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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
betterdays Apr 2015
in,
inscribing memories
of better times,
i am,
overwriting
the grief of a life
unravelling.
the ink placed
so
carefully
on parchment paper,
dissolves into a
watercolour
of  greys and dismal days.
words of love,
become mere twigs
and bird scratchings.
floating in the
fugue
of monumental despair.
i look hard
and long
to find some meaning.
but see only
these words
passionately written,
gleaming.
it's not fair,
it's not fair.
as my tears
drizzle
off
the page.
write from last year
in lieu, of a terzenelle
Dean Eastmond Dec 2014
Every inch of our ceiling
is bruised in memory,
watercoloured blues
fade into last Summer's browns.
It hurts.
Night brings the poetry
I'm still trying not to trip over,
the written and spoken wounds
that mark my body
still spell out your favourite weapons:

1) Ginsberg
2) Naivety
3) Perpetuated incompleteness.

I am anatomically structured for
falling apart with one cut heart string
at a time; a countdown only I control.
One only you tick for.

One day you'll learn
that the world is made from tissue paper,
and tears as easily as I.
chimaera Dec 2014
In the cold winter greyness, by the whipping leaning willow,
I gently throw my heart in the stream and watch it sink.

Through the waving naked branches, the stuttering wind goes
plunging lullabies in the dormant numbness of the river.

Aside the howling wandering world, the selfmade outcast departs
choosing dissoluteness in the watercoloured light of love.

The river flows hiding its depth, its surface keeps trace of nothing.
In the thick mistiness of life, to impossibly love breathlessly.
25.02.2014
An exercise on Tang Dynasty poetic forms (China, 618–907 AD).
ottaross Sep 2014
Rain soaks through my shoulders
And trickles down my spine
Like fingers over cracked and fractured stone.

Your breaths come like zephyrs
Your limbs tangle up with mine
Your voice, the only one I've ever known.

   And Coltrane blows a story tall
   To a bass line like a siren call
   Building tapestries of Cashmere
   For a dry and blistered blank concrete wall.

   You'll always be the bright full moon
   That filled my chest and filled the room
   While Rome is burned to embers
   The drums of war rose carrying the tune.


Footsteps on city walls
Hands upon splintered wood.
The battles lead to losses for all sides.

Honey comes from stinging bees
I'd get some for you if I could
But winter left us lost on drifting tides.

   Still Coltrane blows a story tall
   To a bass line like a siren call
   Building tapestries of Cashmere
   For a dry and blistered blank concrete wall.

   I'll offer you a silk cocoon
   A watercoloured afternoon
   While Rome is burned to embers
   The drums of war rose carrying the tune.


Morning sun brings the day
The smell of candles still
Clothes hang to dry from chairs along the walls.

Take our time to wake up
Arms protect you from the chill
"Yesterday," the radio news recalls.

   Then Coltrane blows a story tall
   To a bass line like a siren call
   Building tapestries of Cashmere
   For a dry and blistered blank concrete wall.

   The sunrise like the silver moon
   Paints us in gold and fills the room
   While Rome is burned to embers
   The drums of war rose carrying the tune.
ethyreal Jul 2014
what was it that the wind said?
what was it that the wind said when it
ran itself through your hair and
pressed its face against yours;
a foreground to the watercoloured sunset?

was it the poetry whispered by
lovestruck boys and girls
who kissed, forbidden,
in the clearings of enchanted forests?

or was it the hissing of embers
setting eachother's souls alight
in an **** of crackling fire wood?

was it the ***** chiming amongst
divine silence; only broken by
the tears of joy in a stained glass cathedral,
as she walked towards you in her wedding gown?

or was it the morning rain
as you woke up to an empty bed
with the lingering scent
she left the night before?
Pearl Ra1n May 2016
Seven drops of rain
  sliding slowly down a windowpane
    creating their own currents out of chaotic sky
  perambulating through the reflection of my eye.

Two collide and five remain
  slipping through a beige, unsuitable frame
    reach the bottom and seem to die
  my watercoloured conceivances drip but never fly

Trickles become one pool - a picture I can't explain
  but within dark waters, a swirling hurricane
    those tears kiss distinction goodbye-
  surrender to let my disordered painting unify.
Theodore Bird Mar 2015
Trafalgar in springtime;
     more people than you're used to.
Trafalgar in flickering sunlight;
     more warmth than you're used to.
Trafalgar in the afternoon;
     heavy clouds and weightless pigeon wings.
Dusty hands and feet;
     torn-open knees and holey socks.
Rumpled collar and hair;
     torn to pieces in a mess of watercoloured pages.
Trafalgar in springtime;
     forget the winter, leave it in the ground.
Penelope Winter Aug 2017
The name itself is but euphony.
The woman is
No different.
With ringlets wild,
Faith of child,
Fingers delicate,
Eyes wise,
Her blushēd cheeks
Are watercoloured
Sunrise waking
Winter skies.
There is music in her laughter.
A new note struck
With every opening of her
Pillowed lips.
In times of sorrow,
Speak her name.
Find healing in loving
Julia.

- p. winter
a poem for a friend who feels unlovable
Rob Rutledge Jan 2019
Clouds converge, bow,
Weep for the world below.
A watercoloured grey,
A smeared conglomerate of colour
Traced light upon the day.

A metaphor, I thought,
For where we had lost our way.
One once fought with passion
But with a penchant for decay.
I thawed.
I saw my fundamentals melt.
Hands dealt I would never draw,
A shore so sure it had no law
But an ancient hound with a lazy eye,
A gammy paw and a mangy hide.
Yawned while clouds wept on high,
Snored as silence passed him by.
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.

— The End —