begin again

poetry for waking up (vol. 1)

He has two sides to him
warring for each other’s company,
vying to earn a greater portion
of his future—given it successfully
would provide one with more equity
and bragging rights than the other,
that allowed them to exclaim,
“I was right!”

All along about what he ought to have done
with his time and how to let bygones be,
and how to act fine even when he wasn’t fine,
and how to be an upstanding bhaijaan
and a conscious citizen of the divine.
Yes, “I gave him a shot at living a life
filled with happiness, and the credit is all mine.”

The warring states of his mother and father,
his brother and the sister he never had,
all come together in hopes of fixing
a broken lad who never had
the opportunity to find his own path
and found himself at war
with both sides of his past.

But opposites attract, and he knew that,
because he grew up studying the art
of putting on an act—
so convincing that people wouldn’t know
he was putting on a show.
So much so,
that they would bring him into their world
with open arms and open hearts,
and share with him their broken parts.

And he would respond back in kind,
and appear so deeply honest.
His authenticity would shine so bright
they would all call him theirs.
Simultaneously were his actions true,
yet his deeper qualities remained to be determined.
Was his blood colored red or blue?

Well, let’s just say—
he needs you
more than you think,
yes, he do.
In fact,
he’s more existentially
deprived of companionship
than a desert emu.

You see, he lives an externally monastic life
but needs you to tell him
how much you believe in him.
He needs you to promise
you won’t leave,
even when he starts to peeve you—
(although he’ll try his hardest not to).

And what’s more concerning
is his lack of decision-making capability.
His undulating emotional capacity
tends to be littered with a litany of opportunities
for every type of directionally adjacent probability
to be accounted for.

And if neither of those sentences made sense,
just know he doesn’t quite understand himself either.

This dichotomy
tends to make him incredibly content
and contiguously paranoid—
hoping he isn’t slowly
descending into complacency.
Is his satisfactory nature
a front for his underlying instability?
Is his brain actually getting torn apart
by his problematic tendency to complicate things?

So sometimes, he’ll speak in an Indian accent,
to take his neuroses and make them a little sillier,
because everything is funnier
when it is recited in the sound of his lifestyle referees—
aka Papa and Mummy
and in the form of memories from a distant scene
in which less mattered and ignorance was free.

It may look pretty on the outside,
but inside he doesn’t quite know
what to do with his life anymore,
or how to embody
that elusive happy-go-lucky quality
that he used to be able to step into immediately
or he just takes himself too seriously.
It’s probably the latter,
it usually is the simpler answer.

It has to be.

Maybe there’s a reason
people figure out—no, accept—
what he has come to believe
at two hundred instead of twenty.
Which is to say, maybe,
we animals were never meant to
stumble upon the silver bullet for satisfaction.

Maybe we were never meant
to find meaning in surrender.
Maybe we were never supposed
to look in the mirror
and see God.

We love to play the game.
And maybe we need the game
more than it needs us.
Maybe this boy was never supposed
to try and build his own console,
or rid himself of needing a game at all.

Maybe he just needs a partner
to ground him in uncertainty.
Maybe he just needs to feel understood—
for the first time—
and feel what it is like
to be loved physically,
and feel so lovingly held
in another’s arms, eternally.

Or maybe
he needs to return to a time when
things were different—
when he wasn’t thinking about then,
when his ignorance lacked
a pen to excavate his pain.

Or maybe
he deserves to take
a simpler breath—
and laugh as the silliness
of his being alive to wonder why
settles into his brown paper skin.

Because although he has already
hit the jackpot and won,
although he has most things—
seeking out everything is fun.

Yes, he knows that nobody has it all,
but that won’t stop himself from trying
to patch every crack in the walls
he grew up surrounded with.
And he has the gall to try,
and enough ambition to start flying—
to the top of Mount Olympus.
He’d always wanted to be
the Brown Percy Jackson

He doesn’t know what
will make sense of his part
in the collective desire
to transcend it all.
But he knows that—
he might as well
begin with how tired
he is right now.

He has worked so hard
for so many years,
orbiting a funnel
of wrapped-around dreams,
ending on the same answer.
Every next epiphany
has become harder to find.
He’s pined–(that’s tired when it rhymes) 
of jumping through hoops,
and exhausted from running after
novel semantic truths.

He needs a moment
to return to the calm
before the battle started
So he takes a step back,
looks up at the sky,
and remembers how lucky he is.

To have moments slip through time,
and minutes to get sniffly and cry.
He puts on a pair of pajamas,
leaves his paper by his side,
and leaves the messages 
from his neuroses unread.

He lays his head on his bed,
puts his rhymes to rest,
and sinks into a deep slumber
where his dreams reconnect 
him with innocent happiness
He later wakes up,
in a rhythmic haze
knowing he will eventually
return to the refrain.

But for now, he is content
content to begin again.