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pride month ended, still wanna nap on tiddies

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we choking. the system isn't broken, it was built this way.

So, India is dying.

Look, I know a good number of you are from the US and things aren't amazing there either, but my country is literally on the brink of collapse. So I'd love it if we could talk about that for a minute.

If you can't do anything else, please just read and reblog.

A second COVID wave has taken out the healthcare system. There are no more hospital beds. There's an oxygen shortage. There's a critical vaccine shortage. The Central Government has thrown its hands up and is passing the baton to the State Governments to do what they can.

There are over 16 million covid cases. A record 330,000 new cases reported yesterday - comparable to the US at its peak. 187,000 dead as of today.

There is no plan.

Mass cremations are taking place. The cremation grounds are running day and night and they are short on wood. People are watching their loved ones die while waiting for a hospital bed, and then they're unable to give them the proper burial rights.

Hospitals are overwhelmed. Patients are being confined, two to a bed. They're the lucky ones.

We are on the verge of people dying in the streets.

This is the second-most populous country in the world. The largest democracy. A country that encapsulates over 15,000 years of recorded human history and has endured everything from famine to invasion to colonisation.

We might be at the end. This might be the thing that does us in.

People are dying.

People are dying.

People are dying and there is no plan.

More good news? Variants are popping up. A double mutation strain has shown up. It is resistant to current vaccines. This will not go away. This is the devastation they warned of when the anti-maskers were out protesting the minor inconvenience of covering their face in public.

My country is on the verge of an emergency state. Our government has failed us. This is as dire a situation as it ever could be.

Look. I don't do much with my life. I write fics, some of you have read them and that's pretty much it. I spend my days with my head in the clouds because that's where I like to be.

But two days ago, my grandmother tested positive, had to be taken to hospital and the ambulance caught fire.

She barely made it to the urgent care she needs.

So, here I am, using whatever meager platform I have to cobble this request together. Because I have to do something.

If you can, donate.

Or spread the word.

Help. Please.

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Mahmoud Darwish, from Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi)

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i. there are poems inside of me

i know because i feel them clawing at each other

when i am at it again with my thoughts at five in the morning

the sad poems tell me i don't even know if it's morning or last year or a dawn from my childhood

the happy poems are pulling at my shirt,

go watch the sun rise it's waiting for you

the angry poems are burning at my throat

and i don't let them break my lips

not right now, they tell me the sun is not waiting for me and all the birds are dead.

ii. there are poems inside of me and i drown them

with numbness and wordless-ness and feeling-lessness and the less and loss of everything

you ask me what i miss, you have expected people to find and lose and miss things chronologically

i tell you it's not like that with me

iii. not everyone tries to hold at water

as if it's something solid

when they drown, i have done it too many times to even try

there are poems inside of me and i am drowning them and it's five in the morning of someday in my life

im not letting them come out but they are not trying to swim

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Self care for me is standing under a burning shower for twenty minutes, and then proceeding to pat-dry my face to 'take care of my skin'.

What can I say, I'm a glutton for irony.

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Physical and mental abuse is so common in Asian households that it's fucking normalised. You are not allowed to feel traumatized because this is what happens to every child. Your feelings are not valid because we were just disciplining you.

How is this ok?

Being beaten mercilessly for small mistakes did nothing to teach us discipline. It's an endless cycle of justified violence.

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the world is so full of people and people are so full of themselves.

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frida, 2020.

"some women fear the fire, some become it" -r.h. sin

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“I am profoundly enchanted by the flowing complexity in you.” - John Keats, Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

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“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful”

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I normally declare proudly that I hate people, on wallpapers, in songs and in journals. I have no interest in people who live off small talk, mundane gossip and ignorance. People who are apathetic, careless, hateful. People who are far removed from poetry, philosophy, literature. People who don't appreciate art like a goddess. People who live their lives like brainless machines powered by capitalism. But if you read, sing, however horribly, write, paint your nails in pastels one day and black the next, if you think you can change the world, if you want to save people, even if that means saving just yourself, if you aren't afraid of being burnt at the stake, if you fight, rebel. Oh, those people who quote philosophers and serenade Greek mythology. Those people who are poems in themselves. Those people who are colours and voids at the same time, those volatile beings called humans, if you are that, you are more than welcome.

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Red. Definitions.

Red is the colour which drowns my eyes when I close them against the ruthless sun. It's the colour I feel rushing to my veins when I get happy or angry, it's the colour of my violent heartbeats in a room full of people.

Red is the colour of my lips, when I smile to talk about something I love, it's the colour enveloping the words that come out of my mouth. My blood is red, so is yours. It's the seventh colour of the rainbow, it's the first colour of my dreams.

They say fire is yellow, heat is blue, but there's nothing like the glow of a solitary bonfire when the dusk beckons to the cold. That glow, is red.

Red is the colour of the apples that grow in Kashmir's orchards, sown in a mud turned red by blood. All blood is red, you know.

Red, they also say, is the colour of romance, it's the colour of love. But then they paint Satan in red too.

It's the colour of pain. It's the colour we worship with, in the clothes of our goddesses and the kumkum on their foreheads. Red is wild, you cannot tame it, it turns rivers and skies into its colour, it is the colour we take from nature, and the colour nature takes back in the end.

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When we pass off maladaptive behaviour in teenagers as them just 'being teenagers'..

We are normalising the struggle of a generation.

We are normalising bloodshot eyes.

We are normalising sleepless nights.

We are normalising anxiety. Depression. Rage. Physical and mental struggle.

We are normalising psychological unhealthiness.

Because 'teenagers are NOT supposed to be like that'. They are not supposed to be these miserable creatures that society has made them.

They are supposed to be understood, heard and empathized with, not rubbished off as 'hormonal imbalance'.

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After years of desensitisation, we have forgotten how it feels to actually be too shocked to believe what happened.

We say the words, drink the next sip of the coffee, and move to the next page.

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Goddess

yes I could cry

lay bare my soul

but I wouldn't

it will scare you

to look at me

the woman you think

you can conquer

when you see she

is the one who you

worship.