sunday, 12.06pm.

I can't say goodbye to writing, no matter how hard I try.

I left my fingers that let me be comfortable in the dark in thursday nights: at pregaming events, afterparties and parties that exist for the sake of parties. I left my middle finger on my right hand and my ring finger on my left at those parties that end at curfew, and my thumbs at parties that bleed into weekends and into the weekdays after, red cups, smudged makeup, lost wallets and all. I could write once, I knew I could - I prided myself on being a writer, being able to string words into sentences into paragraphs, not being “sappy” but sappy enough for the bark to bleed from a torn branch. I was a writer - correction, I am a writer (I keep trying to convince myself).

I met a god on one of those drunk thursdays, at the tapri outside campus. they lit the food trucks and cigarettes for the both of us back when lighters and fires made me nervous, they told me that flowers will fall three centimeters deep, there will be sun at the sunset and moon at sunrise; Obvious things, you’d think. I woke up the next morning to a thousand bird carcasses, lurching roses at a grasp of final fruition, their feathers twitch and split the way brittle nails do, their feet digging into the pavement begging to leave their names behind and the moon setting north. I will reach into TV static to feel a twinge of electricity and, nothing. I will touch metal handlebars and sockets and, nothing. I will scream at my friends and I will call my mother names and? nothing. A thousand and one dead carcasses, my phone doesn’t buffer before playing the next song, and I will reach into my pocket for another cigarette. there is no more pain that is ordinary, what is left to write poetry about?

I used to talk to the avla tree in my grandmother’s garden, the champa flowers in my building complex. All trees here feel foreign, no more bougainvillea to seize balconies, no tulsi to pluck for poojas, no dirt to fester under my fingernails, no poems, no prose. I will recite poetry and act in plays, perform lines I have written into the back of my throat and feel nothing. I eat curdled milk and rotting onions, I will light more cigarettes and I will shiver under the dust and meaningless graffiti wearing jackets that aren’t warm enough under jackets that are (mine, and theirs), and I will bite my tongue, because I know that the cup will never spill over, there isn’t enough for a poem.

I write in persian and learn that my instagram username means my life, my friends call me my life before they call me life. my professor will play songs that yearn to a return to heaven, like heaven is where life began (rather than life blooming itself). is this revolution? I will adjust broken watches backwards - is this revolution? I will listen to people beg for second chances, for one more song and for their others to stay one second longer - is this revolution? I will do all these things for the sake of writing them into a poem - is this the revolution I was promised? is this the road not taken? the fish that keeps us fed? the maundy thursday? the two-headed calf? the walk I would love to take with you? is this the dream of a poet I was promised when I felt my heart for the first time? is this the dream of a poet I was promised when I learned about meter? is this it? this?

I took care of my fingers once, I trimmed my fingernails and put bandaids over paper cuts. these days I will let callouses grow over indents where hands and pencils once rested. I let bruises scab and wither at the oasis of my palms, I close my fist and wells of words spill over into the cement. I used to write, I tell myself, I can do it if I just try.

The me that sat with singular words and phrases for hours asks AI if I will ever be okay again. the black dot pulsates, itching to give me the same manicured sympathy it is so used to giving before, itching to hemorrhage into TV static, into the mindless dinosaur game and into broken code, into voids where poetry is sowed. all my sentences start with i because I have left all the you’s with the younger me that hid in bathroom stalls in lavish hotels, and thin bedsheets and corners of rooms untouched by moonlight to write. to write obsessively the way woodchuckers bare into trees, the way a runner’s heart catches up to their feet at the end of a race, the way smiles catch up to laughter over jokes that would make no sense sober. I have left her with the gods that riot with cigarettes for mics and plastic chairs for podiums, I have left him with those trees I don’t like to talk to because the people who planted them have all their words cited in journals and novels (where’s the room for poetry that is only poetry for a minute?), I have left them where all the metro lines merge and eventually I will leave I too, stuffed between food my parents bring me and my friends leave behind under my bed, to rot.

the rgveda today isn’t the same rgveda that was sung for the first time, it was a years long chinese whisper game from teacher to pupil, from listeners who mouth the words to themselves and then to others, from poet to muse, parent to child. poems lost to the minutes that the twenty-four clock cuts off. I ask AI about the poems I think about, I google the same words when they’re stuck at the back of my throat, I don’t sit with the thought to remember - rather i gnaw at myself to remember. there’s no words for me to piece myself anymore, there’s no more room in these empty rooms.

I don’t think I have it in me to be a poet anymore, I use similes and bad grammar to make up for metaphors lost, my palms for fingers lost, words for words lost. words don’t come for me easy anymore, and if they do, they’re too cheesy for substack articles, aren’t they?

---

I used to write in infinities because I thought that my loneliness would be, and I was right! this piece is a callout to my newfound smoking addiction, the way I have been reusing metaphors because I can’t think of any new ones, a pleading request to myself to try to write again. I don’t know man :,) I don’t know how poets do it.

hope u had fun reading this (frankly, garbage, but i don’t care enough to edit it)!

forever and always,

jia sharma