#AboutLastNight

Liquid courage, they call it;
A swig is all you need
To take life by the balls
And to chase your dreams.

One swig
And you'll stop being scared
Stop wishing you'd dared
That one time
When you ran away.

It's fight distilled from adrenaline

It's the balls to say what you mean.

Liquid courage
One swig and you're super human;

You're doing stuff they said you can't
You're breaking rules
You never believed in
You're saying words
You rehearsed
A hundred times in front of a mirror.

A sip to remember
That you're the boss
That it's your job
To take charge
Send that mail
And goddammit, ask for that raise!

Your best friend
Leading you to the dance floor
That lying bastard
Who says you're a bomb
When you're probably more a nunchuk
And that REALLY shouldn't be
Your song.

Your wingman
Who hates to see you crash and burn
But knows she's so damn far
Out of your league
That you probably shouldn't even dream of her.
A swig is all it takes

For "Hi, what're you drinking?"

That idiot
Who told you "You have a dream""
"You have a gift
Damn, you should perform your poetry
It really speaks to me"
Except they've been swigging
Pretty damn hard themselves.

Aged for years
With wisdom imbibed from
Oak casks, and brewing tanks
Microscopic bubbles of yeast-fuelled logic
Pushing their way into your mind
Telling you what you already know
Just don't have the impetus to go for.

Liquid fucking courage.
Because for some reason
Without one swig
You have a duty to suppress it
You know what you want
But you're denied it
Flight fights back
Flight comes in first place
While you cower in the back
"Bhai daaru lao..."

Almost There

I’m not perfect and I don’t expect
To really ever be
I have endless flaws but that’s just how
I know to be me
I’m a fighter, undercover
As a quiet soul
Perfection bides away its time
Till it's unleashed upon the world.

I’m not perfect, not even close yet
And I’ll never be
I’m a warrior, undercover
Till something deserves me
It won’t be perfect, I can’t expect
Anything to be
But I’ll fight if I’m convinced I should
And that this fight, I fight for me.

I’m flawed for sure, I can’t deny it
But I’m almost there
The flaws are mine to hold for life
Not something I despair
I’ll find a flaw I can complement
And then things will be perfect
But till then I’m almost there
I’m not perfect yet.

Falling in Love More Than Once

Love seems to come & go as it pleases
Looks like it listened to you
And those pointless & super cheesy
Dialogues you continue to spew:

"If I don't leave, how will I return?"
A pathetic attempt to soothe the burn
Of the departure I struggle against
Of the long wait that lies ahead.

Until I see you the next time
And all the love comes rushing in
Like the crashing waves of the incoming tide,
A tidal wave set of from within.

I guess it's worth the wait again
Till you find a way back to me
And I fall in love all over again
So many times now, I gave up counting.

OCD

Routine to see.
Shudders from you
At my style
Which I refuse
To match to yours
Because I’m all odds:
Odd Socks. Odd Laces
Odd Rhymes
Odd Timing
Oddball Furball.

And your structure
Causes torture
Too fixed
Too matched
To match to my desire
For oddities
Among symmetry.

Straining
Against what we are, inherently
Built so differently.
Obsessive in our own degrees;
Your even keel & my extremity
Both out of sorts
With all humanity.

But we’re calmer
When we’re together
Because when two halves make one
They must fit
In symmetry
In equality
And here we agree perfectly
With each other.

Fitting cracks into cracks
Where we both broke
In unison
Where equal hurt
Rests quietly
Complementary
To the capacity
To heal

Till we’re fixed
On one reality
That obsessive-compulsively
We must be
You & Me.

Last Dance

Save the last dance for me
The one where the band
Recycles all the old beats
The one you'll debate sitting out
The night is almost over, you admit defeat
Lose that argument
Get off your seat
Because you're dancing that one with me.
That waltz where the floor's almost empty
Where by now, it's only alcohol, not energy
And it will be just you & me
And a dance we'll share for eternity.
Not the first, with the awkward moves
Nor later, the beats pulsing through the room
We'll wait for it, there's no hurry
As long as you promise to dance with me.
We'll hum quietly along to the tune they play
A mellow, sepia end to the day
It won't matter who you danced with in between
The last one, you will reserve for me.
So at the end of the day, at the end of it all
I know it will be me you'll call
Together, you & I, we'll fall
Into a rhythm that will play on
And it will happen so naturally
I'll hold you & you'll hold me
Nobody, nothing else left to see
Because you're dancing your last dance
With me.

Aaji's Fridge

We're all a bunch of nomads
We don't have roots, we have a family tree
4 daughters, 8 grand-daughters & assorted family
Who all set out to travel as far as could be
Festivals were different wherever we would be
Even the hours moved very differently
Days passed by at different speeds
Reunions became distant dreams
But there's one place we gathered at
One place that remained
Aunts, cousins, husbands cats
One place to which we came

Open the door and take a look
You'll spot all parts of the globe
Work, travel, business & fun
Snapshots from wherever we'd go
Spices sourced from Italy
Saffron straight from Spain
Chocolates from Duty Free
And achaar always remained
We never met all at once
What with work, life, college, kids...
But we still connected somehow
In the interiors of my Aaji's fridge

No matter who, or where they were
We brought back lovely things to eat
Because we knew, once safely stored
They'd be the way the family meets
That fridge is a symbol of the family
Each taste different, each choice unique
Each ready to partake cheerfully
Of the complete insanity

There was always something for you there 

Whoever you were, there would be

Something special just for you 

Included in the mix carefully 

You knew, whenever you rummaged through

You were where you had a right to be

It wasn't just another fridge

It was a tribute to family

I don't know where that fridge will go now
Nor does the machine matter to me
I only wish, somewhere, somehow
We find another excuse to meet
How else will we share the love
What else could we use to bridge
Time zones, people, countries without
The central point of Aaji's fridge?
Where will home-made bhaaji meet
The sinful chocolate of the Swiss
Where else will the fancy Cheese
Meet gharcha loncha in total peace?
Our melting pot is unhooked now
The shelves morose & empty
We'll find another, there's no doubt
And on those shelves, again we'll meet
But the central point will always be
The shelves of my Aaji's fridge
Where we returned religiously
Despite work, life, college or kids.

Aashna Iyer - The Last Supper - Airplane Poetry Movement

Climax

She fell back against her pillow, exhausted.
She had to take a few deep breaths to calm her rapidly beating heart, each breath escaping her lungs as a sigh. Lying in the comfort of her sheets, she closed her eyes, reliving the past hour or so, smiling at the memories, revelling in the complete satisfaction engulfing her.
"What a workout..." She whispered, her eyes still closed, "nobody prepares you for this stuff."
He had really pushed her to her limits, taking her to heights she didn't know she could reach. It had all escalated so fast, she still couldn't believe it. When her phone had buzzed, she had no idea it was the start of something so... "Phenomenal..."
She grinned to herself, aware that she was shamelessly boosting his ego, but she knew it was equally her contribution.
They had both been giver and taker, alternating seamlessly, supporting each other without needing to say anything. Like he'd read her mind, he had responded to every cue in fairytale fashion. And she'd loved having a hand in his responses, knowing that the increasingly intense reactions, the new responses, the involuntary reactions they had both experienced were what they had created together.
She replayed their conversation in her head, from the first message to the last, laughing at all the bad jokes, heart-rate increasing at every new level of intellectual stimulation and marvelling at his skill with words.
"Who knew a random conversation about nothing could be this intense an experience?" She murmured to herself, unlocking her phone to read the chat again.
He had the disconcerting skill of taking a simple chat conversation to dizzying heights. Which was why she was so hooked to him. It was a rush so much more potent than flirting, so much more real than sex; talking to him made her brain work on overdrive. It wore her out like no physical encounter could, nobody had made her feel this alive before, nothing had ever made verbal sparring this... Memorable.
"And the best part? It's all virtual... No expectations from this... No 'will he, won't he'..."
Chat over, end of story...
She flopped back into bed, smiled at the chat window once again before keeping her phone away, turning the lights off and sleeping an unparalleled sleep.

Happy Endings

Real life is not a happy ending. In fact, there really cannot be a single, black and white ending to real life. There’s no clear-cut phase which you can really identify. So when this is true, and it’s obvious, by “Elementary, my dear Watson” that all romantic products created by authors, writers, musicians and any other dream-sellers are fiction, why do we still produce them?

Isn’t selling a Rom-Com essentially just selling a lie?

Probably. But then again, if life’s so bleak and the future is so grim, then is there any harm in dreaming a little?

Think about it this way: If your dreams become nightmares with glimpses of work and traffic and bosses and screwed-up love-lives and… You get my drift… If dreams are nightmares and reality is fuelling your nightmares, then where do you get to take a detour and a breather?

Eat, sleep, work, rinse and repeat; this is the way our lives function today, so where do we relax? Where do we get to slow down and glimpse dreams as they were; a world where love and peace of mind are not distant castles in the sky, where do we get to refuel hope and positivity?

I am a writer. I sell you pictures I paint through my words. And you know what? I’ll sell you fiction wrapped up in rainbows and fairy-dust because I need to do something to refurnish dreams. I’m stuck in a world where there’s no time for love. Relationships are a waste of time and passion is too slow for the pace at which the world is going. So I build dreams of my own. I like to imagine a world where, just for those few moments, life isn’t waiting with Karma around the corner to stab you with something else.

And this is why I sell you dreams.

Because I want to at least believe that I can help someone forget about the crap life throws at them for a while. I want to further escapism. You can call it what you want, you can say that I’m helping people live in denial and furthering stereotypes and building a pretend world where everything is just an illusion. But I will do it anyway.

Because there’s no point in living if there’s no hope, no starry-eyed dreamers and no dreams. You can’t survive on a sleep peppered with nightmares.

So I am a writer. And I will sell you happy endings.