[poetofblues]

the heartbreak is the greatest massacre.

[poetofblues]

it is frighteningly beautiful to recognise how out of loss and brokenness we try to abandon certain memories, and then there are those who look into the mirror struggling to remember their own identity.

[poetofblues]

i was asked what has your departure done to me? i answered that i have lost my ability to see the colour blue, only a shade of sadness permeates the sky and the sea. the infinities, the forevers, the always and the all-ways have turned into a tone of emptiness, an inescapable void. does it ache? yes, just like the pain of a broken glass cutting itself. they asked me why i didn’t do anything to stop you? how could i? i was never was your first love. it was always death. how do i still survive? because inside this hollowed body i still carry the ashes of your soul and every alive moment i choke on my own memories and breaths.

[poetofblues]

have you ever deliberately broken your own heart

to understand the colour of your beloved’s ache?

[poetofblues]

my heart is a minefield, where

memories of you ceaselessly explode.

and your love resurrects me from the dead.

[poetofblues]

my heart bleeds of hopelessness

against a blizzard of silences

that fills the distance between us

as frost settles between my eyelashes

and a cold wind caresses my numb lips

i realise the winter of love has long

gone by. but the season of a sombre snow

in this frozen heart never ends

[poetofblues]

my memory of the time is cluttered,

did it happen at all, was it even me,

did we meet at all?

[poetofblues]

what is one line of poetry/writing that lives in your head rent free?

[poetofblues]

my heart is a city devoid of people — people who are alive. there are a lot of you i have buried in here!

[poetofblues]

I hope that you do go and visit the memory lanes of your heart someday. Be careful, they may have gathered a bit of dust. Under the streetlights of longings and regrets, you may find my heart roaming like a hungry animal looking for scraps of love and hope.

— excerpt, letters to bl(you)e

[poetofblues]

we have become ruined landscapes.

[poetofblues]

one day you sing a song looking into the mirror your reflection hums back a different tune you toss between reflection and recognition wondering when did the mirrors turn into furnaces you watch your hopes burn to ground with palms filled with your own ashes you begin to add some more depth to your grave holding guns in their hands they ask what’s the colour of hell? can bullets paint rainbows? how do you draw borders in your heart? wars are not fought on lands they are first born in our minds with the weights of sufferings we become ruined landscapes the shades of hell become furiously dark we stop looking to the skies waiting for our guardian angels to arrive instead we look at eye level into the eyes of another human knowing that we are each other’s saviours sufferings don’t always need a cure sometimes it’s an acknowledgement that makes a miraculous difference there are cries of unknown people from faraway lands that wake you up from your sleep you become grateful for your bed for the ground below your feet and for the roof above your head some roll back into to the comfort of their fortunes others blindly dive into the night hoping to save a drowning cry you are fatigued fighting and standing up for your beliefs democracy, humanity, religion, politics gender, caste, equality, freedom all shaped like a noose from a tree sweat gathers around your neck knowing the grip will tighten any moment ‘the world is full of paper. write to me.’ even if it means to put an axe to a tree? you wonder. you hope! sometimes you have to stretch the void that develops between you and the world because the abyss becomes your new mirror echoing the songs of your sufferings the skeletons of memories rise and begin to dance in the cemetery how long will it take for the rivers of grief to melt from our eyes and rain upon your cold hearts.

[poetofblues]

“damn us poets! we have made pain so beautiful that people sometimes forget that it still is pain.”

— khawaja musadiq

[poetofblues]

At the outset I would like to state that this is not a comparison but an acknowledgement. No two griefs are comparable. They cannot be placed on weighing scales to ascertain which one sits heavier on someone’s chest.

The awareness of mental health conditions is much wider spread than ever before. Today, while extending my sympathy and empathy for every person fighting depression, I would like to dedicate this piece to all the people who are a support person for someone facing depression. For their selfless dedication, incredible determination and beautiful acceptance.

Being a support person for someone with a mental health condition must feel like a journey through a blur. A support person forgets to live from day to day and begins surviving from episode to episode. The clocks in the house remain stationary with dead batteries in them. As if they too understand the irrelevance of time. A support blows out, with eager breaths, candles that bring light to their lives because the person they love only knows how to survive in darkness. And then one day the realisation hits that just love is not going to be enough.

While the person with a mental health condition begins to dig all the graves in the graveyard of his/her mind to ensure that they find themselves in one of them, a support person stands in the corner holding a bunch of flowers in his/her hands. Flowers as an acknowledgement of the weight of death on their loved one’s mind and flowers also as a significance of hope – that life is still beautiful.

Life isn’t about dealing with the cards or lemons given to you. Pills become a reality of it – of different shapes, sizes and colours. And the support people try to suck out the bitterness and only hand over the blandness of reality to the person they are taking care of. Implausible as it may sound, this is what it feels like. And how do you aid someone to swallow this pill of reality?

Perhaps it is a challenge for the minds like mine to comprehend what it must be to watch a part of your heart trying to tighten a rope around itself and you are given a double-edged razor to cut it. In every possibility of cutting the rope, of being a saviour, you have to bleed. This is no longer about choices but about the only choice you have.

Life becomes like disappearing moments, moments that neither have a past nor a future but are born and die in the same instance. The three-dimensional life turns into a one-dimensional existence – that of intersecting lines of the person with mental health condition and of the support person. Depression at one end of these lines and something unknown at the other end. Every step in this journey becomes a destination to celebrate survival. There are no simple roads but just deep oceans that drown you or formidable peaks with exit signs.

To all those support people out there, I know that the people you are helping to heal may not be able to express their gratitude at times, rather many a times. But please accept this as an acknowledgement of their and our thankfulness which may have escaped until now to take the shape of words. While depression and the depressed have become the subject matter of poetry and other forms of art, please know that you are that shapeless dream in the shadows that makes it all possible.

[poetofblues]

numb. a poem #poetofblues #khawajamusadiq #poem

[poetofblues]

count your stars. a poem.

[poetofblues]

#poems #poemsporn #poetry #micropoetry