On some days you wake up and see the world around you surrendering
Other days, you are the one writing your last letter
There is so much hype around carrying earth within ourselves
So much water inside us to wash away the imprints of first love
Or too much silt the bones carry when burnt
We have been more land than sky
Forever despising freedom that comes with the final fall
A little push and we are flying on some days,
And buried under the cemented graves on other
Perhaps that is why it is not astounding to learn that the same blood which makes the skin blossom like spring cherries on being kissed,
Carries all the timeless plastic from food cans,
I wonder hunger, when ignored for long, becomes parasitic,
Leeching onto the memories of how taste carries itself through mouth, until it resides in the empty stomach of a man who knows food as a reflex than a choice,
Dying from claustrophobic arteries inside him.
There is no poetry in learning about the descent of body till it touches the ground
Soaking everything that resembles its favourite cupcake from a pastry shop that sells the leftovers and calls it ‘saving the world’
There is no way to know our place on this earth without becoming it first
You see, a beggar almost never begs thinking about future but to find respite from the day that stands in front of him
With healthy snacks, and a Pavlov bell,
there is always a distance unfathomable, like unhappy lovers living under the same roof, where aroma of a half cooked meal never stops,
More because of emptiness that fills their hearts, than their mutual love for food.
It takes everything to save a man dying from hopelessness than an aging heart
So recently, when the lab rats showed plastic depositing over their kidneys and liver,
It made me wonder if the same would show in the autopsy report of a hungry child
Whose mother mixes sand with salt, dries it and feeds it to him while telling him the stories of Midas,
We are so much of what surrounds us
That some days I mistake myself for a flower
And on other days I am the insect hovering over a boy with red t-shirt, thinking if all things coloured contain some sweetness in them
Which is to say I am more of what hunger means
Than being hungry myself.
There is no denying in finding traces of slowly decomposing stillness in our blood
But sometimes we are too much earth crumbling in a vast space where nobody else is present to look after us
So much blood on our hands but nobody to see it,
Our wounds pestering us with the glib knowledge that in our healing, the earth heals
Little by little, a world crackling with fire turns itself into a turtle,
We have always been carrying our homes on our shoulders
We have always been hungry to feed the world, to feed on the world,
And nothing can make it beautiful, this damned epiphany
That we live to become everything not easily replaceable, and when we die, our blood dries off, but not this unending need for permanence.

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