#samudra suryamukhi

[samudra-suryamukhi]

gold bangles

three weeks ago my mother gave me two of her gold bangles to wear

(i took them off; they made me feel too much like a woman)

i wonder how much of our gold has been mined from other people's pain

and flesh and bones

whoever we are

wherever we came from

we have colonized mind and body

our orange vermillion turmeric idols

housed in temples made of thousand-year-old corpses

our dams flooding their gods

our silos crushing their lungs

we lose them, and ourselves.

if i stop talking about it

will you give the gold back?

[samudra-suryamukhi]

past midnight is

a time that will be out of reach for the foreseeable future.

a time that should have been mine but is instead spent listening for footsteps outside my half-closed door (i prefer to refer to it as half-closed instead of half-open). my night light broke so i can't turn my room yellow anymore, this garish bright light feels like a curse upon my closed eyelids (half-closed).

in another life, past midnight would have felt like a good dream, strolling in a meadow with bright, warm sunlight and the fragrance of grass and dandelions in the musty breeze, waiting for the rain. or staring out the window at night, watching the construction floodlights flicker out one by one, like the thoughts in my head when it is time to sleep. past midnight is a time i will create for myself and for the only other person who first knew i was here. i am writing this past midnight, the soft click of keys a sonnet in binary and morse code and boolean variables (i am trilingual). i want to do everything but also absolutely nothing at all. these days i only wish i could spend midnight and every hour after that - with you.

[samudra-suryamukhi]

beacon is an overused word

so many people have used 'beacon of light' so many times in the past decade that i feel it has quite lost its meaning. i however scarcely know of any alternatives. i don't want to write like my life so far has been a dark, damp, moldy cave tunnel barely big enough for me to crawl through since that reality is not real but dissociative. i know there is a beacon waiting for me, with me, waiting at me to unfurl my paper wings and fly out of my wooden cage wherein i am the woodpecker, persistent, pecking away at evaporating bars. i want my life to be real, to smell the green white buds when i go for a walk in the morning, the wind making my eyes water and my hair fly like a superhero's cape behind me. i'll wear golden clear blue seawater jewelled bangles with a t-shirt saying fuck my haters, pouring just enough of myself into the world to make a rainbow but also keeping me concentrated enough so i can access righteous anger at a moment's notice. even though this rage is red and fiery and burns down friendships built on a false flag at a moment's notice, it is my beacon of light and guiding path. i will build a better life, brick by brick, poem by poem.