curly hair part but I wanted the whole package.
Thick-framed round glasses, a rhinestone glint on my nose, an eclectic bag full of scraps of old paper with inky words that smudged and leaked, poetry in thought and a
confident confusion in speech.
With a padded notebook, inky pen and a seat underneath the coziest tree on college green,
invincible, romantic, endearing.
An image of an intellectual species formulated by years of “non-mainstream” literature and the kind of Malayalam films people forward through
- the stereotypical bhuji.
I wanted to write words so
passionate that they would be burnt
at birth,
above flags and cloth-stuffed human beings.
I wanted to speak in tongues so convoluted that
the Holy Spirit himself would have trouble discerning
a thesis.
And the tip of my pen would be too frail to hold up the weight of my thoughts.
And if I ever felt like descending from the white mare I was on,
the world would be too bland to suit my palate and I would need a cleanser so unlike the Calvados Sorbet the old chef recommended.
No, this is not a poem. This is a freaking epilogue.
Remember?
The words with which those glasses cracked
when using tape was a fashion faux-pas.
Remember?
when reality took over orientation and disoriented became too
unfashionable of a term
and dreamers went to a hell
that they themselves dreamt up.
Remember?
when you thumb wrestled adulthood and
lost.
Remember?
when the mirage of intellectualism became so foggy
that it resembled nothing more than a fudged up
closet-Marxist with a love for Apple products standing up for
the children of a Palestinian mother he
unwittingly
paid to kill.
Remember?
that first time a single personal thought took over
dreams of world peace and economic solutions for the
children of the world in the third internet universe
when personal sadness had more value than a
collective grief.
Remember?
the first time you stopped thinking
that time you sat in a subway in the winter without a single thought of the
sorry plight of the pregnant woman next to you with a
torn winter jacket
because you were too busy drowned
in self-pity.
Remember?
And I’d admire those intellectuals
so much.
I wanted their frankness, their
bold ways of fighting the world with nothing more than a feather’s
ink.
But, the one time I was bold enough to be bold- I learned it cost
too much. Because this isn’t a freaking war:
the choices don’t have labels, and mistakes are made in
the best kind of smelly Sharpies. And people like me
only have the hair.
I wanted to shake the world with
my thunder and instead
allowed myself to drown
behind its
godly-manicured fingernail.
No, this is not poetry. It’s only an epilogue.
And no, I do not want your
yellow
*claps*
Awesome