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.