soumyamurthy

[soumyamurthy]

Escape

A forgotten date, when you didn't come, not even late, A silent night, broken with a slap and an impending fight, Make me wonder why I stayed, Make me want to shout for an escape.

A cold night and huddled warm, yet I shiver with anxiety more. A closed door and words; jarring and painfully sore. Make me wonder why I prayed, Make me want to plead for an escape.

A broken soul, some tears and a strangled child, And an unaffected you, who couldn't even stand by my side, Make me wonder why you live, Make me want to plot for an escape.

On a midsummer night, when the air feels scorched, I pour more and more till you pass out. You then thought that you stumbled for the bed, While I lead you to walk off the railing, broken and frayed.

And as I watched you fall into the abyss of death I felt my shackles follow and then my sanity tumble. Makes me wonder about the rush it gave, Makes me want to kill again;my new escape.

[soumyamurthy]

Sunshine

She’s a paradox of shimmering light, A soft glow at times but mostly just fierce radiance, You be nice, now. Stay under that mellow shade, And watch her dance in her radiant night.

She moves about in a frenzied pace, rushing to live the life she hasn’t known, Books, Babka and Bond; she breezes past them all, And yet she is quietly forlorn for missing the now.

She laughs aloud; vicariously too, When you overwhelm her or hug her tight, But moves between days of unsaid silences, Even as she keeps reaching beyond her might.

She and her multitude of brightly hued teas, She and her million ways of love for me, She and the big yellow ray of sunshine she is, Quietly holding my hand in my lonely abyss.

Swini Todd, this is for you :)

[soumyamurthy]

“Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life. It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.”

Depression is not a synonym for being sad or having a bad day/bad week. (via sancty)

If you need to understand what it is like..

[soumyamurthy]

Frozen

Do you know what it is to run and then fail in every damn race, To stand up, brush aside your scrapped elbows and yet fall? Do you think it breaks your mind, your spirit and your soul, To give and give, only to be dismissed as cold? Do you see how it all looks inevitable and trite, And yet, you fool yourself into hoping with all your might? Do you feel what it is to stand inside a swirling ocean of humanity, And yet distant from every beating heart but your own? Do you like to escape from your deeply buried misery, But realize half way out you are your own wretched company? Do you realize your nerves and your ill controlled sinews, Have long silenced and your heart is, infact, frozen?

[soumyamurthy]

Longing

The Chinese jade we brought for good luck and the damp shirts by the laundry bin, They wait for me, invading my space and filling me in with your presence. And yet I stand rooted to the floor, taking it all in, one more time; if not the last.

The children must be in the school, and the dog is at your brother-in-law's, My heart, skin and my very bones, they yearn for you in ways I cannot count. I let the reports and files clatter on the ground, and I swear I don't hear the sound anymore.

Did you wonder how I would survive, did you even believe I'd live as free, Or did you really think of me as your better half, as you softly declared after the stormy nights, And trust me to live, while I walk by to the only sliver of sunlight in this gloomy kitchen.

We never had the time, I never knew what you thought of the apple crumble I made last night, It was our wedding anniversary, dear, but I had fondly let you forget. It's time you see; fickle as it may be, I thought we had an eternity.

But I never knew that everything for you was falling through, I never knew you would really walk off that bridge, and leave me with all of it, Or I would have dragged you home for some love and maybe your favourite fudge?

[soumyamurthy]

Out

Grab yourself a passport, and a few crumpled notes, Take away a satchel along with your chords n totes. Come away, my dear, you don't need no goodbyes, It's the 3 AM to nowhere and we have all our nine lives.

Give away the dog and your shredded past, While I leave those petunias, people and the shadows they cast. We don't belong anymore and no one can claim a thing, The evening is bright as long as the Phoenixes sing.

It was never in this life, you knew that well, And they kept calling me with their silent knell, But we have to leave all this now, cause I was not born to drown; baby come on.

[soumyamurthy]

Always

Did you think I was perfect, as we lay basking in the afternoon sun? When wet kisses shined almost as bright. I remember those afternoons and gasps, I remember those fingers caressing my soul.

Did you see I was moving away, as we walked down the meadowed paths, When our hands were comfortably in each other's stay, I remember choking on words I could never tell, I remember lying to you on what I never felt.

Did you know how simple it was for me to wake up and go, When you asked me pleadingly to stay with you. I remember not feeling a thing as you stood there waiting, I remember laughing to finally not have that burden; Of loving you enough to walk away, Of wanting you enough to let you be free.

Did you know when I broke your heart, I broke mine more so I would never heal? Did you know I always loved you, even as you died not knowing me in the end?

[soumyamurthy]

Disney bride

She wears red lipstick and streaked shoes. Hands limp of her ring and scarred hues. When she goes about wandering out and under, searching for you.

She knows she could have died; she should have died. Until you swapped her blood with formaldehyde. Now she walks the earth dead and reeking of, revenge for you.

The nights make her feverish with the same nightmare, It was your whiskey filled breath and the leering air, She never knew till that day that monsters walked the earth, monsters like you.

Quaint town’s bride, in a trail of nonchalant whites, On her way to the rose pews strungs in fairy lights; Oh how she fought, while you slapped her for, running from you.

So she scours to find you by the wave swept piers, drenched by the sea, smelling of salt and acrid fear, But not a words passes her bloodless lips as she digs her rotten nails, deep inside you.

[soumyamurthy]

‘Parents,’ said Harry, ‘shouldn’t leave their kids unless – unless they’ve got to.’

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

[soumyamurthy]

Speak not because it is safe, but because it is right.

Edward Snowden

[soumyamurthy]

Death

“Look, it’s nothing you haven’t done before. Being a human actually makes it easy to accept it. Since the futurepasts we have seen –

My bad, you do not know what a futurepast is in this form. Well, for simplicity’s sake, let us call it time.  

Since the time humanity has been the lifeform this planet has designed – 

Of course! All planets are sentient and have the right to create the lifeforms they want; do not be ridiculous. It is their fundamental right, as decided in the third CCOPE - Celestial Convention of Planetary Entities.

Where was I? ...Since you began life, primitively as hunter-gatherers, we realized you are not accepting enough to understand what we really are. Gaia would not allow us to level-up you either. 

The idea that we are from a world just above yours in the dimension of time and therefore it is natural for you to move across worlds as universal travellers was a hard concept to sell. We figured it would be easier to introduce ourselves as your higher beings called Gods. – 

Yeah, it was quite a stupid pun and yet none of your species got it!

Where do you think you get the urge to visit places and collect those fancy postcards and cheap souvenirs? How do you think you get wistful when you are cooped in one place for too long? Why do you think you have the urge to get up and go to unfamiliar places, and see the places you have never even known?

I could go on, but you know it too, that it is all in you; in your so-called DNA. Everything in this world is transient, especially you. You enter this world with just what you need and you leave it just the way you should, moving from place to place, time to time – 

Yeah, because the soul just cannot have any memories you know, it is like a program. You attach it to the database you need in that planet, and lo! You have the world you wanted to experience. However, without that data; those stunning visuals and adaptive emotions, your ‘program’ is just existing, simple and unfettered. It is free to go anywhere, ‘live’ anything.

We call it Immersive Experience Technology. IET. I believe the closest concept to IET would be what you beings call as ‘soul’. – 

You think we didn’t try ?! We always stopped over, one futurepast or the other to explain it all. Bless Gaia for making you as delusional as possible though because every attempt we make to explain how it this is just a form to transition over and you had a hundred others talk about prophets, hell and heaven. One quiet youngling then started this thing called religion and that is when we discovered that this quite a hostile lifeform.

It was quite amusing. We always wondered at your creativity to have 600 different faiths but the inability to see beyond a supreme power. – 

Ah yes, God. I was wondering when you would ask.

No, there is no heaven, hell, Satan or God.

God is absolutism, something that we trans-dimensional beings never grasp. We never stop and ergo there is no absolute entity to lord over us. The universe with its constant chaos and ensures there is always another planet, another life to experience. So we obey her and keep ‘living’.

Personally, I have no idea why you think someone cares about policing supremely futile beings such as yourself. Look beyond this microcosm of perspective and you will realize there is only thing you can always do - travel. Visit all the worlds. Here and then. Watch the futurepasts zigzag past you as new worlds coalesce and die. See it all.

So go on, just keep swimming.

Fin.

[soumyamurthy]

Maybe

I threw a wish in the well, don't ask me I'll never tell, pennies and dimes floated down the end, while I stood silent, hands still. It's ghoulish to even think it, I know, and here I am, fervently praying so, away from the laughable irony, and the invisible binds. And yet all I see is the many faces that scar. You took your time with it all, the cold emotions and the silent curses. I took no time to fall, clawing to escape and yet loving you just more and so. But now I have run out of excuses, mouldy coins and time. I just want you gone, away from mine. I know to escape you, and my closeted screams, I need to wish you away, unapologetic and true. I threw a wish in the well, And if you ask me I'll never tell, But it’s not enough if they are merely gone, you’ll need to wish they were dead.

[soumyamurthy]

Slash

Sometimes, usually, when the world is spewing nothing but black, I trace sweet lines of joy, and wait. In tremulous anticipation.

It trickles in a small nondescript bubble, unsure of why I pulled it out. And shyly peeks, bathed in painful lines of red. Quietly pulsing my lifeless veins.

Crimson senses awaken me from my stupor, careening me into a seeming arch of life, and yet I know as do they, that all I will do is swing right back into the pitted depths.

The words will fail, with jagged shadows cast. The men won’t smile and friends disappear along with your cat. And yet I know as don’t they, that empty void was where I always belonged.

[soumyamurthy]

Free

You are the pain of a thousand broken shards of doubt and insanity, and the scalding winds of the parched desert sands. You are the grasp, I could never escape, And all the angry dark welts who wrote a ballad of scars on my soul. You are the white noise, always engulfing my past; suffocating, and the dead flutters of a shattered heart. All that torment of the ill-disguised love, which clutched and clawed at my insides; All that misery of the repressed moods, which killed me softly, everyday. I set them all behind, as I stumble into the ethereal, I watch the shadows turn to dust as I step over the veil. For I loved you and hated you for never letting me go, But here I am, fading and silent at end of the show. And all I can say is now I have a smile on my heart, away from you, even death is chaos without its last.

[soumyamurthy]

Goodbye

The silence speaks for the words unsaid, harsh and bitter ever, of truths hidden. Of walking down the path of twisted joys, of all the lies which made you and me stay. The silence speaks for the elusive peace, free from the worlds of broken promises. Away from the wrongs I cannot let you right; far from the broken shards of the distorted light. The silence is still and calm this night, when I finally sight the reasons despite, my heart hiding it masterfully so. I smile quiet and I know now, to let go.

[soumyamurthy]

Mental illness is never to be ignored. its #okaytosay

The Real Monsters are reborn! 

Upon getting so much attention for my previous designs, I wanted to redesign the monsters and develop the concept a little more. You’ll notice most of the monsters have subtle alterations and the descriptions have been changed to better reflect my original concepts.

Disclaimer: The artwork is not at all intended to make light of these conditions but instead is intended to give these intangible mental illnesses some substance and make them appear more managable as physical entities. 

Prints! http://society6.com/TobyAllen

All work ©Toby Allen 2013

[soumyamurthy]

Brontë's girl

When you are a wicked wild girl, like Brontë thought, you are too bright for this dreary ol’ world. The words, the notes; they sparkle high, but the melody only pulsates with a quiet sigh.

When you are a wicked wild girl, like Brontë thought, you play around a little too reckless with the laws, no doubt. The heartbreaks, the kisses; they happen more often, yet the soul never tires of memories and men.

When you are a wicked wild girl, like Brontë thought, you laugh for all the universes you have lost, pieces of heart and fluffed up verve, all scattered and taken, for them to sew their blanket of clichéd lives.