The Ballad of a Lamenting Lunatic

I couldn't be the son you wanted
But trust me, I tried
I couldn't be the friend you wanted
But trust me, I tried
I couldn't be the brother you wanted
But trust me, I tried
I couldn't be the lover you wanted
But trust me, I tried

I tried it all
I tried not being the mess you see around
I tried not being the disaster you think I am
I tried it all

But, aren't we all entitled to failures?

I could never become the son you would have wanted me to
I could never let you in those dark alleys I sleep to every night
I could never live all of that dreamy life you had promised yourself to let me have
I could never do any of it
Did I want to?
Maybe I did, but maybe, just maybe, I wanted a life I could call my own more than a life of unnecessary debts and continual regrets

Is it too audacious to live for yourself for once?

I could never become the friend you would have wanted me to
I could never let you in all of my uncomfortable that I house
I could never be the midnight kerchief to your torments and tears
I could never do any of it
Did I want to?
Maybe I did, but maybe, just maybe, I had too many demons taking shape in the entrails, demons I couldn't let loose

Is it too harsh to live for yourself for once?

I could never become the brother you would have wanted me to
I could never let you in the open scars I hide behind the hundred smiles
I could never be the cornerstone you could look up to in your times of distraught
I could never do any of it
Did I want to?
Maybe I did, but maybe, just maybe, I had too many stories of my own, too many loose ends that could never be mended

Is it too ruthless to live for yourself for once?

I could never become the lover you would have wanted me to
I could never let you in the thousand tales that keep me awake every single night
I could never be the eyes every time you wanted to see the world just a bit differently
I could never do any of it
Did I want to?
Maybe I did, but maybe, just maybe, I was too scared to let you bleed every time you trod on the broken pieces of me like they were your morning meadow

Is it too dead to live for yourself for once?


Maybe I could have saved you all.
But then, who'd save me?

The Ballad of My Death Note

Is this it?
The end?
The end of it all?

I had always wished for a grandeur of a goodbye.
But then, who hasn't staged their death in their head over and over again?

And yet here I am
Bewildered at the very suddenness
But then, death has always surprised
It's almost like you had staged this moment, cherished the very idea of an overwhelming performance to a standing ovation
And yet, death decided to spoil it all
Death wouldn't just let you walk away with glory
As if she was getting her revenge
For the every one time I denied her
For the every one time I looked into her eyes with the audacity of immortality

Revenge is a dish best served cold
Death is the coldest of them all.

As the crimson veins turns cobalt
As the laid out skin shrivels up to wrinkles
The silence shivers into splinters
Whispers turn into conversations
Conversations turn into commotion
The elaborate walls lay wide awake
In an endless search
For
Shattered stories
Tattered tales
Peeled out poetry
With a glint of hope in their eyes
That someday someone would come looking for them
That someday the storyteller would come and pick them all, as if pieces of a broken mirror
And sprinkle it all in the thin air

The marred lives and the scarred faces would call it paperback.


Death is an inexpensive slapstick
The life
The times of the life
The people of the life
The works of the life
The lives of the life
Every singular makes history
What if the history was just a history of a few hours
History is history nevertheless


But then, do outlaws make it to history?
Or are they chosen to be forgotten in the corpses of the termites that feed off your legends?

The heroes condemn me for blasphemy
The respectables disdain me for defiance
The everyday men damn me for apostasy

The fallen stand at a distance
Not a word escapes
Not even a tear
The silences stand tall, as if a guard of honour


All my life I romanced death
And yet death feels nothing like the death I loved
And yet death feels nothing like the death I knew
And yet death feels nothing like the death I staged


Death feels nothing like death.
Death feels like nothing is death.

The Ballad of the Southern Wind

Remember how you were in love with the intense in me?
Remember how you said it was a fairytale come to life?
Remember how you thought falling out of me wasn't even a question?

Life grew up; so did we
Words grew thinner
The silences overarching
But, don't silences have so much more to say than just words?
If only opposites and differences remained the same through the lengths of an entirety

The sweet turns sour
The sour turns bitter
The differences become arguments
The arguments become episodes
Episodes of a war drama
A war of egos
A war of choices
A war of differences
A war of silences
A war of the wars
Or was it ever a war of any of these?
Or, just a war imagined off ideas and illusions?

But, does any of it still make sense?

What was built in years
Was dust in days
But, that's what rampages have always been about, isn't it?

The intensity was no more a preference
The fairies had turned too real for a tale
The equations had shifted; falling out of love was a reality of the broad daylight

The arguments
The fights
The silences
The lack of words
All of it had become too much to bear with
All of it had no apparent answers

So, one inebriated evening you decided to walk out; for a while, that's what you said
The habits had crept in too deep; I was too intoxicated to let the daylight in

I drank till I couldn't stand
I cried till my jaws pained
I screamed till my lungs would burn

You said you needed time
You said you needed sanity
You said I was too impatient
You said I was too absurd

And then
One good morning
It all changed
None of it same as ever before


Existences no more made sense
The skin had turned numb
Words could scar me no more
Beliefs were too sober to get me drunk

And this time around I was too cold for your liking.



A hundred years from now
Some other day
Some other time
Some other place
We would get back
We would get back in love
We would get back at love
We would grow in love
We would grow in love unless we grew out of it
We would probably do it all
Again
And yet again


But wait.


This time around, let's not
Let's not love
Let's not grow in love
Let's not give it a chance to grow out of love
This time around, let all of it be the fairytale
This time around, let all of it sink in the distant dream of a drunken midnight

This time around, let none of it begin
For beginnings have endings
And endings mean newer beginnings

I am not scared of endings
I am scared of newer beginnings.

Bad Blood

       tonight
I cut myself open
a cut here
a cut there
a cut over another and yet another

       until
the walls smell of fresh flesh
the fresh scars lose clarity
the flesh stops longing for flesh

     blood
on the walls
on the patterned mosaic
on the sheets
on the blunt edges of the rusted knife
on the blood
on the horizons of the bare skin

       tonight
I cut myself open
a cut here
a cut there
a cut over another and yet another

       until
the skin doesn't smell of you anymore
the blood doesn't feel like you anymore
the very last drop of me isn't you anymore

 
      bad blood...

Cancer

He was cancer.

Stealthily invading the spaces within
Growing like a bad habit
Until one morning; the face fell off
The gangrene had spread too far

Death was about time.

And then at the dawn of a usual dusk
He bled from the nose and the mouth
The eyes turned crimson as he choked for breath
His maligned lungs had crumbled

Cancer had killed cancer.
Could death do death justice though?

A Wednesday

A Wednesday.
It was a Wednesday that you left.


Every last bit of you
It was all gone

A single purple sock, a broken hairclip, and a few crumpled paper bills summed up all of what remained of the entirety of an existence

It's been a while since then
The tale of a love lost has been buried in the sands of a clumsy time
The sock, the hairclip, the paper bills have found their way to the debris of a trash
The sheets don't smell of you anymore
Names have found fresh surnames; lives have found new addresses

Wednesdays have come and gone by


But...

The Obituary

I could have chosen to not die.
I could have taken one last chance at life.
Would it make it any different?

The things we did to the other, could we ever undo them?
The pieces we left behind every time we broke, could we ever hold them back together and still make sense?
The wars we waged in the name of love, could we ever forgive the scars we left behind?

The being we grew out of, could we ever live it all over again?


I could have lived one last time.
I could have walked out on death this one time.
Would it be any different?


Years later from this day
I'd be writing yet another beginning
I'd be living one more time hoping this time would be different...