Tobacco & Musk

You may claim
that we'll just be friends
And that is how
it was meant to be.

Ten years from now,
I will still want
The taste of your tobacco lips
to swill in your musk
while my anxious tongue
flicks deliriously.

I will bend the crease
in the fiercest of your coattails
and stupidly wonder why
I burrow into untested waters
at once shimmering and empty
To allow myself to see
your rough hands
grabbing me by the hand
And pulling me closer
To keep me away. Forever.

With-In

There is this room, where souls bond. Floors of mosaic, tip toed upon, lazy feet pushed, fingers slid between fingers and seduced. There is this room, with no windows. No skylights. Just four walls. Four walls that cage as much as they free. That let ignominy swallow you as much as they enlighten. This is where contradictions coexist.

From the outside, it is hard even merely to imagine that such a place could come to be.

It's like some encapsulated reality, in a capsule, which exists from the inside and other crazy things like that. Threads of connections between beings, are formed, nurtured, and shattered. Irrational, unexplained bonds rooted in raw needs. The honesty in those bonds is almost sacred. There is no pretension in those chords that tie. And untie. Almost as immediately as that thirst is quenched, the knots are opened up. Disentangled. Free to go.

But for as long as there is that inseparability, there is no questions asked. No answers sought.

Again, did somebody ever say, there was more honesty in lust than in love itself. Or did I just imagine. Being told so.

In One Night

"Quiet" says the voice
"quiet, and listen.
Hear the beating of his heart.
Can you tell apart the ache from the desire?
Or are you just keeping time
to the rhythm of his pulse?"

Forehead

At times, the only urge I feel
is to roll over to face
the other side of the beds we shared
and ask you, "are you okay?"
as I kiss you on the forehead.

Asterisk

Do you not get it? Is it that hard? And the anatomy of my affection so inconceivably difficult to unravel? It isn't.

It's rather simple. Honest and uncomplicated. And you're not naive yourself. So don't flatter yourself yet. Not now, not ever.

Don't flatter yourself with the sole assumption that I am in love with you. I am not. Can never be.

I busy my mind with your thoughts, force feed the imaginative future that I may come to live in with you someday, because, baby, I am only trying to run away from myself. Yeah.

You see, I am this obnoxiously obsessed woman who cannot stop thinking and constantly needs something for her mind to feed on. Anything, at all. Like they say gastric acids eat up the stomach walls if there's no food, a similar force of self-destruction is my underlying. And if I don't think about you, proxima centauri, some extinct mesozoic reptile, or you, nothing would stop me from thinking about myself.

And thinking about myself, is fatal. That's why I have to love you. To convince myself that it's not yet time to take the self seriously. So don't just flatter yourself. And boast about getting me off your back.

Hah! You've no idea.

Anchor

That glow in your eyes
and the lilt in your voice.
The current calls me away,
But I stay in my place.
Your pride is the only thing
Keeping me anchored.

How Not To Fall In Love

It was an empty embrace, meant more to comfort than to love. You saw what you wanted, and I saw what I wanted, but we couldn't see what it wasn't or was.

It wasn't lust that held you against me.

It was desire that made it.

Your kisses froze on my cheek like tears on rough winter mornings. I dared not cry, silently sinking lower into the depths of my shame. I have no place to hide.

Closure

Goodbyes are so hard
I would rather not say a word at all
But I fear, worst of memories are often those,
in which the adieus weren't bid
and what was ought to be said, wasn't.

But
Is there anything to say?
Anything at all, that could
make this any bearable
In a way you seemed to do

So, I have nothing more
but my dearth of words to give you
Take this along, won't you
Remember me
as the one whose longing for you
was Undying

And as the one,
who always begged you to stay,
Stay a little longer
May be till the sun came up

Inquisitively

Friends are a great discomfort sometimes, you know? An inquisitive friend of mine, he asked me who you were. To me. And I couldn't come up with a convincing answer. I had none. My heart shrank for a moment and then I nervously told him that you were just an acquaintance. World is a small place. It's hard not to know people. Just an acquaintance. Did I say friend? I don't even remember. I was a little too shocked. It was like our tiny secret could be out in the open anytime, my little secret. I told him that we knew each other mutually, just like that.

I didn't tell him a lot of things. A hoard of things. The way you lost your sleep when I wanted you to be awake. The way you never got me down from cloud nine. The way you made me laugh, breathlessly sometimes. How at the end of those laughs I would have forgotten why I had begun laughing in the first place. Yeah, that crazy! I didn't tell him all this. I trust you haven't told anyone either, have you? I hid from him memories of our endless conversations, late into the nights. I didn't tell him about your caresses and kisses to my early morning sleepy mumbles. He doesn't deserve to know, does he? Some stories should die untold. Unheard. Some secrets are created to be frozen. I didn't tell him how much you had entered into my conscious, how you were almost on my speed-dial these days. How you lived in the back of my mind, all day and all night. I didn't tell him about my endless waits, I didn't tell him about my bouts of madness, utter madness, that unruly longing to belong to you. Nah, nothing. I didn't tell him that I was practically in love with you. I didn't tell him why we couldn't be together. Nothing at all. I hope he doesn't have the slightest idea and isn't mocking at me inside. I would hate that. Fuck, I hate inquisitive friends. I just hate-hate them.

Shameless

Before:

She is a woman, her mind flies from the first glance, to infatuation, to love and matrimony in a matter of moments. Shamelessly. It cannot be ceased, her mind. A whiff of assured company, is as tempting as life. She jumps into deep holes with people she doesn't know, knits dreams she does not have the power to make come true. She sees hope in what could be disastrous, she moves fast, very fast. Restraint isn't aware of her existence. She is capricious, synonymous with the wild buzzing bee. From flower to flower she goes, searching for something she does not know. And the instant she sees a hint of love, somewhere on the far horizon, forgetting how tiny she is she keeps flying and flying, with relentless hope. She cannot translate her restlessness into words. She does not die until her heart is trampled mercilessly. Her quest is die hard. It is eager to leap into a flight, any moment, anywhere, imagining a life that is yet to be, imagining a life that is not to be.

After:

She has been a woman. She has been to the deepest pits of shamelessness that could ever be. She has been through what she never imagined she would be through. Turning into a person she only feared she once could become. Love brought out the best and the worst in her. The catch is that even the best looks worse than the worst in afterthought. Drenched in regret, she is nowhere. The way she revealed those darkest secrets of hers, in one breath, without a pause of hesitation, now makes her wonder, how doped was she? How did she ever let a stranger peel off layers of her skin and look at her naked soul? Lust makes you shameless, it makes you another person. Another person you don't recognize once you wake up in the morning. Now is her morning. A whiff of that shamelessness hangs in the air still. And she has questions that she can only bury.

She is a woman. Her life switches between the Before and the After.

Monsters

Look at us, the monsters we have become. Seething through time, hiding our desires, stealing glances from the mirror, what have we made of ourselves, baby! Long ago, when the day began and we were innocent children, I believed in fairies and unicorns. That picture is now lost in oblivion. And now, how with time, we have constantly drained that naivety out of our systems, effortlessly, with the lone whim of surpassing petty desires.

Did you ever imagine this? Nor did I. It's scary, how I've become somebody I would've failed to recognize a few years ago. And I have become this, in your shadow. Chasing you, in and out of the light, I have only bought myself so much shame that I cannot bear to look at you, or look away.

This just cannot be true. This is not me. And you're not you. This must be some devil's dream. Because we couldn't sink so beneath ourselves. Sometimes I convince myself so. But then I wake up the next morning, with my mind stepping back into every moment of the lust last night was. And I can't help but lie down, and admire every inch of you.

How deep are we now? In this slur, I can't find my feet. All I can feel is the warm gasps of your breath and tickles of lust that suck me in. And precisely that moment, I give in. To the animal inside. And let go of shame and let me be me. For I have become what I have become.

Label

Shouldn't every relationship have a name? Ours doesn't have one and this scares me a lot every single time you leave me alone for the night. I try not to make a noise and wake you up. I like you more this way. Peacefully asleep, oblivious of the tides inside me.

I slide out quietly, lest I wake you. I don't want you to realize the sudden absence of my touch. I lie an inch away from you and wonder what would you be dreaming about. It's difficult to resist touching you again, running my fingers over your face, trying to assure myself that you are for real and not a figment of my imagination. I also wonder if you would look for me in the morning if I am gone, will you run your hands over the creases on the sheet, trying to remember my caresses?

I try to think of a name, for this thing between us. Every relationship has a name, shouldn't ours also have one?

999

When you sit upon a ticking bomb, I have been told it is easy to fall in love.

Maybe that is true, and maybe it isn't, I don't know for certain. But what I do know for certain is that one very uncertain summer night, with the impending doom of adulthood upon my head, just when I least expected it, I thought I was in love. It was, as they say, the best of times, it was the worst of times.When we laid on bed and talked into the early hours of the morning, I didn't feel hurt over all that had passed, but happy that I had gotten through it all; we both had, the  two of us, two separate spheres orbiting two separate universes.

Then the summer was over and my best friend said I had other things to worry about and as much as I hate to admit it, he is right. This man - this perfect, perfect man - doesn't deserve to be dealt a hand of uncertainty from my very complicated life. He makes me so, so happy and the best I can give him is half a dream. So in an obscure room in the nooks of the early dawn, I am about to go break my own heart.

Can someone please, please stop me?