Stuffed Toy Unicorn

"It's so fluffy I will die", she said when she was small and cute. As Agnes grew up, I, her unicorn, became her sexuality. She hugged me to sleep, the hugs were the same, only with tears, sometimes.

[poems-for-agnes]

Birds live inside

Birds of paradise, bee-eaters, mynahs, bulbuls.

They'd love to fly out

But they stay quiet and calm for me.

Creepers and weeds grow inside

They are forever begging me with bribes of flowers, green, new buds, glossy baby leaves, mature leaves of forest green.

They'd love some sunlight,

But they don't send their tendrils to explore the cracks --

For me.

Little children fly kites inside

They love talking to the birds

They twirl the creepers around their small, soft bodies

And giggle at each other.

They don't want to go out either, they play inside.

The winds outside tear their kites apart,

Make the threads go haywire

Their kites bring each other down unintended,

Out of control. The blazing sun

Mars the vibrant colours on the kite paper.

They love the inside of my closet.

I am sworn to their well-being

I can't stand them being unhappy

So I keep the doors closed.

The birds, they understand.

The creepers -- they get it too.

It is comfortable inside.

[poems-for-agnes]

The Stranger

When Someone I Like asks me “where are you from?”

I want to take them down to my college, with its Bidisha Jheel shimmering in the Ganga breeze. Yellow flowers stuck on the barbed wire fence surrounding it, for mind you, the Jheel has quite an appetite — it swallows whole everyone who tries to embrace it without asking.

When Someone I Like asks me “who are you?”

I want to tell them that I weave stories inside my head when I am lazing around, and when I am bored I make my characters have babies, then the babies grow up fast and the parents die just so that I can have a new set of characters without having to imagine a different setting for those new characters! But that’s just a bit of me, you see I also love food, and I —

— I can go on.

When Someone I Like asks me “what do you think of Love”

I want to tell them I prefer my men like Darjeeling tea, with boyish smiles and eyes sparkling with stories to tell; men who carry secret tiny notebooks with poetry written in neat pearls across a randomly occuring page in the middle; men who speak too much and too hurriedly because they are so excited to see me.

But when I love, I love a man with messy hair who binges on murder dramas in their shabby one-room apartment, someone who falls asleep halfway through the word p-o-e-m and surely has leftover pizza from last night in the fridge.

And when I introduce myself, I use all the qualifier words Life has allotted to me (engineer? Research scholar? IT graduate?), I chew on my smile with fear that everybody knows I am overcompensating for being incomplete.

When they ask me where I am from, I say, “not from here”.

[poems-for-agnes]

The Boring Presentation

Words like bricks, steel paperclips, pins

Esoteric letters and numbers in italics

Tumbling down the fresh white.

Disciplined columns of light, unoffending colours stand guard.

Fistful of brains working, buzzing with a busy "hmmmmm"

I am growing a garden in mine

A tiny kitchen garden. Grass, tiny flowers, dandelions. Blue sky.

The light has moved away from me, onto people with bright sparkling eyes! I am comfortable.

[miss-starrynight]

[poems-for-agnes]

I knew this girl called Lavanya

She spoke four languages

And laughed heartily in all of them

Friends called her Lavi

I gazed at her white teeth

And golden earrings vibrating,

Swinging, singing, when she spoke

And I called her La Vie.

[poems-for-agnes]

I'm happy now

Distance is stronger than rationale

By that, I mean, it's presence allows rationale to spread itself, unfurl it's toolbox and set to work.

You might have tried to be nice to me

for once,

but I no longer want to go back.

You were wrong earlier; now you are right: you tried but I didn't.

The room of regrets is empty.

I reconciled

with the mountains I ran away from.

I climbed them,

I felt each sharp or blunt stone

under my feet.

Then I ran down and embraced

the waves of the sea I love.

[poems-for-agnes]

The Bestie I Never Wanted

Yeah, yeah, this is my pseudo-intellectual blabber about my mental illness. The insignificant letters that follow are not spicy, not heart-warming and inconsequential at best. Being the nerdy asocial unfashionable version of Amy Schumer that I am.... Wait what was my topic? Oh yes, self-loathing.

For the past few years, I have nurtured a young but fast-growing pair of dark circles, who are blossoming into full bloom and mildly represent the abyss in my heart. Lately,y creqtive instincts died. I have been incapable of getting words to align with each other (I used to _kinda_ write), art supplies languish in my room, I have sort of stopped humming -- the only music genre I engaged in. I stay distracted -- in pointless internet and real life debates, superficial manga/anime and gossip. Sometimes, I look at glowing sunshine splattered into artful watermarks on the road and I feel my insides twitching on recognising the internal emptiness.

I imagine Self-Loathing as a woman. In a red and black dress. A tastefully made up face. She stays in suspended animation somewhere up, thus looking down on me. When light falls on her jewellery and glitters, I cower. I feel ashamed of a lot of things -- I feel small, anyone in my shoes would be a better PhD Scholar than me; I feel jealous, I have no talent that rises above mediocre; I body shame myself, what fat bitch keeps getting fatter without managing to at least stop herself from bloating. Each twinkle of her eyes pushes me into a darker corner.

Well, she has kept me from overestimating myself. There are no voices in my head saying "you are bad" because I myself have accepted that and made it true. For the above points, I am indebted to her; she is not wrathful. I just have one thing that I tell her, one thing from the dimly lit corners of my heart...

Whatever you are, however much you corner me, I will make poetry out of you. Maybe not poetry in a language I know, maybe it will just be a poetry of strung together emotions or images. But that is the only teapot in which I can capture you, in true Newt Scamander fashion.

[theheightofdepression]

You’ll hear me down in the valley

Singing songs of old.

You’ll find me up on the mountain

Reaping stars bright and cold.

I am the cloud shepherd,

Wandering,

Roaming,

Gathering.

Restless, aimless,

Through mist and dust,

Dancing in the dusk.

[poems-for-agnes]

Whirling round n' round in ecstasy, like a dervish, I sung of his love; then I sung of His love.

[poems-for-agnes]

Languid Observations

Lunchtime snippets for when my cycle is not working -- Two women walk side by side, their dupattas having a fight on who could flutter the highest in the breeze. The breeze gracefully danced with both of them, giving equal attention. I saw the smatphone spiral : a group of salwar clad ladies sitting around a tree, all gazing at their phones, their colourful dupattas flitting in the wind. The great bougainvillea was guarding our hostel in its magenta majesty, as its fallen petals surround its roots to stand guard on the territorry of resplendent beauty. The Anna who sits at the counter of the mess wishfully stared outside, where the trees were disapprovingly nodding their heads. The demure light coming through the tinted glass panes of the doors formed a pool of illumination at his feet.

[poems-for-agnes]

সুখ

দীর্ঘ দীর্ঘ দিন, মাস,

আমি কাটিয়েছি, কাটাই

নিজেকে শেষ করে দেওয়ার ইচ্ছেটাকে

মেঘ মনে করে...

আমার বিন্দু বিন্দু দুঃখ

জমাট হয়ে সে জন্ম নেয়,

সারা আকাশ ঢেকে ফেলে --

তারপর আমার দমবন্ধ - করা

অপেক্ষার উত্তরে কোনোদিন

আনমনা হয়ে ভেসে চলে যায়।

সুখকে ভেবেছি জোড়া রামধনু,

হাসতে ভুলে গেছি,

উনিশের নামতার মতো।

[poems-for-agnes]

Work in Progress

Screeching, writhing and flailing my limbs about

I've been trying to climb up a wall.

I had willingly leant forward and let myself go

Over the mouth of this well.

"That is the way it is supposed to be"

My hair used to be neatly parted and plaited

I wore loose, covered dresses

I abhorred make up

I shivered when men simply shook my hand.

Freedom with responsibility, I said.

But I had a shape.

Now I am just water.

It is tiring, not choosing a shape!

There are hundreds of rivers inside a sea,

Yet no one knows

No one gets to know whether the river hidden inside

Is happy? Sad? In pain?

I want a sea that I can flow into.

[poems-for-agnes]

I am going

By saying "It will end" again and again

You brought end near.

By saying "It will end" again and again,

You brought end near, because

I denied you humour.

Laughs born of absurdity do not dissolve pain.

I am the ghostwriter of my past self.

When I wanted to lay down colours on the floor,

And gently tumble a basket of kittens over them,

You made me dig graves.

You made me dig graves and work,

"Tap, tap, tap!" Hammering nails on small coffins

I put to rest, a bottle of paint in each coffin

All my colours buried six feet under.

I didn't weep because I had finished my tears the day before.

I feel singeing pain when you rain allpins on me

Verses of allpins congealing into flower frogs : Conversations with you.

My past is coteried now. Now, I can get up

And walk away.

I have been packing my bags for way too long,

And since you have brought the end to the doorstep

See me go.

[poems-for-agnes]

Sometimes I feel

Inside my fat, bloated body

Inside all these

Signs of over-indulgence

Is a shrivelled, thin

Figure, rolled into a

Pose that is a cross

Between a foetus and

Rodin's thinker;

Weeping silently.

[poems-for-agnes]

Browsing Youtube when it's raining outside

The last stanza of the song made many people cry, as the comments would testify. Gentle guitar riffs with grumbling thunderstorms, "borders of our lives". Mulling over awkward moments and sly jibes. Sad and lonely, but a cup o'coffee turns the loneliness to solitude. A deep dive under the weather: I'm just not in the mood. And the chubby teddies patterned onto my blanket console, warmth seeps in like the faint glow of dying candlelight: juxtaposed with the animated glow of the laptop screen, bright. The sighs squibbling at my larynx die down; my frown, straightens, and a tear sinks, into silence.

[poems-for-agnes]

I think "It's okay" are the magic words that we keep telling each other to stay sane when everything is falling apart like a flipped jigsaw puzzle.

[poems-for-agnes]

Partly Cloudy

Do you remember school in the after hours? You would have lost something – A water bottle maybe, or a really soft jumper because you left it somewhere when you felt hot with all the running during “Games” class – And you walk back, gingerly, From the cheery, happy school car park. You enter the behemoth of a building Its halls usually reverberating with clamour, To find it brooding in solitude! But the ghosts of your friends’ mischieves haven’t even left, you ask the structure, How are you so empty? The school house stays quiet He is too dazed to answer you The place where Nimmi sat the whole day, going about her new transformer mechano set, was still warm. The piece of paper with the traces of the highly contested hangman match during last period rocked in the soft breeze. And the curtains, green curtains Swung like shaking eyelashes of someone who was weeping. That sort of imagery stays with you. Wets you like a passing cloud when you happen to recall it. That is how I felt, when I met you by chance, the other day. I was the empty school house, the heavy green curtains. Your smile quickly disappeared, like the boy who forgot his sweater at school.

[writerscreed]

Creed Discovery of September & October 2017

Writers Creed has been digging through the Tumblr Writing Community to find more writers to feature on our blog. Here are the talented writers we have found during September and October who deserve more attention! Check them out and give them a follow, and as usual, keep writing everyone! We cannot wait to find out who will make the list in November!❤

@baldpoetry

@nadaclouds

@softspokenmemories

@ivegotcramps

@tonicristine

@read-my-heart-tonight

@jennfel-blog

@mobbleberry

@juanicu

@parasitethapoet

@starlightpoet

@leemartenspoetry

@xxsixzerosixxx

@the-wild-rxse

@poetfromlondon

@kythepoet

@taylorshowtan

@ghost-417

@shawnraepoetry

@wishididnotwish

@lettersandroses

@wickedmewickedyou

@jossfontenot

@claphandsound

@nicemeniceyou

@quietdissidentlyricist @azukilynn

@mcparty27

@vodkaandbears

@crowned-in-stone

@tomdeckard

@dream-in-hearts

@hiddenwhalewriter

@audiphillips

@teenage-author

@sitandbleed

@secretlyanonymouspoems

@rhymingtherapy

@rockinrollinhippiesoulin

@stripedgriffin

@marcoxroses

@shinypizzakid

@ghostofrevenge

@imagine-quotes

@astyze

@wordsaregolden22

@sassoonery

@synonymousme

@wicked-angeles

@sachdevkarishma

@rquideal

@ohhkandice

@shierri

@anna-g-x

@anavableu

@humcreates

@whispering-soul-in-darkness

@alittlebitofnightmusing

@theaslan17

@blynbleedswords

@r-jacob

@gretchenheffernan

@eaclesparaadoxa

@starrbeau

@alittlelessclueless

@dissonantwindchime

@moldybarstool

@bluemonkwrites

@i-am-bibliophile

@blooodywords

@xxrecoveringprincessxx

@enchantingsaddness

@wordslifeandthings

@words-pouring-out

@justanothermuddledkid

@kozmichaos

@thoughtandforgotten

@fatimanaseem

@lostinthistale

@wordsbykristen

@mthoney

@dearduende

@mirbes

@gil-tea

@tonicristine

@canadaalbin

@righteousghost

@soleanticipation

@shespoly

@mouththorn

@brentefisher

@distinguishabledifferences

@poetdreamerfool

@asiwithercrumbleandfade

@mega2wheellife

@redfortunex

@retrouvailleset

@imogenre

@silver-tounge-bastard

@mizflibble

@pierianensorcell

@onemissingsoul

@bones-and-mortar

@etrawme

@demianmolinari

@miss-mandyy

@naturesbrokenheart

@saccharine-is-a-good-word

@lichen-lull

@xmrgoodguyx

@maybeontuesday

@dreamsarelikedragonflies

@domingobot

@observationsofnow

@alytalang

@blackfeathereddeath @spokenwordonthepage

@writeinmysoul

@poems-for-sleepless-nights

@nervous-poet

@starsmattersinpoetry

@inhalemusicdna

@thevisualaftermath

@thatunicorndaniella

@tkpoet6

@sanojapoetry 

@somehowletters

@applekaur

@zahraapat3l

@seraamala

@creetdavies

@darrion-brown

@substantive-thoughts

@inkfrommyheart

@bookflakeshighbrowangle

@skylightpoet2

@not-so-silly

@cinnaluna

@sanskrutii

@psychic-landscape

@secretlyanonymouspoems

@alyce-wolf-413

@loved-and-lostt-blog 

@biatabones

@which-craft-me

@september-stardust

@ubiquitous-abhorrence  

@crimson-kuwaiti

@poems-for-agnes

[poems-for-agnes]

So happy to have been noticed by senpai!!! Much love and thanks, @writerscreed ❤️