poem1

Poem on Routine:

Wake up
Brush my teeth
Wash my face- the face wash depends on the country I’m in
Go to the kitchen, make coffee
Filter coffee in India, especially when I’m at my parent’s house, french press elsewhere
Always with milk and sugar
Both give a sense of home- but the apparatus can’t be mixed up. No, that breaks routine
Make a cup of coffee- the apparatus too depends on the country I’m in
Check my phone
Send some messages
The start of my day
Very rarely looks much different.
And at night I speak to you
While looking at the moon
And we feel like we are close, under the same sky, with the same witness
But now that I’m here and your night and my night are no longer the same
My nights no longer have you in them
Another broken routine
I’m not one to call myself a person of routine
And yet, with every new place, I feel the rhythm of my day changing
The movement of my body, the items on my grocery list, the activities in my day.
My outfits, my skin, the texture of my hair.
The size of doors, the way door handles work
The temperature outdoors, and indoors
and the smell of the breeze and sound of the street
Who knew, these things too made a routine.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

What’s the stuff of home? Food, talk, trains, tones? The way the sky looks at 5 in the evening in the spring? How the rays of sun – the same sun as everywhere – disconfigured your landscape?
Here, an acidic green erupts mid spring. The gentle flowers paved a way for something more unapologetic. At the same time, the rain makes the ground a darker, more fertile, more rumbling colour. This earthly simmer cut through with the beautiful fickleness of buds, the beginnings of leaves. It’s like chips and pickles. The sky is a milky tea, threatening to spill all over you. And so you try to take one bite of this, one bite of that, then a sip. And inside it all swirls, the discordances of renewal that you don’t get to choose. You just try to keep your feet dry.

Strike. Strike. Strike.

A forced break in routine, one that makes everyone uncomfortable. A tool of attention. The sound of silence, the absence, coming to the fore. Like text that’s been stricken through. You can still make out the words but they pretend as if they aren’t there. Do they pretend? But the sum of that ambivalent absence, unwilling presence is not nil. It’s more presence. The pause that makes more force, the stop that makes more movement. The revision and revisitation. The looping is disrupted and thus it wounds more tightly.