I have starry lights on my breath and
I don't know what to do
because I'm
choking.

Why did I start writing,
feeling
like this?
In an attempt to fill the spaces
in my narrative?
They gape open like
self-forced split wounds.
And yet are empty, so
empty
and bloodless.
Just numb.

Every **** self-help book
tells me it's my choice
how I feel.
I've been thinking and thinking and
I disagree.
It was never my decision to
paint my rib-cage blue,
to dull out and flatten, like a piece of
wood, my eyes into a lifeless faded varnish
that others mistake for spark or
mystery.
Or to stuff my head with
cotton wool that won't stop
pressing,
pressing.

I've just realized this is a not-good poem.
Forgive me, I'm
choking.

I'm 'sophisticatedly' sticking a pen
in my mouth, pretending
to smoke a cigarette.
I don't have the courage to hurt
myself, but
I do.
In 'subtle and implied' ways, he
says.

I make watery coffee and convince
myself, my happiness
lies in there,
floating. And I pretend
I'm in a Parisian cafe.
But these are pipe-dream dregs,
nothing else.
I guess they can't substitute the
vividness of being,
living.
Of sharp technicolour experience that can be
smelt.
Dregs, indeed.

Today, I borrowed Birthday Letters by
Ted Hughes from the library.
I'm wondering if
salvias were his favourite
flower.
His favourite.
I can't figure it out.
For his words are only stricken,
messy with the rawness of
too-technicolour experience.
Beautiful.
But sharp
enough to pierce and
poison,
like Paris.
My Paris, your Paris,
our little Paris.
So startlingly, breathlessly
red.

I suddenly know why I have written this.
The colour of salvias,
of Paris,
of me and you,
is my soul's favourite.
His favourite.
And salvias, their fragrance, it
douses the fire that's threatening to
suffocate, swallow my
life whole,
incomplete.

Red is my favourite colour.
And it's yours.

But I really don't think I want it to be.

Wanderer.
From window to window.
Seeking
             something
in different glass scenes
from offices and trains and restaurants.
Like she'll see something or someone
or somebody.
And the world will no longer be
a tilted painting.

Clear spring cold
papers over
the scene of the city of her world.
She's freezing.

There is a cafe at the end of the
road
where sidewalk snow has mingled
with trod-on mud
from commuter's shoes.
It's called
'Les yeux qui voient tout'

She can smell coffee and cigarettes and paper and words
and smiles and wine all the way from Bordeaux.
She sits by the window.

Tendrils of hair cut
across her cheek
as she lowers.
The seat is cold.
Legs crossed,
                       arms clasped,
high-heeled shoes with straps
that cross,
head bent
over a crossword.

'Un cafe au lait, s'il vous plait.'

Last four-letter word pencilled in so
she crumples up the paper.
The eyes don't notice
origami birds dangling above her.
Somehow
they're all angled
towards the glass window
like sunflowers reaching for the sun.
Perhaps the casual
shuttered-open winds
are the birds' oxygen;
reminders that
                          something
like
sky,
air,
wind,
exist, beyond
coffee-smoked counters.
Reminders that
they could breathe, live, fly
in some other city of some other world.

Cup and saucer on a silver platter
hover over.
Idle fingers
and then a clatter.
She stares down into
the white porcelain pit,
teeming with hot brown
                                           alarms.
It isn't a portal
into
       something.
Just a cup of coffee.
Now that is an alarm.

Slow and
                shaking,
drip,
         drip,
                  drip.
The milk is poured.
Curling, italic, Persian carpet spread
from the cup's centre into warm-cream brown.
She imagines it is
blood in her heart.

She raises the little silver teaspoon
napping on the saucer and
stirs.

'Le sucre?'
Does she want it all
to be
sweeter?

Two packets, long like
Marlboros,
hastily, desperately dumped
into the mix.
Quick and
                  shaking,
she raises the little silver teaspoon and
stirs.
Little sugar grains ******
into a vortex,
dissolved and melted into
the city of the world of the cup.

With her little finger, she
dabs
stray sugar grains
on the table
and tries to bring sweetness
to her sleep-thick tongue.

Slow and
                shaking,
sip,
      sip,
            sip.

She's­ tricked herself
into feeling warmth.
Ticker-tape banner
pops up in her head:
'All of this will not
fix you.'

Porcelain clatter
as cup meets saucer.
Again.
She arms herself with
a cigarette case and a book.
Maybe now she will belong
amongst these people
with sad eyes and burning lips,
clinging on to cups and drinks.
So desperately-lit smoke
trails out of
her warm mouth,
steaming up her face
like a window on a cold winter day.
And meanwhile Camus perches
in her hand.

Her eyes swim
in the choppy seas
of French.
The cigarette dangles,
painting the air grey, grey,
tilting, tilting, tilting.
Slow and
                shaking,
she weeps.

Half-aglow in the white sunshine filter
from the glass window,
a woman is wondering.
She drinks her coffee,
wipes her smudged mouth
and leaves.

Nobody notices the wobble
in her high-heeled gait.
She's just a part of
another tilting painting,
another glass scene.

These simple acts,
           simple things,
define
the speaking soul.
In a scene of the city of the world.

Little girl in a blue
snow globe.
Pressed white shirt and tartan skirt.
Hair slipping
out of a ponytail or braid or something
like that.
Laughter like a current
to be lost in by a boatman.
Her first time at the beach.
Writing
childish saltwater sonnets
in the sand with her toes.

Paper-plane sky
kisses
sea brimming
out of its seams.
Singing, on-off key,
school choir tone,
'Never Let Me Go'.
Who needs, she needs
nothing
but
the horizon
cupped
in outstretched palms.
Innocence stored
in jagged-shiny shells
waiting to be
buried
in hot, bare sand.

Time comes to shore, oceans
grow warmer,
shallow.
No more of kid braids
but a woman in
azure.
Her whole life having been
a half-moon run
out of deep, dry wells
in search of,
in search of...
in search of
what, but
hope.
Cracking oyster shells
looking for
pearls.

Time again comes to shore.
Cigarette pants for tartan skirt,
in a blue-almost-black.
Staring out
at water lapping before her,
before her, after the sky.
Before,
after.
The horizon is a pretty picture
she wants to hang
on the wall of her heart.
But she, schoolgirl trapped in snow globe,
remembers
textbook phrases like
'Humans are made up of 75%
water.'
So we are drowning every moment,
she thinks dryly.

Water within,
inevitable.
Maybe her skin or nerves or vocal cords
sensed it all those years ago
in the schoolgirl's snow globe.
Like crying, like love,
like fearing, like dying.
Shifting, receding, flowing in
and out.

Could emotions be tides she dares,
dares not
row, row,
row through?

Where did it all leak away?
Was it in the salt
running down her face?
If she is 75% water,
where has it drained
to leave the heart parched,
and her tartan days a distant drought
of memory?

Snow globe melts away.
Wade in, wade in,
have your fill,
until skin is slick
with better pain.
You told the ocean years ago,
you sang in schoolgirl choir tones,
never,
never,
never let me go.

Now it never will.

Since when did you fall back into the habit
of making homes out of people?

Stop being so silly.
It's dangerous.

You begin again with your inner monologue:
When will you ever learn?
You've slipped back into the glass comfort of
relocating your heart.
Back from the library into
a girl's blue hair, a boy's ricocheting argument,
so it beats in time,
in time
to the indie music pirouetting out of shared earphones.

But then of course,
you're alone in your bedroom, thinking, realizing.
Those flowers that you've planted
in the skin of one, the eyes of another,
the hands and conversations, notes and
t-shirts
will die one day.
Death frightens you, keeps you
wide-eyed fearful.
A black nothing where
you can't grow flowers.

In all this, in all this,
you've forgotten to sow seeds in your own veins
and take care of your own petals.
You're bloodless and so
your petals lie flat and pale,
dying.
It isn't pretty.
And maybe that's why those homes
where you've nurtured a garden,
planted roses, lilies, ******* sunflowers,
eventually crumble, vanish,
leave.
Before you know it, you're staring at somebody else's home,
somebody else's flowers.
And wishing they were yours.

Haven't I told you
not to make homes out of people?

i cut all the strings

so why am i still
your marionette?

snow was brittle, i found
fresh white paper
crinkling under

snow was fragile, i learned
like shredded glass
but softer

like all my edges
as they really are
not how
i see them

I have his mouth but
slurred and sharper; we do not
know how to converse

Art is good
medication so you'll
deal with this creatively.

You've careened into this so
make the wreck,
the chaos
bloom on a page.
It might even help.

You're going to be a comic book artist
because in the face of such things
words fail and lips
falter,  and you
want to knock your head comedically.
You want
to conjure silly star-loops for
smashing into this
feeling.
Knocked-out.
Reeling.
Draw, draw out
and ink in your malady.

Crash!

The worst is when
your heart is the caricature.
A full-page feature,
a splash,
of high-strung colours
begging to be neatened.

Splash!

Your
cartoon heart. An
image of a fat, crimson
apple
like a clip-art pic, got
a little worm poking through
it.

Eating, eating away
to leave a love
or loss-sized hole.
Fat white bubbles announcing
hurt!
so graphically.

Go on and
draw it more lurid. If
the feeling is here, you might as well
feel it.
Let the slops of gaudy red
and green
bleed and
bleed
out of the panel.
Stain it, stain
the gutter
where time happens.

At least it gives the comic
a heartbreaking!
twist.

And then you turn the page.

you filter every pixel pore
you angle yourself thin

my darling, which
do you love more?

the ******* the screen
or the girl in your skin?

tea
for the unfinished assignments
for the time of the month
for the boy who douses you with salt
for trying to feel loved

wine
for your tired eyes
for your loneliness, a butterfly
beating its wings on your ribs,
for trying to grasp
what freedom is.

my darling,
don't you love to heal?
don't you love to escape?

their spines are straight -
two different trees in two different woods.
people like them are not meant
to come face to face.
is this the first time the distance between them is silent?
emptied of political din, hoarse
shouts of protest in market squares,
flags unfurled not in love for a country
but in hate for the other.

are enemies still enemies when they are of the same space?

the two girls recognize
that their hair curls in the same way.
they don't reach out to touch
but a curiosity forms a thread between them.
a thread. their fingers tingle, flutter
spooling and unspooling
this new connection, this new thread.
their eyes swing like pendulums.
how new, how strange to breathe
in air that is clean of artificial hate.

they are curious, spooling and unspooling.
what will happen to this thread?
for threads are too easy to break.
and each knows the power of governments,
their ability to dangle them
then break
and break and break.

the two girls wonder. the two girls stare.
they look. they look and look.

but their spines are straight -
two different trees in two different woods.

That night, I heard
the violin.
Between staves of
leaves,
string-encrusted frills,
I heard a violin,

not cry, not sing, but
dream.
I heard a violin dream.

Before long, after
soon,
I heard the violin.
Between shifting, fleeting,
mindful things,
I heard a violin,

fitted unmathematically
within a memory.

Paris: immutable
permanent marker
dream.

I love you like
the giddy sparkle-crack,
irrational love
found in picture-book fairy tales
I outgrew by
13. You are
my desperate idealism
romanticized into sepia wallpaper
on my laptop screen so
hi there.
Hi, Eiffel Tower.
I think I know your contours
better than a man knows the outlines of his lover but
Paris.
My feelings run
still.
Stiller than still, like
blood gone cold
in love's deep-freeze,
I'm fixated.

Paris, you've got
a residence permit
without an expiration
date
to live in the red beating
city
within me
where no boy has ever kept up his rent and
what,
           what
what does that say about me?
That I reach out my arms to
a rose-tinted Google image
rather than a
tangible embrace waiting for me at my
locker every day.

Why can I serenade you
but not even speak about him?

Paris, I don't think...
I don't think I should love you so
fairly.
For you are my soul investment
but we won't breakeven.
And they warned me,
Paris, they warned me
that you are most beautiful in the rain.
How gorgeous, how
dangerous,
in this age of acidity.

You do not need me
when countless 'artistes'
make love to you
on camera rolls, ivory keys, second-hand
typewriters of silk-faced men.
You do not need me.
Even history has shaped you
into an evenly symmetrical heart
on the map.
You do not need me
but I gorge myself on your
romance
to keep me sane.

Who needs therapy when there's the Champs-Elysées?

And I know that you're crumbling
like, God, yes, the pastries in your abandoned patisseries. I
know that you're crumbling
beneath pink candy wrappers and Casablanca
scene imitations so
that's why
they say you disappoint.

My aunt had a suite at the Ritz but
emailed to tell me
about the soot-stained post office
on rue-this or rue-that and
what,
         what,
what does that say about you?

Is that why they took
all the locks off your eternal bridge,
discarded each love-tale
attached to your hinges
because you were
                               heaving?
Vomiting out love because
it was over-indulgence, like
you'd stuffed yourself on red velvet cupcakes
to find you couldn't digest all that romance and
Paris,

I'm holding you tightly.

My feelings irrationally match
with some product with a price-sticker that reads
'true love'.
Did I tell you I cherish your flaws?
The smoke snuck on buildings and
vines like
veins
bleeding honeysuckles onto windowpanes
and brusque sandwich orders
in some seedy cafe.

I want to crawl
into your chinks and spaces,
make little dark coves
in each little gap where
I can sit and
read.
I can read.

I can read you.

Paris, you are
the postcard that never
came in the mail
but I somehow found
in an empty drawer one day and
I love you.

Paris, I love you.
I'm writing it now but
in some beautiful future,
I'll tell you in person.

I want so badly to feel
not just know
the life living within me.

Cells of my heart,
what makes you stay
and stick
and love
in such efficient harmony?
What are the series of
coincidences
constructed into miracles
by some invisible hand
to let you be?
What are you, how are you?
To drop and fall into one -
pulse-
compelling me, luring me
to breathe, breathe
even under the anaesthetic of sleep.

I crave to know
how my body cups my soul
in a mirrored glass and not
a casket
or cage, if I wish.

And why the soul cries
even so,
so

I speak
to the ever and ever lying beyond the sky.
I ask

Please?

Dreams break and lines break
but don't let
my heart break

into me.
It is living.

And I don't yet know
what that means.

the shadow picks
a nice path on your face;

across planes,
                        in wells
I never drank from,
                        on a pink bud
from which I stole
sugar
        instead
of
tasting.

Where words slipped
I thieved, not
                       kissed.

shadow hovers
as a bee
             searching
for pollen
in darkness.

It loves all
the places
                I missed

because

I substituted French phrases for
your limbs;
spoke to your
light
in a language I didn't quite
know yet

but

sounded
         like
              like
the poetry found

in light's absence.

the words
are beads and gems
and hooks and strings

scattered in a box
somewhere in
the softness behind my breastbone

my palms are up to catch the key
whenever it chooses to land

a pandora poised
to make ornaments
from all she uncovers,
all she unleashes

'Tu me manques'.
I miss you.

Or literally
'You are missing to me'.
I like that.
I like that it seems
as if
this person is so necessary,
so important,
so absolutely integral to my life that
they are 'missing' from me.
Missing.
Like a limb or my skin or my thoughts,
things I can't live without.

'Tu me manques'.

Shakespeare wrote
of ‘trees bedashed with rain’
Doesn’t that remind you
of tears upon a face?

Our lips hung amongst the stars.

Believe it or not, I feel aggressively happy.
Yes?
Yes.
Yes.

Yes.

Sun slits in through slats
of kitchen window blinds
and she is alone.

The art major is cooking
spaghetti,
pretending her thrifted T-shirt
bearing a cotton copy
of Campbell's Soup Cans
is not stained with tears and blood.
Oh, but that's hysterics and
hyperbole;
art has a tendency of making its worshippers
melodramatic...no?
The blood is only tomato sauce
and the tears...
well, what are tears but
water and salt?
After all, dramatizing the
mundane is just one awkward shade
of artistic temperament.
Visualizing life through
a heavy silk screen.

The art major sighs and
stirs.
The spaghetti is redder and
redder as she cooks.
Just as
her paintings bleed more blood
as she dangles a brush over them -
the teary-eyed watercolours.

The art major has decided
that drawing out extremities
of colour
might transform
her own life into
a pop of a Warhol painting.

The art major sighs and
stirs.

She thinks, tries to
think
in technicolour.
Today's thought-pencilled thesis
concludes (like a brush stroke of uncertain finality) that
love is the red of tomato soup cans.
Anger is the boil, passion is
the gulp,
danger, caution, warning,
the hot breaths, fleeting warmths,
the burn and sweet and tang.
She looks down at the
scarlet of
Warhol's soup cans,
blooming in worn out cotton
on her chest.

It might as well be blood, she
thinks.
It is,
it is,
it is.
Blood red love -
tomato soup cans.

Sun sets in slits
through kitchen window blinds
and she is still alone.

The art major sighs and
stirs.
The spaghetti is ready.

You send me a song every Wednesday,

a soul offering; a slice of the strange radioactive
lunatic madness -
love-
growing inside your wonderland.
(It is not a cancerous tumour, please stop calling it that.)
You say it is dark, the Arctic's lover;
I say it is dark, like
velvet punk music and
stained checked shirts and
almost-blood wine (in shared glasses); like
the colour of your skin.

Come on.
We've both been more fascinated by the depths of the ocean
than the blue glass surfaces.
Isn't that why we fell into bottomless black holes and called it
love?
Isn't that why we branded ourselves poets,
seared the red hot poker labels onto our backs,
so that we wouldn't have to say we're just
sad...?

Yes, we are carefully disintegrating;
the world already gave us a head-start
by curling our spines into the snakelike 'S'
It was preparing us
for our careful meandering
into a river mess:
living.

No doubt, in the pool depths of African evenings,
you drink,
*****-tinged cereal or tea,  
the glass Roobios surface reflecting
a lover's face and the boredom of sadness.
No doubt, I drink to you,
coffee or warm milk,
to try and wake myself into
dying without a purpose.
No doubt, we both drink
the night itself.
And let it fester in our veins,
to curdle our blood into that same wine-shade of
darkness.
We drink.

Virginia Woolf had courage,
Sylvia Plath had courage,
Ernest Hemingway had courage,
you and I don't.
We are too fearless to live.
So we drink
and clutch at each other desperately
without reaching out a single finger.
We form shotguns with our hands, make pacts, go
home again.
And drink.

We are helping each other to die
and live
at the same time.
We are helping each other to try fit the day
too
into our arteries.

You send me a song every Wednesday;
this song will save our existence.

It's the awkwardness and strangeness and
slugging-in-time-ness
of discovering a new
person.
Too often, movies portray the meeting of the
protagonists as some
heady rush or a
whirlwind of sparks or some
******* like that.
In reality, it's a slow fire
laboriously
begun with two
sticks.

And sometimes that fire never even starts.

The poet looks
and delves.

She wonders if he ever stops,
him, this rushing-forward-breathlessly train,
if he did park himself in fantastical paragraphs;
the poet is dumbfounded at him
ceasing.

In construction sites of grammar,
where free ideas float in ruins,
poet wonders how,
how, how
he came to plan to live
up
to an exclamation mark.
And condensed so many dribbles and strikes
of strange and fruitful, even withered
paragraphs into one line and pointer -
a smile and a lope-stagger dance of a walk -
an exclamation mark.

The poet stares, once again
astounded by the little streaks of the universe
and longs to hold on to something.
Disarmed,
she can't quite put a finger on it,
his gaping honesty and his quiet one,
that contradiction
shouting in her face
while whispering in her eyes.

The poet laughs -
laughs of, in, out
of sleep.
Summer is here.
And she chooses to notice.
He laughs too,
but he's always been noticing
and the poet writes down how
she learnt to bite and chew into the fruit of the world
and taste

it sour runny sweet cold explosive lingering
just as him.
The poet saw all
colours rolling in one
strange song of limbs.
She did not like the music
but she made herself a blank white canvas

and listened
and laughed

clean, silly laughs
fluting out of the incongruity
of simple,
simple
moments.

Fun life, easy stretch of the mouth -
it is possible to smile down at
what a clown pain is.
He declares this boldly
without saying a word
or two.
The poet is dumbfounded at him
being.

She did not see and had not seen and now only began to picture
but she was blind.
He said he was blinder and that
was true. The poet
did not smirk but giggle at the irony -
he lived in pop-bold spectacles,
she slept in black and white films.
But both were blind.

We cannot see and
we
are blurs.

The poet likes that life scrapes away at her
because she can see chinks of white sunshine
through all the sheared-off layers.
Clean, clean,

bright, bright -
he teaches her in a beam
without a hello.

The poet writes poetry
on breathing action prose.
And she laughs -

You are everything I don't want
but I'm curious.

She contemplated death
as coolly as the opening of
a lotus.

Its light spread on
her mad-locked smile
drained
of his mournful red,
like unfinished smears
of butter on toast.

I wish I had told you
when even the stars had been
too cold to breathe, that
yes,
you are my disaster.

See, your hurricane blew out
the paper-candle-sun I'd so
precariously perched
back in January
for warmth and solitary
subsistence.
Instead, you dragged me out
into harsh, hot, white
spotlight,
my hand grabbed in yours,
with your series of purple and then more
purple verses,
while I resisted the fact that
that
I wanted, want
wanted, want
to be more
than fodder for your poetry.

You may not comprehend
the catastrophe conjured
by your hands, your words
but I know myself.
I've always lived on the
edge of disarray and I
think I relished,
relish
my mania
because now I'm
stilled.
Stilled.
Wagon wheels stuck
in African mud,
halted
by stop signs of
violet violent violet
velvety verses.

Now I'm cowering under blankets
for artificial warmth,
with my thoughts
and a book, all clad
in the ghosts of your hands, I've been
stilled.
You've thrown silence
into the life of a musician.
You have scratched the vinyl
to break the song into pieces,
stop
stop
Caution.
This is a broken record.

Stilled.
If you are a hurricane,
then I am a bigger blossoming wreck,
still
you have managed to do it -
stilled.

All I want is to shatter
teacup
after
teacup
against the walls
and scream
into your too-brown eyes
but I can't say or sing a thing,
cowering -
stilled.

I wish I had told you
when the stars had been too cold to breathe and
you and me
you and me
did not even bother
to inhale or other such trivialities;
our breaths had been stolen
in the time and space of a white
aeroplane,
I wish I had said
yes,
you are my disaster,
so what am I to you?

science tells you
growing into a woman
means a fuller chest and
hips just beginning to smile.
it's the new smell of blood.
it's thoughts fermenting
from grapes to wine.

art shows you
becoming a woman
is a series of quiet
revolutions.
a blessing to bear.
taking a little girl's hand.
leading her into
a great Somewhere.
wiping her tears
because she is afraid.

but logic and art are two
halves of one fruit.
we as humans are living proof.
with rational minds.
with paint on our hands.

so listen to yourself.

you will realize
becoming a woman
is a miracle.
a gift. a grace.
a poem dedicated to all
the little girls
and the women that screamed
for them.

Dear Vamika,
of a long and a
short
time away. Of the
future, when
your ******* are fuller
and you can finally speak
French fluently.

I hope you are a woman.

I know you
have not changed the world.
I didn’t write you that way.
I’m still
not writing you that way.
For my cheap gel pen
has none of that spark
of Fitzgerald’s and Nabokov’s,
who could bewitch the imagination with
such timeless giants
as ****** and Daisy.

So remember:
you’ll be brilliant
but absent
from any history books.
But still.
You are enough, exquisitely enough,
for the literature
I inhabit.

Hence, I fill pages with your inky
outlines, shade in the spaces
slowly
with hopes and wishes and poetry and dreams.
For you, of you.
I note
all that you are
composed of, so that
even the marginalia
laughs out your lipstick,
your clothes drawers,
your reading habits.

I am writing you as a woman.

I am writing you
as Music. Here is your laughter,
a little smokier now,
unspooling like a work of
Debussy’s. Here are your
fingers, lighter now, like meringues
or dandelions, as they dance
on your silver flute,
better, better, better than ever,
in shiny theatres far
grander than you imagined.
And here are your tiny
scrawled music notes, that with a few touched
keys, echo as tumbling stars
in the ears of thousands
and then plenty.

I hope you are a woman.
So play, compose, laugh and sing; be
Music ‘til your dying day.

I am writing you
as Ambition. It is calmer
than the fire that currently
singes my hands. Yet it’s still as
constant
as the flame you
light, every night before bed,
in front of the Goddess Durga
you pray to.
Your heart still
salivates for hard-boiled
surprises, for lucky pennies
found on pavements, for the
metallic sweetness of, yes,
success.

I hope you are a woman.
So strive, and strive again,
‘til you’re nothing but ash.

I am writing you, too,
as Success.
Surprise!
Those words unhooked
from the crevices of your mind,
are now bound in
paperbacks.
You are a poet, sleeker than
the 17-year-old fledgling
in her dim bedroom.
You are a journalist,
pouring morning stories
like hot tea, and sighing
with honey glee at
your name in
print.
You are a writer;
you fill even more pages, and
you now have a
gleaming, expensive
pen.

I hope you are a woman.
So write, ‘til you have lost
all breath.

I am writing you
as Compassion. How could I not
let you share words (your  personal magic) with
countless sparking children?
And not fill your hands with
gifts of maths, English,
science and art that you can
give and give and
give to them?
An education is as precious and
priceless as Picasso, you say.
A human right, all the same.
A human right.

I hope you are a woman.
So be kind. That’s it.
Always.
I have not forgotten  
to write you as
Justice.
Go out and support,
wave flags and placards,
sign petitions, join many
campaigns, scream out ‘til
your throat can’t bear such
honesty, such
indignation.
Keep fighting.
Never stop. The world is unfixable,
imperfect and
unhappy.
Help it.

I hope you fight for other women.
I hope you fight for other humans.

I am also writing you
as Resilience. So you’re able
to face yourself in that
mirror, even though
your stomach has a stubborn bulge, still,
and you haven’t yet learned
to smile at your nose.
Still.
And I’m reminding you that you do,
yes, you do,
have the strength to cry alone, then
get over it,
to have panic attacks, then
get over it,
to pick yourself up from
life’s many disintegrations and
start again.
You can. You’ve already done it.
I hope you always will.

I know that you are a woman.
So never give up, as
cliché as it sounds. Go ahead and
die trying.

Now, as the cadenza
of this rather sentimental piece,
which I’ve spun as
sweet
as stolen sugar
and the romantic comedies at which
you secretly weep,
I am writing you as
Tenderness.
See, I decided that Love and
Romance are but
bombs. And you and I both
believe in non-violence.
Therefore, you are
a hugger now, with lips
which kiss your husband,
scold your children
and sing
lullabies to the whole silly lot of them.
Your heart is always
swimming
with a good bit of warm wine,  so don’t
question its fullness.
Take care of yourself.

This.
This, above, is all I hope for you
to stay and have and be
until the symphony’s final note, your
final breath.

You are a woman.
Flawed, intelligent, beautiful, cracked, strong, kind, stubborn, soft, honest.
Real.

You are a woman.
So stay like this,
but be just a little more wiser, a little more grown
each passing year.

A woman.
Vamika, that’s all I ever want you to be.