I will follow you into the dark
I will sup with an open mind
I will eat out my heart
The moments do not rewind
The kindness of time warms
The stills within my soul
And paints the dark and the heavy
With a light and lurid stroke
The night fire stokes my dreams
Casting reflections of the day
Spicy, salty, sour, sweet
Never could I want to stay
Sweet nothings fill the morning air
Cool blues smudge the red half-sun
I breathe in dewy undertones
Before time leaps into a run
– Akanksha Gupta
Smirking, the shards of your rainbow
Cut deep my days and my nights
Folding the blades of my elbows
I stare at the edge of alright
Reason curdles at my fingertips
Toes burrow into hot sands
Cold gains foothold in my stomach
Winds blow ice from distant lands
Flickering, the shadows gather
Black clouds dance in my sight
Rain pelts reality at blind spots
Whetting with caution my appetite
– Akanksha Gupta
My bones are black
Chapped with the ashes of my past
They stack up like a house of cards
The soot dribbles from their sinews
No gust of wind can whisk asunder
The faith that bids them continue
And weave the tapestry of time –
Oh weave a tapestry of time
That steals all my blunder away
Until the victory is all mine
And I am the captain of my fate
– Akanksha Gupta
Between the shadows
and the soul
The mysteries lurk
uncontrolled
From bold the lies to
colder truth
Nothing is ever
understood
O in the shade
of hung despair
The silence shrouds
and stands and stares
A whiff of careless
times gone by
Invites the whims
to multiply
Till at the close
eyes weary rest
Ashes to ashes
jest to jest
– Akanksha Gupta
I am what I am Exactly the way I am Varnished, unvarnished, Tarnished by tide I gleam in the morrow Swim in the today The night is nigh Tomorrow is another day And unlike yourself You might find me staid But I am happy to keep up With me at my own pace The race never dies Fatigue sets in sometimes And I kip in the boulevard Of my mind There right across the corner Between sun-kissed trees Where the hammock stretches Oh so invitingly I lie in thought In waking dream And knock upon my reveries You knock upon my reveries I curl, and sigh And squeeze shut my eyes But the reel escapes My memory I groan and rise You needn’t knock twice Tomorrow has come I know Life beckons only once
– Akanksha Gupta
I haven’t rested in a while
Frozen in the expression of lassitude
Daunted by thoughts of endless toil
That occupy my solitude
A joyless haze of laissez-faire
Has settled so deep within my sinews
That a fledgling thought of raison d’être
Sends me hurtling down the icy blues
I now muse in silent interludes
The what-ifs have all but passed me by
And yet, for idle thoughts are idle not,
A weary passenger can still try
– Akanksha Gupta (poem)
Lurking in the depths of my soul
The hunger unfettered, growls and roars
I grab it tight with both my arms
With fingers unclenched from clammy palms
Yet fear threatens to swallow all sound
The muted ringing of silence surrounds
I dare not open my eyes, and stare
Into the very eyes of despair
On a face that could so easily mirror my own
Had it not been wildly unkempt and so very old
Dazed, startled, I uncurl again, and again glimpse
The future that spins anew with every blink
~ Akanksha Gupta (poem)
These are tears of yesteryear
Trailing the frowns etched ‘cross a lifetime
This is a mess of bitter words
That ego-clenched hearts left behind
Tracing the passage of the years
I cast every sulfurous word aside –
An attempt to conciliate maturity
That leaves my sanity mortified
Inside, a storm brews strong and fierce
Unrelenting in its intensity
Whilst my lips purse in a smile
And uncrease my brows with acridity
– Akanksha Gupta (poem)
Ink stains blue my finger tips
Calloused by their genteel labors
Upon the grays of black-and-whites
As the minutes turn into hours
Them faceless thus dance, endlessly
Their silent music greeting all ears
While the sightless, deafeningly,
Dip the brush in a sea of tears
Garbled hues then mottle my world
That stands still to the vagaries of time
Moments, both terrible and terrific,
Burn brightly and gently die.
– Akanksha Gupta
Those were the days
That flew upon the breeze
Scented with platters
Of words-worthy feasts
Them wintry special editions
Of home cooked meals
Warmed up like Enid Blytons
Seasoned with John Keats
The lazy summer afternoons too
Sprawled with Agatha Christies;
My bread and butter
Your wine and cheese
The popular cliques’
Nancy Drews were just
So sickeningly sweet,
They squatted prettily
Like jars of jam
Languishing in ignominy
That was when Sherlock Holmes
Was the gentleman’s gentlemen
And John Grisham a treatise,
And David Baldacci was as legal
As you could get
In a thrill baker’s paradise
But Shakespeare was
The Indians’ Chinese soup
All slurped down in delight,
Until pig’s blood like misogyny
Left ’em squirming in surprise
That was when Austen and Bronte
Were the Julia Childs of English Lit,
Deliciously piquant in delivery despite
Their obsession with etiquette
In contrast, the desi summer retreats
Became a much needed respite,
Cutting through the western sensibilities
With spicy mythological strife
Their sensationally spiritual plots
And samosa-eared pages of lore
Could wage a Game of Thrones
With more honour and less gore
Where Satya Jit Ray sprightly sleuthed
From fortresses to chawls,
Arunadhati Roy bluntly sluiced
Variety with liberal over hauls
Then came Chetan Bhagat
To conquer cinema with realism,
But with grammar like pirated pizza’s
He posed Adiga little competition
Thusly, the experiments with
Fictional truths grew by and by,
As I kept up with nuggets of
Phantasmagoria on the sly
It was the best of times, indeed,
It was the worst of times,
To have swum through the Trojan wars
Yet have doddered into Twilight
It was the age of wisdom, truly,
It was the age of foolishness,
Where the literature of examinations battled
To gain foothold in my reading lists
This fascist state of poiesis
Kept me winded and on my toes;
With History and Future in a flux
I spent hours thinking fast and slow
And through this epoch of identity politics,
Cultural wars and Digital putsch,
That the fad of Harry Potter thrived
Became a universally acknowledged truth
– Akanksha Gupta
I’ve always been someone
Rather inconspicuous
Rather ordinary,
Terribly awkward about everything
And awfully clumsy
Yet I’ve found myself in severe arguments
Willing and unwilling repartees,
Thrillingly innocent adventures
Brimming with anomalies
There is an unrest within
A proclivity for annoyance,
A desire to be anonymous
While indulging in flamboyance
They call it individuality
A vanilla curiously original,
Without elegance or intricacies
Yet standing out in the peripheral
I am standing in my shoes
But uncomfortably wear my skin,
Perhaps it’s all the eyes on me
That I wish I wouldn’t imagine
My irrepressible inner conspiracy theorist
Shudders in irreverent timidity,
Wanting to minify my presence
While standing with enforced equanimity
There is a tug of war
And I am balanced precariously,
The rope is taut, pulled on either ends
By paradoxical ideologies
I am very present in every thought
And absent from reality,
Thusly standing in the shoes of the self-involved
Quietly convinced of a self-aware personality
– Akanksha Gupta
I like to think
I am like a pendulum;
I am wont to seesaw
Between
A very high opinion
Of myself
And a critically flawed
One
Yet unlike the pendulum
This wont is an artist’s science –
Abstract rhythm
Immeasurable rhyme
It ebbs and flows
Like a musician’s score,
Its intensity oft rendering
Thinking a chore,
And in this state my Subconscious
Still battles with indecision;
A furious yet subliminal exercise
Both, a virtue and a vice
That’s crept up in my sinews
Contracting, expanding,
In sweet delirium
(Quite unlike alcohol)
Therefore,
And Apparently,
This makes it good for the soul,
Like,
Chicken soup!
Drinking in incredible stories –
An oblivious escape
A deliberate distraction
A tragic twist
An inspiring action –
Each oscillation thusly stokes
The storyteller’s
Imagination
And, don’t we have them all?
Stories to tell
Stories to live
Even as we’re grasping
At the straws
We push through
And pull rabbits
Out of our ordinary tales –
Veritable magicians we are
With bewilderingly bewitching brains
That delude themselves
To swing
Between
Self love
And loathing
– Akanksha Gupta
The day
Like embroidery
Is fine
It scrapes across the fingertips
And digs ‘neath the roughshod nails
Before it eases into night
And the hardships gently wane
And ebb and flow with tendresse
Of each, now habitual, caress
That kneads the creases and furrows away
The day
Like embroidery
Is fine
It scrapes across the fingertips
It digs ‘neath the roughshod nails
Benign, as a child’s gaze,
It draws blood –
It plucks each drop
And hurls into the design
Of Drowning suns
And Ruby skies
The drops pool
The wounds cool
The day rests into night
The rains glaze over the reds
That macabrely coalesce
Along the hardened lines
But if the fault
Were upturned
The rains would gently graze the reds
And ebb and flow with tendresse
Of each, now habitual, caress
That kneads the creases and furrows away
Then the day
Unbeguiled
Like embroidery
Would also smile
– Akanksha Gupta
Dichotomizing the masses
Into Haves and Have-Nots
Misclassifies
Those who think out of the box
Bestowing polarized labels
That qualify all difference
Serves to consciously diminish
Both diversity and tolerance
Proscribing and prescribing
With sanctimony the sacrilege
Rattles no glass ceilings
But blinders the window ledge
Sermonizing and imposing
These truths on unknown polities
Translates into unintelligent
And offensive foreign policies
Pitiably unaware
In the headiness of pan-superiority
Immune to introspection
The mind languishes
Oblivious
To its own insecurities
– Akanksha Gupta
Unbidden
The thoughts of yesterday
Threaten to drown me
And I’m reminded
There’s a fine line
Between careless and carefree
Those who
Throw caution to the winds
Yet come out smelling like roses
Know we’re accustomed
And inured
To our own play of ignorance
Those who
Mince words, measure thoughts
Yet are censured for every gesture,
Unknowingly let them out
In their voice, in their eyes
And in their posture
Justice is blind
But Judgment is deaf
And while Reason is neither
It sputters when
Truth is mute
And Instinct has taken over
– Akanksha Gupta
The Pluming PoeTree 
