My heart aches a thousand times more
Each time my mind wanders.
It is the voices that rage me.
I hold my chair tight till it tattoos marks on my palm.

Because of you, because of your *****,
Your *******, *******, worshipping the ******* blue ******,
You have made me so jaded.

The naivete that I carried on my sleeve,
The sweet innocence looking forward to wonderful,
The trust I invested in total strangers,
The belief that there was good in every mankind,
All lies. I am now blinded by brutality and deceit.
I lost trust and I lost God. Both never existed.

How manipulative, calculative you were.
Not to mention your sister-*****, who later became your own concubine,
How she'd tricked me, lured me into believing every move.
I nodded, smiled and laughed along with the deceit.
All along a big *** knife was ****** into my back.

Who knew backstabbing was your favourite sport.

Shalini Nayar
© 2005

I would flutter around the wind,
Twisting my soul in all its directions,
Falling in and out like I do with love,
Hating, swallowing every single spit.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

Love has made me foolish.
The joke, har har har, and they go.
Carrying you, and you, and you
Has taken a toll on me, my heart.
It is the emotions I miss, the rush of it.

Whenever I think of you, I think of lies.
This was supposed to be our year, you remember?
The art galleries, the plays, the orchestras,
The million meaningless things we said to each other,
We promised each other. Laugh! All lies.

Whenever I think of you, I think of foolishness.
For you’re still a young boy at heart, so naïve.
When you find love, you let it go, and settling for less
Every single time. How stupid of you.
Your smile melts me, but I’m undaunted. I laugh everything off.

Whenever I think of you, I think of bravery.
Bravery that got me through the mess, the rude ordeals,
To finally say it to your face what I really thought of you.
I hated you as a person, every atom of your stinking presence,
So much so it choked me at times. Now I laugh, thinking back.

I would fall into it just to feel the surge of everything alive,
Just because I really missed it pulsing in my veins,
And not because I pride myself on finding my soul mate.
I’m too cynical for that.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

My hands, my knees.
Look at it jolting out of me,
Cavemen clubs with nowhere to go.

The passageway now hurts, pushing out
Whatever that went in.
Liquid, solid, knives,
Lies, lies, lies, grievances.

The forcing, the cough, the blow
Right here, into the middle of my stomach.
The stupid things I do sometimes
Just to feed the pressure.

The oil greases over me,
It’s hard enough to breathe in here.
Hear hear, I speak. It is you I want.
Mr. Grape’s hair I gently stroke away in that trailer,
His lips I gently kiss to an ******.

Right there, in my neck,
Between the pulsating veins,
The urge hissing on my tongue.
That’s where you must belong always.

Mamma, won’t you get off
Your fat back and your fat haunch,
Off that sweaty couch, off that shaky little house
And get me out of this god-forsaken land?

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

Everything is ruined.
The plan, the plans.
Every ******* thing is torn
Shredded. The hand is poison,
The mouth is a gate that never shuts.
The body, the mind,
A mismatched pair. Utterly senseless.

I’m a hypocrite when I do this.
But then again I might just be fickle.
They call it changing minds,
With the hypocrisy riding on it
Like a wave, up to a froth-filled
Bang on the sandy shore.

The smell of salt annihilates.
I do not wish to live for this.

There, I’ve said it. I’ve sent the
Package to you like I told my head
I would not.

Crumble, crumble oh Pliny.
Vesuvius’s wrath spews here again.
Choking us with its mountain of black ash,
Rushing towards us like a news in hurry.
Salvaging our bones among the ruins of Herculaneum.
We, the organic, getting eaten for centuries.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

How can I ever hate you?
Crashing waves, over and over,
Like a group of cymbals clapping each other
Never reaching me.
You blend in with the wave, the sun
Lighting on all that is clear and sweet.

Down there, a heart blooms.
Stinging red and beating,
Roadkill that never quite died.
They’re stomping all over it,
Can’t you see, the damage,
The spill of black oozing from it.

Find a drum beat for me there,
A chord of bass flowing through the music,
The flawless voice singing “Are you in?”
And us, sitting there, in our own spaces,
(The sand with crab-holes, you fill them in one by one)
Bodies in the same proximity, head somewhere else.
Listening, listening.

This is the way it’s supposed to be.
Meant to be. The pitfalls eating us alive.
The morning glory saying hello again.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004

The parsimony chokes like a
Heart-shaped balloon tied at your throat.
The guilt, the grief.
If I could meet you just once
I wouldn’t say a word.
I’ll grab what’s mine
And leave you hollow and empty.

Shalini Nayar
© 2004