Horizon

Here's to people with messed-up heads but more importantly, here's to people who still stay and support you. 

Horizon
By: Akhilesh Agarwal

The horizons are razor sharp, my love
             Cutting across your eyes, your bloodied face
I am coming down to drown your grief and pain in your seas
             I am coming down to drag your body out to the shore
I will untangle weed out of your hair and breathe into your mouth
             I will press into your heart till it gives into my hand
I am coming down to give you a taste of my skin
             I am coming down to drag you out of yourself

You told me once that a person can never be in two places at once
            But look, my love, I am in your seas and our hands are reaching for your skies.

                

Like Real People Do

'Honey just put your sweet lips on my lips/ We should just kiss like real people do' ~Hozier, Like Real People Do

Like Real People Do

By: Akhilesh Agarwal

I.

We are cutting ourselves open and stitching ourselves shut

With cut-glass strings and trembling hands 

Your lips have bled and stained your shirt bright red

How do you wash off the blood? I said

You smiled and looked at me like I was half-insane

You said, ‘Don’t you remember? You kiss it all away

Lick off the blood and swallow it all slowly’,

                I don’t remember ever touching you, ever being so close

‘You kissed me. You made me taste my blood.’

II.

You pin me to the floor by my throat, beating me to submission

This is nothing sexual, this is an ending I never desired

I lie desolate, repeating your name like a prayer

                What grave can hold me? I cannot be buried.

‘I will burn you to the ash, feed it to the birds

They will fly you to the moon, spread you over

You will think of me in the space, how you ruined me’

                I never did such a thing. I only kissed you

‘You did. You kissed me. You made me taste my blood.’

III.

Now I am stone cold and you are trying to shrug me off

We both know how this one ends, we have known it all along

 It ends with me alive and you sedated to the bone white

                I ruined you, I kissed you

‘How could you? You were mine to imagine.’

A Thousand Crows

‘Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.’ ~Richard Siken, Crush

A Thousand Crows

By: Akhilesh Agarwal

Imagine a thousand crows coming at you with a vengeance
               Imagine your lover’s lips sewn shut, the needle belongs to you
Imagine a bridge, the water beneath red, the sky above red
               Imagine a sword in a movie coming out of the screen and cutting you open

These are all the things I imagined when I looked at your fingers
               Hooking themselves in his neck, I hate the term lovers
Makes it sound like sex, makes it sound like a blasphemy
               Makes it sound like everything I don’t want the two of you to be

Throw open a window, we have to look at the sky again
               If fates are written in stars, I wonder if mine is dead
I have come to realize this, faith is like a crow
               Imagine it to be anything but black as sin.

From The Ground Up

'I am drowning, there is no sign of land/ You are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand.' ~The Mountain Goats, No Children

From The Ground Up
By: Akhilesh Agarwal

Speak in monochrome colors
In the night sky, in its rhythm
My love, suns are dying every second
You are whispering consolations to you
Your sacred heart
Your hellish soul, ravaged like a flood
Did it drown you or did you finally swim?
Keep this town in your spaces, forget
The words they have ever spoken
Bury them in parts of you you can’t reach
We just weren’t made that way
We are blossoming or breaking
We are eternally changing.

Boxed-In

'The fear : that nothing survives.The greater fear : that something does.
The night sky is vast and wide.' 

~Richard Siken, excerpt of The Language of The Birds

Boxed-In

By: Akhilesh Agarwal

Imagine this
You are under the sea, in a room hardly big enough
She says, your face is all the shades of despair
It is all you have ever known, you wish not
You wish you could swim away and away
You have known people, sure, but they leave
You don’t know if they survive the water
If they can breathe in water, you often wonder
But that is all you ever do, you wonder

You wish you could open the gates with your skinny arms
You wish you could set your eyes upon the room for finality
But you are afraid to find out what awaits beyond the gates
Is it a sea so green that your eyes will water in ecstasy
Or the corpses of all the people that were too foolish to believe

You have cut yourself so many times
Just below your neck, just above your abdomen
You can never find your gills, just lungs
Dying of boredom
You wonder if you have them in your back, if they exist
You wonder if she will cut you for you
Just right above the shoulder blades, your gills will be pink
And as she cuts, they will unfurl like a peacock’s feathers
You wonder if she will be happy to see you realize your dream
Or if she will lie to keep you with her, darling, there are no gills
Just blood and muscle beating to the rhythm much like mine
I can’t cut you anymore, I can’t hold the parts I take anywhere
I am too full darling, I am done
You wonder if you will give up then
You wonder if you will act like you believe her and stay.

From One To Seven

"Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.” ~Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

or

“I don’t know where I end and the world begins. My best guess? Skin. It’s the only actual boundary between the body and the world, between a body and any other body.” ~Richard Siken

From One To Seven
By: Akhilesh Agarwal

I am always falling into deeper recesses of my mind
Seven in total,
Eight if you count my skull
I don’t
Seven in total then, the recesses of my mind
In each I don’t have something
Rather than have something
In each I am holding your skin
In each I know the reason why

             
             One, There is greed
to sell your skin for bones
to carve myself a house much better than your body

             Two, There is lust
to unravel your skin like a secret
and bathe myself in its glory, in its blood, in its lies.
             

            Three, There is anger
to tear it in swatches, to tear it in stars
to tear it so many times that I am brought alive

            Four, There is nothing but your skin and reason

            Five, There is nothing

            
            Six, There is faith
to be kept, and skin to be explored
if your skin was a jungle, could I be the riffle exploding through

             
             Seven,
             Seven times I have told you this before
             And you still haven’t come to know
             My skin is your skin
             My reason is we are quiet.

Silence

'When I am pipe and slippers and rocking chair, singing dreadful songs about summer.' ~ Arctic Monkeys, Love Is A Laserquest
Silence
By: Akhilesh Agarwal

I know how silence works
I have known it since forever
Since I have been in my mother’s womb and didn’t kick
Her womb was a gift that I couldn’t dare disturb
So I slept silent, I couldn’t know my mother didn’t

I know how silence breeds
Like a cacophony in a jungle, like panic in a crowd
I know it because I have seen it happen while I lay silent
Silence is not always a calm breeze but a tomb
Bury all the things that you wish had lived

I know how silence ends
It ends like a cut to the jugular; it ends like a moan to skies
It ends like a dying wish, like a hopeless overture
It ends like both feet off the cliff, it ends like me
Hush, I know how silence kills.

Embrace

I wish everything were all as I wish for but then again, where's the fun in that?
Embrace
By: Akhilesh Agarwal

I dream a world in which you aren’t covered in shame
My love, there seas are as blue as the skies you see
My love, there you aren’t curling your toes wrapping
a universe that you can only wish for in your thoughts
A universe in the slick of your toes, in which you are his
And he is yours, quite lovely the way silence seems

The way you come up with lies astounds me
To see someone filtering filth through something so pure
So beautiful your lips, the way they curl into a smile so wistful
The way they seem so tired some days, so hopeful the other
I wish I could tell you to just let them reach your eyes
Because my love, that is where all beautiful stars are
Waiting to dance in the lap of your embrace.

Water Nature

'Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.' ~A.A. Milne

Water Nature
By: Akhilesh Agarwal

In an ocean so vast, you lay darling

As undiscovered as the depths of the tides

That wave the boats home, men tossing their nets

Around themselves, in a tight noose,

Around my neck, and your face

Is painted behind these eyelids, while I weep

May morning return you to me.

It is the water’s nature, don’t you know it?

To take up everything in its crash

And now that you have left me a shell, a story

Don’t stray near the land where I don’t wait

Lest morning should return you to me.

Toska

'No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.' ~Vladimir Nobakov

Toska

By: Akhilesh Agarwal

(i) Take me home No, drag me By my skin and bones Pull off my clothes Let the sand burn through I am greedy To feel the threshold pass me I will hold all your chains Until you feel I am worthy.

(ii) Open-mouthed star, sleeping galaxy Shake away the dust, let meteors fall You can strip away layer each And still have parts left to reach.

(iii) Fathoms deep, the ocean fills me Occupying sinuses, coagulating my being But with every breathe I heave I only hope you embrace me.

The Normal Nothing

The Normal Nothing

By: Akhilesh Agarwal

Mother, when I come home,

I won’t be true, I won’t be clean

I will hold myself

With the silence in between

And mother, could you smile

For a fleeting moment

Soon enough, your son shall die

After he sees the swallows fly 

He shall kiss himself between the bridge of his nose

He shall sing himself all his favourite notes

Mother, could you feel the goodbye

Like some air sucked out of an abandoned room

He left his teardrops beneath that cabinet

Could you check and see if they have dried

Or if they still cake his face, stuffed in a bag

And you are miles away, looking away.

Hail and Quivers

'Memories warm you up from the inside. but they also tear you apart.' ~Haruki Murakami, Kafka On The Shore.

This poem is vaguely inspired by a book I recently read, 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro. The book left a very deep impression on me and I feel the aforementioned quote summarises the book and the poem perfectly.

Hail and Quivers

By: Akhilesh Agarwal

In our isolation was a sense of freedom

We stood at land’s edge and felt home

You wrestled your way into me

And l didn't remember a time before anymore

Your body was, no doubt, wasting

Breaking like an old beaten boat

But your eyes were all stars and sugar

And glazing over with the thought of time

The eternity stood in wind, hushed and quiet

But you could feel it crawling your way up your spine

You grabbed at your cord and pulled down

And fell, fell deeper into the recesses of my mind.