Once, I could not imagine that a book might hurt me. It’s like this. Not much different. Reading, like lovemaking, is among our most private of pleasures. An act that asks for you to leave your armour at the door and wear only your vulnerability. Books and their secrets. Books and the secrets they cannot keep. Like […]
Tag: dreams & conversations
Letter to a young writer in NYC
…It’s funny you know, but it feels as though I have a better relationship with my father now he’s gone. Our relationship was always tumultuous. We loved each other as much as we disliked each other, and those are the most intriguing connections we share on earth; more so because the absence of say, […]
You bring out the man in me
You bring out the man in me The muscle and the sinew of me The ripping forearms and The sweat-dotted brow of me. You bring out the musk and the male The husk and the hewn Firmness of the flesh of the thigh of me You bring to awakening my torrid heat My tenuous passion […]
Reading broken, writing drunk: an open letter to Clementine Von Radics
Your books are maps. This is what I understood. I never went anywhere without a poem lest I lose myself in places where girls like me should not be lost. Places like the cleavage. Or clavicles. Places like love. Or worse – possession. Places like wounds that must be tended to, and places […]
For all things that must end
I am now thinking of what marks finality. I believe sometimes it can be just where you… Well, stop. That should be enough to say ‘it is done with.’ Of course nothing is ever truly done with, not as long as there is memory, and attachment, and possession. We may hold on to […]
A love letter to my father
Baba, So many years have passed since I have done this. I do not remember the last time I wrote to you, and it has not been for lack of need, or wanting to do so. I need to be honest: at some point, I just gave up on you. There did not seem to […]
One year of without
There are some nights that the thought of you or even your name do not leave the sleeve of my shirt alone. It pulls like a kitten. Tonight is like that. I no longer question if it is you trying to reach me, to communicate. I am flooded with desire to see you. To […]
19 notes to myself
Look at this list. Trudgy, preachy, smug even I think. Honestly, I can be pedantic as hell. Maybe it’s something we all are from time to time. This one time I started writing down things that seemed to matter to me. It might have begun as something of a wish list for the kind of […]
19 things the world is teaching me today
I am sick, sick, sick to the stomach with the world we live in. Our girls are being raped day and night. Planes are being shot down. Israel is bombing Palestinian civilians. There are floods and droughts at the same time. There are people dying of hunger and an obesity epidemic at hand simultaneously. The […]