the sky used to mean something
used to feel heavy
when it rained
but now it just drips down glass, slides past a stranger’s eyes at the bus stop
there was a time when color mattered
when blue was a bruise or a breath
now it’s just blue
I try to remember what warmth meant
not the physical, not the sun on skin
the other kind
the hush in a voice, the linger of a glance but it’s gone
or maybe buried under layers of noise
I didn’t ask for news headlines,
forgotten passwords,
unpaid parking tickets
thoughts used to come like rivers, now they’re dust motes caught in a shaft of light only visible for a second, then nothing
I sat in a chair this morning
and forgot why
then forgot that I had forgotten
that felt important somehow
but I didn’t write it down
didn’t care to
even tears feel tired now
they know they won’t mean anything
no one sees them, not even me
I wipe them out of habit
I keep thinking I used to love someone
or something
but the shape of it’s gone,
I'm trying to remember a dream an hour too late
only the weight lingers
not the image
sometimes I laugh
but it’s not laughter
it’s muscle memory
When my my mouth is impersonating a better time
I want to scream
but the scream won’t come
it's just a breath
that never sharpens just fades
and maybe
that’s what I’ve become
not broken
not whole
just fading.

You say I'm childish
For freely professing
All the words that are
Etched on my heart

As if I had any
Other choice but to
Be buried by them

My tongue stays knotted—
a noose around my throat,
tightening with every word I don't say.
I choke on thoughts I can’t release,
each one suspended
in the silence of sentences I cannot find.

Ideas flash past like speeding cars,
but I stay still,
stranded at the edge of my own mind.
I am voiceless.
Mute.
Not because I have nothing to say—
but because I don’t know how to begin.

How can my head be full of questions
with no answers to still the storm?
I carry a flood behind my teeth.
They act as dams, holding back the ruin.

I reach for better days,
grasping air,
clutching at light that slips through my fingers.
But only the bitter ones remain.
I am too young
to feel the weight of this much sorrow.

The noose tightens.
And I fade—
not from view, but from within,
swallowing the ache that never softens.

I need the words
to name this pain,
to give it shape
so it no longer owns me.

I must find that voice—
the one I buried deep—
and set it free
before silence becomes the only sound I know.

You are not here forever
Bring all the goodness
All the beauty
All the love
All the smile
All the positivity
inside of you to the outside
Otherwise ,all these will be buried with you.

                                                                              -Sandeep Kaushal

It’s a beautiful day,
A Saturday.
One of those effervescent Spring afternoons  that buzzes with sunny activity,
a neighborhoodly kind of
picture perfect blue sky kind of
everything’s gonna be okay kind of day.

I stare at it from the corner of the couch,
through the window at the lawns across the street from the corner of the couch
and look down at myself.
*****, covered in soil from head to toe.
So bright, too bright out there
through eyes that have been languishing overlong in the deep brown black of the underground,
behind masks and walls,
closed for fear of opening.

They dazzle now and squint,
watering at the light,
not watering,
crying, crying,
etching riverbeds upon my ***** face.
How long was I down there?
Dreaming awake and automatic,
watching her water the houseplants and
comfort the friends
and rock the child
while I shoveled earth over my living form
to protect this vulnerable animal,
to bury bury bury it.

The noise doesn’t reach me
there in my cocoon.
It threatens now to crack my fragile sanity; though madness I would greet as an old companion.
I reject the invitation beckoning me from somewhere deep inside,
push push push it down,
and wave to my neighbor through the window
as he mows his grass.

It’s a beautiful day,
A Saturday,
and my senses pulse with indignation against it.
Back to the dreaming
where I will wrap my mind in cotton
and try again tomorrow.

A friend asked, “Where would you like to be buried when you die?”
While he looked to the ground
My eyes lingered upon the sky—
“The verdant grass makes me itch
While the bluest ocean is too deep...
The void meanwhile is quiet and without any life...
Isn't it perfect place to rest after I die?”
He laughed and said, ”That's crazy!”
And I thought:

You are the crazy
To live in this world of weary
And not escape, but instead be buried—
In my death I want to be free.

This bone-tired body is a battlefield
where I keep returning
to bury the same soldier,
over and over.

His face shifts like seasons—
familiar and foreign,
the line between my lines,
fading into fable,
floating into folklore.

He’s died here a hundred times,
and I survived every one.
But I keep coming back,
thinking I might unearth
something softer.

My hands tremble from holding too much—
soliloquies, symptoms, scapegoats,
saltshakers, semicolons, starry-eyed sighs.
My knees buckle under the weight
of a history I can’t rewrite.

No matter how many poems erupt
from my shell-shock,
how many mornings I crawl from trenches,
listening to the sound of birdsong—
I always return, ***** in hand.

He stares up from the dirt,
his mouth unmoving but full of accusations.
"You never let me go,"
he whispers without sound,
"and I’ll keep rising until you do.
Don’t you get it?
You buried yourself here too."

How many deaths does it take
to make a ghost let go?
I’m running out of shovels,
but never out of wishes.

Some wounds are wars,
and some wars never surrender.
If I stop digging, will the war finally end—
or will it bloom
in the silence I leave behind?

I… was a dreamer trapped in a haunting nightmare,
a paradox of hope and despair; drying out these tears
with pieces of nothing – don’t fare so well crying in public.


These eyes are the window, to all unspoken fears,
cloaked in silence.


I… am a war between two formidable forces of always
wanting to embrace the world with love, and also the
fear of rejection that longs to keep me so vaguely isolated.

Stuck in this place, to stay and acknowledge,
all the time buried beneath the grains of time...

Yet another dug up watch with these bare hands –
I could have buried so many hatchets, only if I never
hesitated burying the prior ones time and time again.

We ran
From something
Unseen. We were
Two, a man and a woman

River flowed red
He is steel. And her tears
Bullets. We are
Bayonets and gun barrels

The earth flourished
With steel, straight statues
Of trees and undergrowth
A perennial memorial

Buried, we were
Under the earth
Meant to last forever
Meant to simply be

Red silence
Enveloped the world
My brothers...
Glided between the trees

Creatures joined
Those of all kinds, prowl
Across the land
Around their brothers

The earth split
We are the valleys. Gashes
Along the veins of the earth
Runs red like streams and fountains

Wounds dried and flaking
Freely beasts roamed
Lands demarcated
Trampled, trodden

We are echoes
Within the canyons. We stalk
Like spirits, like steel
Behind fervor, behind craze

They lost
Time was forgotten
Time was reclaimed
Remade

We do not know time
We do not sow
We do not reap
We do not see
We do not hear

The world is never silent
But the underground is

How would you feel
If you knew that
The world was hollow
Held up by rifles...