Rant

Hello beautiful people. Within one month of being back on WordPress, I’m here to rant. You all might not agree but if you do, I know how annoying this specific thing is.
Spam comments are common on WordPress (if it’s not and I need to fix something on my blog, please let me know). I have been on and off here since 2018 and I have seen wordpress saving me from hundreds of potential threats, spam and out of context comments throughout the time (a feature I saw only on WordPress). However the number was pretty low. By early 2021 it went up gradually, still bearable.
This year from mid June until this day, such comments are close to hundred. Within a month, can you believe it? I couldn’t.

I know the deal here, new accounts, even old ones have to interact in order to let your account/art/words be seen. But come on. There’s a huge difference between reading someone’s work because you appreciate them and reading/liking/commenting for your own sake. It really annoys me. I always thought WordPress was a safe space for people who appreciate all the forms of art. But “nice writeup, follow my blog” doesn’t sound genuine to me. And if it’s not genuine, what’s the point? Some don’t even leave comments relevant to the posts!

Worse are people who like tens of posts within seconds, like how do you do that? How can you do that? Don’t you think people can see the notifications?!

My point is, self promotion is something we should all be doing because if I’m not promoting my works, who is going to? But there’s a thin line. We don’t have to disrespect others’ works to bring attention to ours.

Image from Pinterest.

© 2023 mermaidspen

Sorrow’s Vertigo

The song of fragments
stitched together by memories,
The wound must bleed.
The lasts are more important than firsts
the last word
the last time
the last place.
empty lies on the promise
of better tomorrow.
Sorrow of seconds dissolved in minutes
heavy heart in a discolored room.
It keep coming
in the past, present and future
From wishing on falling stars
to fall like stars.

~🧜‍♀️

© 2022 mermaidspen

Connections

“By convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour, but in reality atoms and void”
  –  DEMOCRITUS

Conversations are tricky. It takes courage and tremendous conviction to initiate something without knowing how a person would respond. Our culture teaches us to be brave, to get up and join a group of people and be a part of the conversation; to be the tiny atom that makes this ever evolving universe. In other words, they say you’re only alive when you’re connected.

I hold on to the atoms within me and hope to see the world within my hands. Contrary to popular belief, world cannot be experienced in a particular way. I think it takes more than few words and couple of meetings to know someone. For some, it takes a lifetime. For some, lifetime is just one day. Sometimes, a day feels like a lifetime.

How do we connect? Will sharing what I’m feeling make anyone reading this my friend? Are connections that easy to build? How are people, people like you and me, are to survive this? How do we connect when we cannot even talk or lack the strength altogether?

Sketch credit: Bharath

https://ridiculousbharath.wordpress.com/

© 2022 mermaidspen

Seasons?

It’s almost dawn and like any other day;
I am looking for something to hold on to.
A popular and supposingly brilliant quote “you find happiness when you look for it” is here again but I feel like I’m done.
How can I look for happiness when all I feel and see is my failing attempts to understand it? How do I define something I have never experienced?
The weather is as confused as I am. Sun is yet to set but it’s too cold for April. Trees are leaf-less yet flowers are ready to bloom. They said spring is early this time,
but what is spring?
How do we know what rain is, when it’s raining? How is downpour so precise?
Where do all these seasons come from? Are wants seasons?

© 2021 mermaidspen

A war of Poppies- a collaboration

How to suck color out a rainbow palette? Is it possible for humans?

They always suck the red out of wounds and then blame the flesh for not being enough.

Beauty lies beneath wounds. But humans scrape wounds off shamelessly instead.

If the sky was painted black will it shield the wounded hearts?

Once I saw a poppy field. I didn’t see the sky’s reflection in it. Did sky shield itself from the wounded, red poppies?

I can bring all the green of rainbow to the field, will the grass still be greener on the other side?

People manipulate what’s beautiful for them. If green is brought down, they’ll again scrape it off.

I think poppies are the women, in middle of war among themselves, pushed to be and do better while their  roots are stuck in filthy mud of  “you can’t”.

Red gushes through the field right now. Is it blood? What if poppies sucked blood. What if all this beauty was swathed in blood?

The bleeding hands/people make  half of this world. They defile pride because they bleed.
I wish the world was colorblind but women.

Pride! Pride is anything but woman.

I’ll wear a scarf that’d wrench me if I ever try to favour red with blood. Both are different.

All I think of is women. I’d love to bring Gods, to ask them for shelter but there are no Gods and maps are deviod of safe.

My new graveyard is a poppy field. It bleeds so the sky keeps away from it. No beauty, no God. Hence, oppressed and hence my home.

No matter who rules whom, they sow poppies to see them bleed.

Skies look blue just to prove beauty can’t be red.

Samyak introduced me to dialogue poetry and our rants turned into, this really close to my heart poem.

Image source: Pinterest

© 2021 mermaidspen

Gods are dying in my country.

Centuries ago, during the
course of evolution, humans
brought the whole species
together, on the base of
One belief system; Religion.
We thrived. They say nothing lasts
forever; humans have this obsession
with change,
To know more, To be more.

And now ( fast forward to ‘I’ )
As ‘act of God’
I see my country moulding
beliefs of generations.
God has now become a tool
To control masses; we are given a
Reason to be scared of the sacred.
I see them locked in fancy buildings
like you and me, having 
‘no right to speech’, worse,
they can’t even speak because
no one is actually asking them.

/I used to think/
I’m an atheist/
but lately/ I have started to
believe otherwise/ like y’all/
I too have a holy book/

My God is as panicky and breathless
as yours. I watch TV
till my heart starts aching,
I clutch the Constitution
close to my flesh, with hopes
of lending some air to it;
I hear him suffocating.
Then I sleep to the weeping
sound of my God (Constitution);
who cries with all the other Gods
because Gods are dying in my country.

Prompt by Samyak

© 2020 mermaidspen

The Fictional Truth

We are in the middle of a pandemic and also the global and national predicament, not to mention, most of us are confused with a lot of questions and quite predictably turn to news. Alas!
I feel like we have no where left to turn to. Like like we are stuck in a loop.

Joseph Goebbels, a German Nazi Politician said, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth”. Almost everything in our present post-truth, modern world, is based on this single statement. This is the era of fake news. Our media shapes perceptions; all the allegations, investigations, trials, tribulations and decisions are made here. If there’s anything that I learnt from all of this is, if media comes to my home, they’ll find me guilty for the crimes I had no idea of.

From religion to advertisements, I feel, we are running on fragile balance between truth and fiction. It’s always easy to weave fiction; because of our ability and the need to be heard and seen in social groups, people tend to believe in the crowd Or link it to centuries old faith. Works like magic!

Truth is always hard to handle and impossible to process. Can we, you and I, handle the truth about the food we eat, clothes we wear, about how we twisted and turned faith of centuries into nothingness, of how we are using God as a psychological weapon? how we ruined the earth we call home? and how we all are to blame for all the bad in the world?

There is good too, I don’t deny it. But I don’t run away from bad. I have learned to acknowledge the problem. Acknowledging a problem is the only way to solve it.

Truth costs relations. And in present world, who wants to lose faith of someone important or powerful? A lie is thus fed a million times, until it becomes the ultimate truth. We believe in what we hear repeatedly.

~ 🧜

© 2020 mermaidspen

I’m dying poetry

In his Letters to Milena, Kafka wrote,
‘You are the knife I turn inside myself;
that is love. That, my dear, is love.’

And I can’t help but wonder
number of times I ate my own skin
to feel your touch on my lips.
And number of times I died,
trying to reason with unknown.
In search of words I travel
through my spine; your garden
in my lungs is dead. Butterflies
have turned into fireflies,
illuminating me while burning
my senses, I am alive you see.

There is a reason why I hate September,
we all have reasons, to reason with
unknown is a silent revolution, a war
with possessiveness. Like a failed
theory my eyes look for you
in patterns, for hints, so that
I can reason with my tied hands;
there are songs of lost touch in my heart.

All I am left with are questions.
I can’t come up with an explanation
for my fear of something that already
passed. Like the evening sky
there are too many colours, too many
shades of verses leaving my finger tips;
I paint my nails red when I miss you the most.

My skin sweat in how, why and where?
You ask me why no happy poems?
These, my dear, are barely poems.

© 2020 mermaidspen

//Touch has a memory//

I have been pretty transparent, if you’re really looking.
On my skin, you could see the boy with hazel eyes
with softest curls and the way,
he is touching my skin just by looking,
You can feel the metaphors
running along my hair
to your fingers;
you can sense the memories
curling up your hand.
Will remind you of the last kiss
or I’ll fill your heart with clichés;
you always fall for it.

Let me tell you stories about disasters and disappointment running deep down under my wrist, in my veins;
If you touch me for a bit longer, you’ll be able to sense the thunders;
touches, devastating enough to burn down the entirety.
But there’s nothing scarier than skin that feels nothing at all.

If I tell you,
consent in love is a funny thing
between the flashback of millions of memories and disruptive silence
in your eyes, you’re lost, believe me.
Once you touch,
there are no more may l’s.

And what about the veins under my skin that still tremble
at slightest touch because there are memories buried underneath me.
You look for justifications on my wrist,
all the longer-than-usual touches,
I’m wearing under my sleeves.

I know you’d believe me crying myself to sleep and how miserable the year has been.

But,
would you believe me
If I tell you,
An unwanted touch can send chills down the man’s spine
when you try to pull him closer after every “no”?
There is always a ” be a man” ready to slip from your tongue.
Can you ever forgive yourself in the name of humanity,
in the crowds shouting for justice while you’re the 5/10 culprits;
for stealing a moment that was not yours; thinking a smile to be a consent or never asking for it?
You know there won’t be any going back for him.
If there was a slight voice of complain,
it’s always easy to be a victim than to take responsibilities.
Funny how you always get away when they’re the ones sulking in pain.

And what about when a man tells you he was molested, would you believe him or say, “must’ve been fun?”

Collaboration with Bharath

© 2020 mermaidspen

//Love is Love//

Words will leave me
at the end of this poem
just like your love
left societies and hearts
day by day or
maybe it was never there.
Maybe I am too delicate.
Breathing before I suffocate.
Am I too slow
to cope up with the
mornings, days and seconds?
But I still am very receptive
towards love, affection
and the foundations of
your faiths and religions.
Everyday I hear lips
shouting “love is love”
but see them denying the same
when it’s time to act.
They let their opinions
slip into air
infecting people,
disheartening the minds
(Sometimes people are
The virus)
Being homosexual or
transgender is no crime;
world needs to stick to love
instead of a gender,
one part of world is on roads,
angry, hurt
and you’re telling me
to deny unlearning
because what you have
been taught is not wrong.
Stop shouting ” we’ll take care
of you, get you checked”
let the people be who they are.
We have so much to learn yet,
we have to go far.
And sooner or later
I’ll find the words which left
but, can you find the love
you threw out of your windows?

Prompt by Meera

© 2020 mermaidspen