I am

Posted on July 31, 2021 by axelle

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

What Makes the World Tick

Posted on May 8, 2019 by axelle

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