creative writing

Poem – Trumping

He stands on the beach trying to
rinse the shores of foreign blood
but he cries foul from sands made
of compacted blood and dust from
foreign seas that called his land their
home, and all the while he forgets
that the fields he now reaps fed his
hungry ancestors when they were
fresh off the boat; forgets that his
throne is painted whiter than the bones
that built it; forgets that the mother of his
children made her home away from home
under the hem of Lady Liberty’s skirts;
but this too shall pass, and some day,
he too will join these shores, dust to dust,
as the waves of freedom crash over the
shores, the same as they have always done.

Poem – Dissect

I donate to science my body,
so they might dissect me and
identify the signs that label me
OTHER
Here they write “female, Indian,
middle-class, educated, unemployed”
in neat little letters that exist 
strictly within their lines.
They sharpen their knives and cut
into the skin which, they note, tears
just as easily as anyone else’s.
They add “fragile” to the list, and
categorically, shelve it under “human”
Blood oozes out of the wound, and they
note it is the same sticky red 
that flows from blue-blooded bodies,
neither paled nor darkened by travel, 
it oozes awkwardly,
with neither the grace of civility
nor the passion of savagery;
the genes of this body are far
more dispersed than the miles
travelled by the wearer’s body,
they dissect till we are all but gone,
and one by one, they discard all the
bodies, a wild mess of blood and guts
and skin and bones, till their neat little
box of “other” is but an empty hole, all
its former inhabitants at once too
haphazardly similar to be
different.

They must continue their search
Elsewhere..                    (26/01/2017)

Poem – Commonwealth Notes on Brexit

There was something odd
about unpacking my bags
in an England defined by Brexit;
using her banks and her books,
and speaking bits of a language
that she stamped on my homeland.
How odd, then, to feel unwelcome
at her doorstep years after she
danced awkwardly at mine;
how unsettling to realise that
I have never truly felt “at home”
with either the coloniser or the
colonised, but rather somewhere
in the page between,
lost in translation forever..;

Poem – On Hating

I didn’t truly understand the
meaning of hate till I
started hating myself
Biology never was my strong suit…
Something about this body
didn’t tick quite right
But one thing I learnt
was the language of power
Biology showed me the
veins of forgiveness hidden
under sinews of acceptance
under harsh daylight
Stripped down to mere human
Nakedness, I began to discover the
linguistics of love, life and body

Poem – The Art of Dressing

She dresses scars and wounds
With silk dresses and lace underwear
And while you marvel at her petite
waist and toned legs peeping out
under her red dress you fail to see
she’s a mastermind at disguise
She’s perfected the art of dressing
learnt that pieces of lace delicately
cover invisible holes and that
silk smoothes away even the
roughest of patches
She’s modelling brands of sorrow
you’ll never hear of, but know
that sometimes the perfection outside
is extra on-point to hide the insides

Poem – Survival of the Fittest

Look yourself in the eye
and remind yourself that the
greatest battles of your life
aren’t the ones you’re fighting now
nor are they hidden
behind folds of future.

The greatest fight you ever fought
is one you can’t remember…
Healthy baby, sick baby
planned baby, mistaken baby
YOU fought the greatest human
battle of all – you chose existence
and fought for it with
every last ounce of strength
in that one lucky sperm
you wanted to be
HERE.

I suppose this is more a pep talk than a poem, but we’ll take what we get… 🙂 Have a lovely day folks!