HALF-OPEN DOORS

Just next to the bustling road, there stand two half-open doors. Inside, there lives someone who grants wishes, waiting for you her only chore.

Every evening, you enter, sit, bare your soul. You let your wishes flow freely on the floor. She listens, heals, grants them often. She doesn't discriminate — good, bad or poor. Money drips out of your wallet into her box, your wishes fulfilled, what else for. You come out, turn back, stare at both. You call one God, the other a whore.

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Today I received the undergarments you'd ordered for me. Jockey, the next best thing to naked. Two of them, so that if I were too lazy to wash the used one, I'd have a spare one for the day. They are supposedly my birthday gift. The best gift, for it is the only thing I needed. I had specifically asked for them when you called me two weeks ago. 'Tell me, seriously, no,' you crooned, 'Harsh, not everything is a joke.' I stood my ground. Other than underwears, I didn't need anything. I have no material desires. No gadgets, no instruments, no books right now, as I'm surviving on bare essentials. Not even ... love, I added and immediately regretted. I was joking, I said. You silently left the conversation.

Holding the pack in my hand right now, I look at it in amusement. You not only ordered it but ordered it early. A week before my birthday, a week after our break-up. You hated how I was always joking when we were together. Did you crack a joke this time?

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I'm the sum total of all those I dated. Those I loved, and also those I hated.

My Spotify playlist has songs that belong to the singer with the finest taste in music. My library contains books that were introduced to me by the lit grad. My words are a gift from the gifted writer. My taste in food, the unique dishes I cook are presents from the self-taught chef. The aesthetics of the curtains & the rugs in my house are that of the designer. My favourite movie, About Time, was a recommendation from the cinephile. My politics is a carbon copy of the activist's. Big additions to the little me, my holes filled
with their whole.

I am made of them, assembled like a makeshift airplane from the parts they left behind. I wonder if they participated in this exchange, if they carry parts of me with them, if they too built makeshift airplanes that fly. Maybe, some day,
we could meet in the sky.

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HALF-OPEN DOORS

Just next to the bustling road, there stand two half-open doors. Inside, there lives someone who grants wishes, waiting for you her only chore.

Every evening, you enter, sit, bare your soul. You let your wishes flow freely on the floor. She listens, heals, grants them often. She doesn't discriminate - good, bad or poor. Money drips out of your wallet into her box, your wishes fulfilled, what else for. You come out, turn back, stare at both. You call one God, the other a whore.

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~• Zone Gyan •~

// Prose Poem//

(In Caption)

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•On colours,art and paintbrushes•
All through the day the pastels of his life keep crumbling up my heart. Like the stars were once written by a poet as a story in his poetry I was once written by a lover who himself was once written as one .
So here starts the story of my art space where he was colours and I was art and then the paintbrushes interrupted.
•captioned•

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••Of a different world and poets••

//Caption

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I really do tried forgetting,
But I always end up.
Falling all over again.

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It is that time of the year again when the sweat makes the shirt stick to our skin. The afternoons swelling with summer heat are spent devouring cooled watermelon, gulping down tender coconut water, relishing multiple untimely showers, drinking water from an earthen pot or bickering about whose turn it was to refill the water bottles to refrigerate. The evenings feel like a collective sigh, let out by the universe, in relief.

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/ Bearing Fruit /



Lemon seeds have been sown in the soil of my stomach. Fresh green leaves have sprouted from my ears, nose and mouth. Sunlight and water has rained, rained heavily on my hair. The leaves are always dripping wet. They smile with content. I never write with an empty stomach.

( READ FULL PROSE POEM IN CAPTION)

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