **** muse, docs and a **** cut
I'm the girl obsessed with ******* and using boundaries as skipping ropes or thread to turn my hair to tapestry

You're Bowie
I'm Hendrix

You like visuals, shapes and sound and pretty cinematography and things I can't understand, your mind is a transcript in calligraphy I can't decipher,
I like books that come in three and getting to the end and not knowing how to live anymore

You're brimming full of hope and dreams and set lighting
I'm disappointment and drowning shame in the bottom of tumblers, spilling the leftovers into quotable dialogue

You're too good for my obscenity to taint, you can't find what you're looking for in me
I'll be your undoing spiralling constantly in a figure 8

You are the manic pixie dream girl we've all been searching for
Priya Devi Jul 2015
She fuelled all my bad habits in the best way possible.

I've never met perfection but she was the closest I ever came to feeling worthy of someone above mediocracy.

She judged me, dissected me, took what she wanted from me,
bus tickets and all.
Took my opinions and moulded them into a formula for the perfect human,

She was the dirt that clinged to my skin
like whispers of where ive been without telling a soul

And i let her be everything when I was her nothing
I let her
I let her devour me whole
and I gave her every last morsel of my soul
and let her wipe her sin stained hands all over my insecurities,
leaving me sullied,
even more so than before.

I let her take my hand and drag me to hell
because it meant I would be by her side
burning.
What I didn't realise was that she had an escape route planned,
my only escape was to grow accustomed to flames.

It seems it's the people who you love the most are the people who you allow to hurt you more than any physical pain you ever felt before. Because pain of the body will heal, you cannot repair trust or hearts the like a punctured tire

She took my hand and told me 'chin up buttercup, you'll never be the first, the last, or the only **** up'

She lit me up
Took a drag from my roll up
Flashed me a smile that would make every sinner weak at their knees

But she's in love with a New Yorker now

And that was the end of us
Priya Devi Jul 2016
You and I are revolutionaries
Right up to the ruckus we cause daily
Switchblade tongues
And coal black lungs
And bittersweet intentions.


We are the voice of a generation
We the Degenerates
We the Proletariats
We the Lost and Found among the wreckage of the millennial metropolis.


Living in our forever 21 society
Governed by no laws and lack of sobriety
We the reckless
We the ruthless
We the key board warriors

Pixels and manic pixie dream girl *******
**** boys, man buns, Jordan's not brogues
We the soulless love makers
We the relentless heartbreakers
We the snapchat sexters, molesters
We the grotesque.

You and I know no boundaries
Lines crossed and used as skipping ropes
As ***** jokes, cut throat and savage
We the endless trouble makers

We who know the end is nigh  
Hiccuping our ways through orchestrated lies
Screaming and bellowing our silent pleas to this world of terror alight
Setting fire to ourselves daily
We the terrified
We the unjustifiable
We the hopeful sad


We the gods of everything and nothing
We the repercussion of double standards
140 characters in every psalm
We the unforgiving
We the unholy
We the non believers
We the incomprehensible in the face of sin


You and I are not recognised by x or Y
We identify in binary with the wind and the stars
Honest realisation that our little lives are insignificant to the monologue of the universe
Lighthearted libertines light years ahead and behind

We the star struck
We the scientists and academics
We the prophets
The artisans
The beauty queens
The mystics and cynics

And I am the voice of a generation you rendered speechless
Priya Devi Apr 2015
I wanted you like I want the skyline of New York to puncture new notches in my belt so I could hold myself together tighter.

Your silence was a city street roar,
I should have known it sooner.
Your hints were more subtle than a sucker punch and I'm a sucker for a heart beating

You were easier than I was ****** and we loved it, we merged into one,
you doused me in gasoline and set me on fire,
inhaled me one kiss at a time.

The vast capacity you held on your tongue was coded,
you chose to translate it with your eyes in fireworks.
The words processed and filtered through smoke sent straight from your brain were riddled with chemical madness
it exhausted me.
You were the perfect excuse for self destruction.
You were the perfect plague.

This is the last time I let myself go, this is the last time,

I will never again be in need of your past tense lullabies,

I am my own salvation, I am my own skyline, I am my own destruction.
Priya Devi Dec 2015
I found inside me an unbreakable pennance,

a sordid and sullied stuttering heartbeat,

and chose to find the beauty amongst the madness
adrift amongst the synapses of my mind.
Priya Devi Oct 2015
The pale morning will sing of our forgotten things,
Left in hostel rooms,
reservations made for 3.

We sat amongst the rooftops of Prague,
while the city reached for it's sky
and scraped the clouds
and strained it's structure,
built on top of itself,
overflowing with countless nameless people from it's brims.

And we sat amongst the rooftops.

Watching the sun change it's mood,
Watching as it tired from it's burning persistence,
Watching it paint the sky with it's own paradox,
Blue to pink to purple to dead.
The solar system above
reflecting the solar system of the city.
The way the warm nights allowed us to finally breathe.

And we sat amongst the rooftops.

Repairing the damage of the strain on our souls,
Too young to attempt to take on the world,
too old to walk the beaten hometown streets for yet another summer.

Starving,
exhilarated,
no cash in our pockets but feeling richer than queens.
We tracked the route on a torn map we stole and defaced from the school library,
on which we had planned our freedom,
running hand in hand from the chaos of our mundane
plotted out our new testiments, our own brand new stories,
our old lives could not see
or touch
or ruin this

for this was ours only.

And we sat amongst the rooftops.

Drowning in life.

And listened to this song.

Because nothing else would quite capture the moment as precisely
As an acoustic lions roar.
Based on 'Lions Roar' by First Aid Kit
Priya Devi Jul 2015
The one who taught me to love the hardest had an anchor for a heart herself.

It was as if the ghosts of the people she ceased to know ran riot on her skin in the form of bruises or scars or the in shadows under her eyes.

It was in those times, when she
couldn't keep her demons down, and we when greeted them again like old friends, that we learned to smile with everything left in our souls and pack overnight bags faster than her frantic heart beat.

And we learned to keep secrets, even when the world was quiet enough to hear the rivers running underneath the streets
as they were waiting with baited breath for explanations.

We all knew she meant well, if only she was well.

We kept more secrets than we had taken breaths and yet their burden didn't take hold until days or weeks afterwards and we could barely comprehend reality outside of our twisted youthful minds.

None of us dared to take a breath out of time,
Speak a word or a line out of line with the lies that we were taught to regurgitate from our fire bellies, perfect diamond fallacies,
Galaxies on our tongues.

And so we conclude with the honesty spilled onto pavements during the walk home, like the spirits I spilled on your blouse,
And recount the time I heard someone say that the most beautiful smiles were paired with the saddest eyes.

I see that now.
Priya Devi Jun 2015
The one who taught me to love the hardest had an anchor for a heart herself.

It was as if the ghosts of the people she ceased to know ran riot on her skin in the form of bruises or scars or the in shadows under her eyes.

It was in those times, when she
couldn't keep her demons down, and we greeted them again like old friends, that we learned to smile with everything left in our souls and pack overnight bags faster than her frantic heart beat.

And we learned to keep secrets, even when the world was quiet enough to hear the rivers running underneath the streets
as they were waiting with baited breath for explanations.

We all knew she meant well, if only she was well.

We kept more secrets than we had taken breaths and yet their burden didn't take hold until days or weeks afterwards and we could barely comprehend reality outside of our twisted youthful minds.

None of us dared to take a breath out of time,
Speak a word or a line out of line with the lies that we were taught to regurgitate from our fire bellies, perfect diamond fallacies,
Galaxies on our tongues.

And so we conclude with the honesty spilled onto pavements during the walk home, like the spirits I spilled on your blouse,
And remember the time I heard someone say that the most beautiful smiles were paired with the saddest eyes.

I see that now.
Priya Devi Jul 2016
Hi guys!

I've taken a break from writing and therefore hadn't posted anything in a while. However, I'm planning to throw myself into it this summer by posting here at least once a week and recording more videos for my YouTube page.

Here's a link:
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqlP7t52iiV4aNRbfLhOfyth7MOw_P5J5

I'll keep you posted with open mic dates/video releases!

Thank you so much,
Priya **
she
Priya Devi Mar 2017
she
She makes sense in the context of her chosen company,

Her views become less obscure,
Understandable.

As if the vibrations of her wavelengths make sense.
When she is surrounded
By similar harmonies.

The depth of their collective perception becomes infinite.

Maybe it was down to their minds
being alive
And full of the smoke of God.

Or maybe,
It was their neuro-pathways,
Moulding and mapping the world around them.
They woke up to the politricks.

Their indigo glow could be just that of youth,
A Millennial whoop,
A tribal pixelated galaxy of potential,
Moulded to form the masses.

Just like a generation beforehand.

The mosaic of human awakening seems never ending.

But there must come a point of human realisation

A mutual realisation

Our little lives are insignificant to the monologue of the universe.
Priya Devi Apr 2015
To be pending is to be drunk or high 90% of the time,
Is to wish you weren't alive in the rest
Is to pray to any god who will listen
And then give in to another form of an addiction when they don't

To be pending is to live a life of sin, give no ***** and let anyone and no one in,
To drink not to get drunk but to die.
To be higher than heaven to be turnt till 11 the next morning when your belly is churning from the demons who wouldn't drown,
turning your belly into a fire pit,
purging you into the flower beds of suburbia

To be pending is to wish you were somewhere when you are nowhere, when you are nothing,
to face constant embarrassment, harassment,
to feel shame with every breath you take,
walking dead girl

To be pending is to wander directionless for a week
or a month
or a year,
living in the eerie grotesque comfort of a home which doesn't really seem like home anymore,
To pace the streets at four in the morning trying to detach memories tied to lampposts like ribbons...

Here is the first places we kissed,
here is where I noticed a heart shaped puddle,
here is where we shared our last spliff, here is when I cried
and here

and here

and here.
Priya Devi Mar 2017
He touched her where she was skinny,
in between the terracotta breaths they took,
underneath the sunburned sky.

They would dim for moments at a time,
watching the world around them melt to water colour,
speaking a language in between their irises that no one else could understand.

But their time ran short,
and his love ran out.

All she wanted was old fashioned love.
All she got was old fashioned morphine.
Priya Devi Mar 2017
This is on account of loving you most ardently,
And believing you were my Mr Darcy,
When you could and never will be,

This is on account of your ability to make me want to take the stars from your eyes,
Brighter than those in the skies,
And inject them straight into my bloodstream.

This is on account of my desire to bottle up every moment we share,
And open it, releasing the essence into the air,
When the days are dark and cold,
And my soul feel worn and old,
And you aren’t as near as I’d like you to be.

This is on account of us,
We are turbulence,
The definition of young and reckless,
Fire breathers and blood drinkers,

You are the rose-tinted beginning and end of everything,
A moment away from your side is a moment wasted.

In short,
This is on account of my loving you forever.
Priya Devi Jul 2016
I confess
I'm not beyond having a colour complex
Constantly linking colours and emotions
To memories and people
And skin and places and pride

I've tried and tried
But amber passports
And red and blue lights
And the red blush of an Indian bride
All scream to me

And
The space between Blue seas
Have come to mean
Worth

Country to country
Skin to skin
Conflict after conflict

Peace loving megalomaniacs
And proletariats
Under the same blue sky
Priya Devi Apr 2015
50 years ago, you and I couldn't hold hands in the street
and here we are checking into hotels, leaving secrets between sheets.

I would be a mullato,
foreigner,
alien.
The mixing of worlds and tones.
I'd be scared to walk down the road at night, or to bat an eye or take a breath or look twice
at the wrong man

You would be strong and proud and from the gentry,
drinking away the demons who have learned to love your poison,
using women like tissues,
breaking them like eggs.

And yet here we are, a clashing of worlds clinking our glasses, our bodies aching for one another behind table cloth
Priya Devi Apr 2015
I have a back pack full of heart break,
More sins than the Bible can count,
Clouded judgement and loser morals than were ever dreamed conceivable.

You have a look in your eyes that just screams 'honey I was made to break your heart',
magnetism in your arms,
Your chokehold comes after a few half pints
Priya Devi May 2015
Let me tell you a secret
I am bored

I'm bored of corporate America flashing their endless subliminal ******* in my face every second
So much so that sometimes without me realising I adopt their accent and mimic and quote what they want me to think and say

I'm bored of reality TV
Of keeping up with the Kardashians and how their name fits so nicely in my mouth like a chunk of poison apple

I'm bored
Of skipping past adverts of skinny black children starving to watch skinny white children starving themselves pretty
I'm scared that I'm the only one whose minds those adverts cling to,
I can only do so much and I can't even trust that I'm helping

I'm bored
Of seeing perfect white girls on TV in their perfect clothes with their perfect hair and their perfect families in their perfect churches with their perfect god who somehow claimed dominance over all the other gods, over my gods
and called me backwards for worshipping the sun and the moon for giving me life and light as opposed to a man who may or may not have existed who they claim split seas

I am bored
I'm bored of being the supporting role
never being pretty enough
but being hot for an Asian girl
being told 'when I think of a beautiful Asian girl I think of you'
being asked 'what are you?', 'no where are you really from?' 'are you gunna go back?' 'were you born on international waters?' Always followed with a 'If you don't mind me asking',  I do,
Let me tell you about the waters that broke and brought me here on this home soil,
let me tell you about the struggle of my mother and the mothers before me and the lightness of being dark skinned in a community of dark skinned beings,
let me tell you about my heritage not like it's a story in a child's book like or a myth, it is real history,
let me tell you about the struggle of my people about the beauty of our most simple words and minds,
let me tell you about how our bodies moulded from the dust and sand around us is no less than yours,
let me tell you what it means to be nothing in your eyes.

We are the products of your mishandling, broken artefacts caged in a glass box with a steel rod stuck up our **** to keep up still in a viewing room in the media's museum
keep us down and keep us quiet keep us looking brutal try to tear us apart from the inside,

Try and tell me I'm a terrorist not a freedom fighter for daring to breathe to speak.
Try to blotch out your wrongdoings by scapegoating us as a region as a religion I don't even belong to as a pigment in a skin colour I can do nothing about I couldn't change it even if I wanted to
Just wait and see how we react

I'm bored of your Islamophobia
I'm bored of you telling me to hate myself
I'm bored of trying to be middle man for two cultures whose only real difference are climate
So *******
**** both of you
Excuse my English
No my Punjabi.
No
I'm done with your negotiations and attempts at tolerance I'm done with trying to blend you both together within me I can't be what either of you want me to be
I can't do this
I won't be a part of your glamourised butchery
Anymore

— The End —