People are not poetry

You can write for hours on hours,
Of all the things you wish you could be,
But the truth of the matter is simple,
People are not poetry,
And I know that you wish you weren’t awkward,
That sweet words could roll right off your tongue,
But your time here’s too short just to worry,
How each single sentence is strung,
It’s okay to be rough round the edges,
To be bruised up and broken and scarred,
But it’s not okay to let people tell you,
That it’s a reason to change who you are,
Your hair doesn’t always seat nicely,
The way a poem sits so neatly on line,
And sometimes you might feel like a word,
That nobody has learnt to define,
You might not be a star that lights darkness,
Or a bird that can teach us to soar,
But it’s okay, because you’re too complex,
To be crammed into one metaphor,
It’s okay not to know what you’re doing,
Since your feelings don’t have to all rhyme,
Though a poem once complete is eternal,
You have the freedom to change over time,
You’re much more than can ever be written,
There is no title to say, “This is me”,
You can’t be trapped in the lines of a notebook,
Because people are not poetry.

Welcome to society

Welcome to society,
We hope you enjoy your stay,
And please feel free to be yourself,
As long as it’s in the right way,
Make sure to love your body,
Not too much or we’ll tear you down,
We’ll bully you for smiling,
And then wonder why you frown,
We’ll tell you that you’re worthless,
That you shouldn’t make a sound,
And then cry with all the others,
As you’re buried in the ground,
You can fall in love with anyone,
As long as it’s who we choose,
And we’ll let you have your opinions,
But please shape them to our views,
Welcome to society,
We promise that we won’t deceive,
And one more rule now that you’re here,
There’s no way you can leave.

The man I know

Inside, you have thousand words
So much you want to say
Your mind floating away
Thinking about your dreams
And how you gonna reach them one day

Gaze into your eyes, and see your soul
Two stars brown and bold
All the warmth that you truly hold
Bare, untouched and still whole

That smile in your eyes
The smile that never lies
The smile that is tender
Its charms to which one surrenders

Your sense of pride is obvious
Though never by design 
Your speech is intimate
Your character, divine

You quietly observe the mood 
Accordingly, you act
You choose your words deliberately
Relying on the facts

A man of calm, exclusive words
You engage those who hear
Relies not on its verbal count
But rather if it’s clear

Your mind is deep, heart is strong
You can make out right from the wrong
Everything you do, is respect and praise
You’re a wonderful person, you always amaze!

She wrote a life

She wrote a life she loved
on the leaves of many books
documenting all the details
so that one day she could look
back at all the things she'd done
and all that she had seen,
all the people she had known,
all the places she had been,
and there upon the paper
her treasures, line by line,
imbued with emotion,
invoke moments in time.
So although this was a story
that only she could tell
the ink left upon her pages said
" My word. She lived it well."

The Binding Chain

We walk together,

Inseparable by design.
Left with no choice,
To our fate we resign.

And yet there is my ego;
I have an identity,
While the one chained to my side
Is nothing without me.

I have a name.
To go with it, a face.
I have ancestors,
Who came from a certain place.

I have this lineage
And a handed religion and caste.
The one chained to me
Has no sense of its past.

I have hopes and dreams,
Things to look forward to.
It has no future to worry about;
No aspirations, nothing to do.

Even when I am gone,
I will be a memory.
But this chained companion of mine
Will have no such luxury.

I am defined,
It is just an outline.
I am continuous,
My shadow exists only at a point in time.

With no identity to uphold,
No tags of religion and caste to bind,
No past to define it,
Nothing in the future to find,

My shadow lives only in the present,
Free from all that defines me.
It is then that I realize - 
I am the one who is chained, she is the one who is free.

Get drunk!

Always be drunk.

That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
get drunk and stay that way.

On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.

But get drunk.

And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness
of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"