Tragic nightmares, of words that send down a chill

and drops of deep red that sadistically spill.

-

An inhumanely coldness frozen inside a vein,

shields flawlessly, the happiness you feign.

-

A man with a sword and an axe out to kill,

you sit for death and the world becomes still.

-

Tragic nightmares, of a sour bloodstain,

they cannot be washed, all attempts are in vain.

-

Once solace fools, the time goes downhill,

making you want to end yourself off your will.

-

A place of malign and forever bearing the pain,

a place of the haunt where the unnatural demons reign.

-

Tragic nightmares, of irrefutable hideous skill

and something of the sphere that makes one ill.

-

A mind of grotesqueness bounded with a chain,

awaiting an end towards a peace to finally attain.

-

Fantasizing a utopia with the darkness of the thrill,

with a box in the hand of memories to instill.

-

Tragic nightmares, making the black venom to rain,

the rain might stop, but will undeniably visit again.

I can't step out into the world.

The echoes of her

thoughts reached

another dimension.

The flowers and leaves

might

wilt and dry

on my touch.

She declared with

a deep sigh.

The sun will lose

its lustre

when I look at it.

The shine will

go into hiding,

it will want refuge

from me.

She walked over

to the mirror.

Stared blankly at her own

reflection.

Stars will quit twinkling

when I begin to

admire them

with my eyes.

One of her hand

reached the surface

of the mirror

and stroke her own

reflection with

a kind of hopelessness

that seemed

unparalleled

through ages.

The soils of

the meadows

will lose their fertility

if I walk on them.

People will divert

their eyes from me

if I try

to approach

them.

Hideousness

has enveloped me.

She noticed

that a lonely tear

had escaped her eyes

after all the struggles

she had put

to keep it inside.

She stared

at her

lean reflection.

The void of her eyes

stared back at her.

The void spoke.

The flowers and leaves

are craving

for your touch

so that they can finally

stretch and yawn into a bud.

The sun

is awaiting your presence.

The stars

continue

to twinkle

knowing one day

you'll admire them

with your eyes.

The soils of the meadows

ache

for the familiar

gentleness

of your feet.

The eyes which

are worthy

of looking at you

are eager to see

the purity

in your possession.

The enchantments

lie

beneath the layers of

your skins and flesh.

Don't look at me, the void

with superficiality,

or your skin

calling it a disgrace.

Look beyond the void,

o woman

of exalted beauty.

Look beyond.

Maybe. Just maybe.

You were the Richard to my

Monica, not Chandler.

You were the Snape to my Lily, not

James.

You were the Stefan to my Elena,

not Damon.

You were the Edgar Linton to my

Catherine, not Heathcliff.

You were the Jacob to my Bella,

not Edward.

You were the Laurie to my Jo, not

Bhaer.

Maybe. Just maybe.

You did love me immensely.

But were not my happily ever

after.

I have loved myself

even when

you said you

couldn't love me.

I have loved myself

even when

I used to

say that

there's nothing such as self love

within me.

I have loved myself

even when

I said I

hated myself.

I have loved myself

even when

I blamed myself

for every atrocity,

every foul play of fate.

I have loved myself

even when

people I trusted

and people I cared about

eluded me.

I have loved myself

even when

I was left

out.

Left out of every plan,

every attribute

that I thought

I would've been great at.

I have loved myself

even when

you blamed me for

everything that went wrong,

everything that could've

so easily been your fault.

And I reckon that it was.

I have loved myself

even when

people forgot I

existed at all.

Chose to ignore me

deliberately or otherwise.

I have loved myself

even when

I said I

wouldn't be able to,

through all the adversity and

trials of my patience.

I didn't see this love

I had for myself

because I constantly

depended on other people

for the same.

But now since this epiphany,

I did come to realise it.

Because now I know,

if I hadn't loved myself,

my survival instinct

would have been absent

through it all.

Because now I know,

if I hadn't loved myself,

I would not have

come this far.

My paradoxes fascinate me.

I find comfort in sorrow

and discomfort in daylight.

I try to make amends

and end up making

everything even worse.

More pain is my go-to

defense mechanism.

I complain of being alone

yet I push everyone away.

I resent positivity.

I condemn my memories

but my heart is latched onto them.

I dread reality so much

that I zone out of it often.

I disassociate myself

from this world,

from confronting my own feelings.

To a world where

torture is soothing

but pain doesn't exist.

Hating myself

while knowing it isn't healthy.

Thinking that I'm incapable of love

and no one will ever love me,

but deep down knowing

that I deserve pure love.

Knowing that I should take control

of my life

but letting life take control of me.

I loathe trends

but lowkey being jealous

of happiness

of people involved in trends.

That I want to stand apart,

not among the herd,

but envying companionship

of the ones in the herd, that they're not alone.

Commitment without the future.

Most fascinating paradoxes

are my greatest fears.

My greatest fears

are the things that are inevitable.

Heartbreak.

Pain.

Loneliness.

Loss.

Life.

But a prick to savour it.

Interestingly,

death.

Craving death, but terrified of it at the same time.

And yes.

Change.

Constant change.

Where have you been?

Why are you here?

It's a little late, don't you think?

Sometime ago,

I would've been terrified

with the fact that you don't need me.

Questions in my mind

don't know where they come from.

I end up questioning the questions.

Their baseless, meaningless words

floating into the space.

You shaped them once

but now I'm disoriented again.

More than ever.

They are initially a little prick at the back.

And slowly come forward

marking their territory.

I'm a very torn person.

You knew that all along.

I don't know any answers

but questions come to me naturally

as if I was born with them

and they, from me.

They're meant for you most of the time.

You see, I often sharpen their edges

on my tongue

and end up hurting myself.

Why me?

Why are you leaving me?

Did I do something wrong?

Can you forgive me?

The self deprecating neediness.

That's my only answer.

I can't seem to answer anything else,

especially when they come from you.

It's a little late to ask questions like

How are you so beautiful?

You're so brave, aren't you?

Aren't you proud of me?

Because you haven't asked me anything straight lately.

The thing that is the most head spinning.

"You don't need anyone else,

you have yourself."

I find this a fairly rendered void,

deprived of meaning.

We're all codependent beings.

There's no way we don't need someone else.

We just go from needing one person

to another.

We're all selfish.

We ask them to stay for our own needs.

Like you and me.

And let them go when the need is desiccated.

Like you and me.

I'm in a disarray.

After each letter, each word,

a mind numbing question mark I just can't reply to.

I never like rhetorics.

And you left me bundled up

in darkly mocking rhetorics.

Let me put it this way.

Sometimes a question is an answer in itself.

And I'm so afraid to know the answers.

Either way.

I'm starving

because I'm still torn

whether to erase you from my collective consciousness

or just find peace in the fact that

you and I are existing

under the same sky.

Life itself

pushed me back from

its shadowy breeze

and let me alone out in the sun.

It shredded me in such small fragments

that even finding the pieces

was improbable.

When I did find,

I couldn't reach up to them,

so far away they were,

and I could do nothing but

hold out my hand to the sky

and wait an eternity

for each of them

to fall in through the wind

and to think

that they'd beautify the wrinkles

I might be gathering at that time.

But I turned its each hateful trick

into a charm.

A charm that I didn't believe

I had the strength to bear,

I always thought of words as deceptive.

But when I summoned the pieces

of my being

instead of waiting for them hopelessly,

I realised I had the power to

enchant my pain

into words of poetry.

Through this strange magic,

I made the dried up flowers

to emanate fragrance

after they lost all hope of

ever be appealing.

I turned the unbearable shrieks

of my mind

into melancholic notes of music.

I counted sad words on my fingertips

and scattered them across a meadow,

as seedlings of sadness

so that they'd grow with graces of their own.

Each grew into a beautiful, sweet, little sapling.

Pain seeped out from my soul

and I spread it across a white facet

through the fragile tip of my pen

and burned its fiery existence

until all that was left of it

was ash.

People say that nights are the darkest.

That they can't handle the 2 a.m. blackness.

But what can one do

when the blackness persists at noon? At dusk? At twilight?

One cannot discard it.

One cannot possibly get rid of it.

Nothing but to make it seem

so alluring,

that it'd be desirable to the millions of hearts watching it.

It's weird how the blackness of the ink

somehow resembles the one that stays in my heart.

I found a way to be present

through time and space

even though

the only thing I've wanted to be in the past

was to be forgotten.

Forgotten through time

where none of it would matter,

what I am doing,

why I am doing it.

And my whole existence.

You see,

life believes that by

hurling me across

from nowhere to nowhere,

it'd destroy me.

What I did was

make each heartbreak,

each trauma,

each shred of pain,

into something so beautiful

that my psyche

couldn't comprehend

its own be-witchery.

People think they'd break me

through abandonment,

and hostility.

Little do they know,

they made me immortal

with the intention of bringing death up to me.

Little do they know

that the loss is theirs,

and the gain is all mine.

Little do they know

the power of power I possess.

The little blood I've left with,

give me pain

and I'll turn it into poetry.

I gazed at every landscape

of every picture and portrait

that my eyes set their sight upon.

Wondered what all unseen secrets

lie beneath

the grinning air in it,

the literal words of that prose

sung by daffodils swaying

in the merry wind

and the layers of paint in that portrait,

painted by a solitary lad

of a small, cold town.

I have

mixed that red with black

and painted drops of it onto something

as lifeless as a corpse

saying that they resemble my tears.

Lifeless

but bringing it alive

with each word

soaked in peace, pain and paradise,

with each movement of my wrist

while stroking the different brushes,

the tip of my pen,

and the graphite end of my pencils

lifting that

iron wrought

weight off the surviving flesh

of my soul.

Art adds the 't' at the end of 'pain'.

Smeared on my hands,

the ink spots bearing whispers of rhymes,

paint stains bearing sobs of a rose.

I handlettered

'solace' across the different horizons

of the skies,

to imbibe myself of it,

when rain the blues.

I shouted poetry off the top of my terrace

until my throat was sore

and heart floating

alongside its reverberations.

I made an aesthetic container

out of my mother's broken cup,

and filled it with waters of a dream,

and hung it over

the most fragile branch of the tree.

I doodled names of wizards

on that same tree

with a blade of the melancholies.

I gulped down one book after another.

One story after another.

One poem after another.

Each had its own taste and fragrance.

Sour. Salty. Sweet. Bitter. Hot.

Sad. Funny. Romantic. Cheesy. Magical.

Heartwarming. Heart-rending.

I tore paper hearts, pandas,

teardrops, flowers and stars,

and pasted them in my

journal of fantasies.

All unrealistic, inhumane and satirical.

Pain of the January and the May.

All unending ballads or essays

combined

would still be short of praise,

that art possesses

in relieving the pain

off an agonized being.

Here's a glittery pizzazz

thank-you card,

to art itself.

Art is the best coping mechanism.

Art is therapy.

Tears are a perpetual plethora of emotions.

Inexplicable entities.

Ambiguous.

It gets exasperating.

When they come out of their hiding

from inside your exhausted eyes

without giving you a heads up.

Those exhausted eyes

which haven’t known sleep for days,

or eyes which have known the dark

for hours.

Eyes which are in delusion,

eyes which know the truth.

Eyes which see the moon painted onto a pale evening sky.

Eyes which have seen blood splattered across their vicinity.

You might question their existence.

Why do they even exist?

It would be better to cry

if they didn’t exist.

There would be no awkward interrogation.

“Are you crying?”

“Why are you crying?”

“What happened?”

“Is everything okay?”

You want to put them on a display.

Let them be known.

They’re no less than a work of art.

Because yes,

they’re made of that saltwater of pain.

But you don’t.

You’re in fear.

Always in fear.

Without tears,

crying would be gratifyingly easy, wouldn’t it?

They wouldn’t run into weird places

like your ears

when you’re lying down.

Or into your mouth when you’re sitting up.

It gets exasperating.

When they trickle down your skin.

Skin that has been burned.

That skin for which the tears

might’ve been known throughout.

Skin that knows no touch of love.

Skin that has bore the tears for years.

It gets exasperating.

When they deceive you.

Tears are heart-rendingly deceptive.

Sometimes you want them

to come out of their hiding

but they don’t.

They get stuck in your veins.

Mixed with the blood,

making it burn in each part of the body.

At other times,

the blood throws them out

like a pen without ink.

Most deceptive when

they show themselves

in happiness.

What is happiness? They ask.

You want to cry

with each ache

that your body so proudly possesses.

Human emotions always come back to tears.

Happiness? Tears.

Sadness? Tears.

Anger? Tears.

Frustration? Tears.

Disgust? Tears.

Surprise? Tears.

Loneliness? Tears.

Jealousy? Tears.

Trust? Tears.

Anticipation? Tears.

Numbness? Meaningless tears.

But only the vision gets blurred with them.

Even being this way,

they are the sole companion

which you never realise

or expect them

to be.

With eerie darkness,

not the light which swells,

are the eyes

still ablaze.

_

Beyond is a soul

as worthless as ever,

yet the hollow heart

still weighs.

_

Neither a beautiful soul,

nor a powerful mind

which steps,

settles and stays.

_

For faith, friendship,

fidelity and fantasy

the heart needed

a perfect paraphrase.

_

Wasn't love or peace

or companioship I craved

but that endless sleep

during a stargaze.

_

Stuck in an infinite loop

of grief and shame

hearing a chiming

that it's just a phase.

_

Leaving a trail of

hopelessness with a

black paint and forever

deprived of the sun's rays.

_

Treading on the path

of false obsession

over-encompassing

a million healthy ways.

_

Everything clear

but the mind chained

with gloom, and stuck

in a mist and haze.

_

Life goes on

with its monotony

and lumber but

the death delays.

_

Yet it is not what I think

nor what everyone else

reckons it to be,

here is where everyone strays.

_

Through the uncountable

screams echoing through,

ears heard music, the strength

of the soul did amaze.

_

Light comes after darkness,

eyes saw light.

With timeless tears comes

the solace worth of days.

_

Nothing comes with

extreme force,

let it be, let it flow

stop the infinite chase.

_

It is a heart-rending

and never ending

cycle, it is endless

yet still a mortal maze.