neither

(written 1 december 2019, 3:30 am)

i'm crushed i'm alive
you see neither

Dancing on My Own

(Written 10 Sep 2019, 3:22 am IST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q31tGyBJhRY)

so it's you,
it's your sound,
that brings me marginally alive,
that re-inters me, meaningfully, in that merciless ground.

"i'm in the corner, watching you kiss her",
he whispered in my ear,
and i looked on, statue in my birth,
lost infernally between there and here.

"i'm right over here, why can't you see me",
he stared into my fidgety eyes,
recession into unattractive self,
all your decisive truths are heartbreaking lies.

"i'm giving it my all, but i'm not the guy you're taking home,
i keep dancing on my own",
and you'll continue to wonder
if i'll ever get grown.

"stilettos on broken bottles",
feminine images on the aftermath,
but i slouch, you bemoan,
and you find breath, and i wrath.

"but you don't see me standing here",
and we never left square one,
while you dance by yourself,
i danced, ended and was undone.

Pain

(Written 24 May 2019, 3:20 AM IST.)

There's something about pain
That most people
Don't understand.

It is usually one side of a coin
Called life,
The other side of which is
Pleasure.

(In case you're wondering,
The rolling edge of the coin is depression.)

There was a boy I loved
When I was sixteen.
He thought it was crazy
That I thought
That pain was beautiful.
I thought it was crazy
That he was pain, pleasure and beauty,
And that he couldn't see it!

Pain is the loss (real or feared)
Of pleasure once felt, or
Of pleasure imagined.
If you focus hard enough,
It will always make you
Smile.
(Perhaps wistfully.)

It is sitting alone with whiskey,
Missing a love that once was.
It is sitting across from a love now,
Misunderstanding, or misunderstood.
It is a single shared glance
With a love unexplored, a longing, with nowhere to go.

Look,
I am quite frequently on the rolling edge.
I find it hard to settle on a side
Because of how much it hurts
To flip to the other.

And well, I loved, and I love.
But you came, for not quite long enough,
And I don't know about you,
But I wanted more time.
That is pain,
And that makes me smile,
And that is pleasure.

There is something about this
That most people
Don't understand.

But screw 'em.

(In the fourth dimension, if I
Look left, the sixteen
Year-old me still loves the boy,
And if I look right, I see
Not quite anything, really, but
I feel the gaze of some older me
Smiling in pain.)