Juairia Haque Mahi
I have seen the moon on his face;
He looked beautiful.
I contemplate how I’ll continue living with broken limbs;
the capability of navigating directions
would be stripped from me.
Pondering what nostalgia resembles…sweet, foggy, or spooky;
whimsically taking my soul into a tunnel of emotions.
It’s heavy, yet light.
At times, memoirs seem ethereal.
Nowadays, I dance alone, cutting my feet on the shards of my heart.
I am sitting on the porch, watching the cars passing by.
It’s raining intermittently at 5, at dawn.
“Doesn’t beautiful suit better to praise belle? I’d prefer handsome, never mind,” you smirked.
Beau, I deem you above biases, above gender.
I will narrate the intense aura you spread,
Like ripe petrichor does after every intermittent rain.
The chasmic invisible recess,
inexplicable void inside the chest,
mount up and swirl high with branches.
You deserve love, stranger; strangely at an unexpected point of life
— a sound reverberates around me.
I look around, there’s none — a dead town.
I’m able to breathe freely, finally, after a long epoch;
missing someone who’s miles away;
the discord nights and jamming;
sighing by smoking together on cold winter days.
And, how the whipping cream smears on his face when he takes sips of his favourite hazelnut latte.
The windows are open; thunder rumbles at a distance.
I built a small house on the top of an abandoned hill,
cached as the opera house I conceal in myself.
Music of life turned less-prolific over years. Slow-core opiate tranquilised anxiety.
I teleported myself away from the mainstream,
A sense of freedom without limits.
In either stupor or slumber, I hallucinated or dreamt.
Life is solemnly intriguing.
I’m wounded yet I haven’t skirmished.
Loss and grief, but no gain.
What will happen to me?
How’d the future be if I come out?
Would undue suffering begin when everyone becomes aware of it?
I have no guarantee of an answer; an erudite one.
No, I don’t want to suppress it any longer
with a grim heart; let me bleed.
Let me shout, let me yell; louder in the void.
Let this be between my God and me.
Another free spirit who came into this realm;
defiant and rebellious with boundless energy
in pursuits of jouissance—
to lead troops to the subsequent revolution:
Unwilling to conform and comply with
what is deemed “normal” and generic.
Tormented spirit: Subjecting to the wounds;
what was left, was a shell of an oke.
Echoing in the most miserable nooks of ticker,
as my spirit tenderly melts into a murky puddle of clay—
wishing to be moulded into sculpt,
or something more of note
among the exquisite artifacts out of guilt;
wishing my fondness be normalised,
in this heteronormative guild.
And, blatantly express what I feel —
without barriers, without panic.
But nemesis is brutal, if not poetic.
The writer is a part of the TDA Editorial Team.