take a scalpel to my temple and carve out;

frame your questions and let my dreams splay

out on your petri-dish. ask me what I really want.

and here’s what I’ll tell you: sometimes, I want to

be framed like a Guru Dutt film,

I want to be nothing but cotton balls and luminous

umbrellas shadowing lovers with cups of sake.

I want to hide, blush and drape myself in my

embarrassing ardour. I want to be a black coat and

a graduate’s moustache, perhaps the last blot of grey

ink on a dying poet’s poem for the muse who faded

away and left a stale smell winding through his fingers.

I want to be the sum of all the softness a girl and

her anklets might carry, but I find that I must

crawl through gravel and the back of my weary hands

to get through.

Sometimes, I want to be a Mani Ratnam film: towering

landscapes that fail to eclipse my lust for life, intimate

spaces between lovers I find myself breathing past, the

ceaseless, eternal roar of the seas that raises a crescendo

of completeness in my bloodstream. Maybe I’m just a girl

looking for something new to shatter over.

Sometimes, stories about sad girls around architectural

marvels will do. I could wind myself tight around a

medieval lighthouse, maybe breathe in the loneliness

plastered in its cobblestoned silence, maybe walk around

in thrushes like an invisible blip of my mother’s existence.

Sometimes, poems wearing boots and walking around

in London will do. If poetry didn’t save me and hold me

together like a house holding all its broken windows in

fragile, teetering place – would anyone, then, tie lace

around my fingers and keep me from vanishing?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anjali Bhavan is an engineering undergrad. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Speaking Tree, Porridge Magazine, Coldnoon International, Allegro Poetry Review and Sooth Swarm Journal among others. She currently writes according to her moods, and looks forward to oddball experiences.