I have had bad days,
angered to revulsion
by friendship, love,
wars, prisons, conformity,
education, neighbours, relatives,
transfers, houses, family trips,
beautiful girls with fake smiles,
bullies, people doing their best
to fit in, all other goddamn worldly pleasures,
and optimistic deeds.
I have read late into the night,
poems of famous writers,
now long dead.
I have tried to understand
their sorrow and happiness,
centered my own sorrow and happiness
around theirs.
I have been focused
on sophisticated rebellion;
an outcast,
trying to understand
the reason for all the love,
for all the hatred.
I have sat by my window
on quiet evenings,
typing away rigorously,
trying to weave
the right words
that will churn out
a perfect poem.
I have toiled away
with punctuation and style.
I have failed,
cried over my failures,
and rejoiced
over insignificant victories.
I have stared at people
through windows
of opposite buildings,
lost in the mundane:
old men polishing their shoes;
young boys practicing with their cricket bats,
or kicking footballs or taking perfect sniper shots;
girls tying their hair,
watering their plants,
or fussing over their pets;
women toiling away in the kitchen,
or having their tea staring out the window.
I have looked at all these people,
and felt a deep sadness for their fates,
a resounding, pessimistic sadness.
I have had my moments of delight,
on the peaks of mountains
where the stars shone bright;
in the cars of friends
who have long become strangers;
in movies with cousins;
in the arms of loving books;
during all-nighters’ when I’ve
sat in terraces’ till the sun came up;
in cafes where good music played;
in parties where everyone threw up in the end;
in traffic-jams with incessant honking;
in shared spliffs of joints;
while chain smoking cigarettes;
in quiet hallways of isolated buildings;
in the rickety-rackety sounds made by my
good-old ceiling fan;
all of these
amidst the cruel fate of life.
I have looked for happiness
all over the place,
in friends, family and, broken hearts.
I have glimpsed
into the eyes of
angels and devils alike.
In shards of broken glass,
I have found perfection;
in compositions of Ludwig Van,
I have found solace;
in the stories of Van Gogh,
I have found grief.
I have lost myself,
and found myself
in hyphens,
semicolons,
and full stops.
This is me.
This is who I am,
a warrior of lost worlds,
finding new battles to fight
most minutes of each day,
inching slowly and deliberately
towards death.
