Being left with these thoughts is dangerous,
I need to dispose of this wicked notion,
With my mind being a landfill of commotion,
Thoughts are cancerous.

Show me the workings of a
world rapt in-news
in-fear
in-side.
What are its mechanics?

What are the mechanics:
a single, sterile globe.
All closing doors,
all shouting to be heard -
engulfed in digital vacuum.

Show me the workings.
Give me something I can touch, something I can taste,
something I can grip
between my teeth and bite down.
Hard. Just to check.

To check the mechanics of navigating the blueprint
of a blueprint
of a home with a sky frozen in a window pane.
The mechanics of a curtain closing.
– there was, in the end, nothing to be done –

Show me the workings.
Lay them out in front of me,
tell me their weight.
Let me know the numbers add up.

Let me know the mechanics of how that scale crests and falls,
heaves and gasps
its decision. Its desperation
to deliver the bodies of evidence in
grams, digits, days, weeks.

I want to see the workings.

Show me the workings.

My day

is

slumbering till my limbs are ready to move

drinking enough water to start a river

dicing the base to the best dishes (skellion and bell peppers).


I stick my head out

for mists of air

arm myself with hand sanitizer

and endlessly walk around at supper time.

I am anxious                                                 I am grateful.


Stillness has made me recognize

a new gnawing in my bones

a seething underneath my skin.

A desire to create the uncreated

to produce gold

haunts us all

like a disease.


But

it’s okay

to be mundane

to be like silver.

I want to reach inside myself

and hug this consuming thing,

quell it.

Tell it all I will do is

obey my nocturnal desires

dance to the music of our now-future

listen to the grumbling of the Metrorail

watch the ritual of trees

and sleep.

i always feel so stuck, like there is this strange expectation of me, like i am not the person they are expecting, they are using, that they are searching for. Or perhaps i constantly feel like that towards everything. I belong, and yet i don't. people belong yet they dont.
constantly trying to beat others, yet never knew be friends with them was really the answer. I am not involving myself enough yet i never want to be. I try then act like I never tried, blame others for annoying me yet allow them to.
I use platforms as an escape from people yet show the same people as a way of being accepted straight after. I do things behind people's backs only to tell everything later. i want to be free yet i have no clue what of.i dont know what is trapping me, but i just know it is. im writing things for myself only to tell them to others.
i message people and they finally reply, then only to feel abandoned again. Things come and go, but never here forever or for very long.
i complain of eyestrain yet stare continuously at the screen like some kind of void for the stress and blame inside me.

It has been a minute
Since I’ve last spilled my words
Every time I write
The lines blurred.

I tried to write about the countdown
Till I see another face again
About hugs, the front-liners, different battles,
The quarantine— when it’ll all end.

But every time I wrote
I was reminded of the truth
2020 hasn’t been all that smooth.

When I would write
A flood of feelings from the past
Told me that moment was
The first and the last.

It was hard to write about the future
Hope disguised as expectations
When reality bled through the sutures
Giving me palpitations— a figment of my imagination.

When I would write about the present
The pain that it came with,
People dying and front-liners crying,
Stupidity preaching the virus is a myth.

Writing poetry
Made me miss people even more,
The outside world
With anxiety kicking down my door.

So I escaped in dances
Music and exercise
Downing six white claws
Playing video games and the ukulele till sunrise.

Writing was my coping mechanism
But I couldn’t stomach this
So here I write, trying it all again
Hopefully it wont hurt as much as it did.

This quarantine teached us manythings,
Work can be done without going to office,
Importance of humans,
Food should not be wasted,
Teaching online,
How to value human beings,
Cleanliness is very important.
Yes, this quarantine teached us many Things.
--Jayalalita B Iyer

I look at my dad laying on his side:
a shoulder pinned to neck.
Opposite arm relaxed, open-palmed.

His heavy body leaned on a crusty elbow
and you’d think his eyes swelled in utero
because he’d just fetalconjured the invention
of the television and its screen.

My brain swims in a bone basin
and I’m human because I can’t stop moving.
As narration and pixels flash in the bedroom,
(this room could be a womblike calm),
my dad is beached, rejected by the waters he denies.

In and out of sleep, he snores awake.
Other times my mom wakes him and says
she hasn’t stopped all day.
Sometimes families do not know to build safe spaces.
My brain shudders when I’m ****** and
when I have to weigh my cargo.