This exists mostly so that if Medium ever shuts down, I still have all my slam poems in one place.
16-year-old Nehal thought she had bars, and honestly, they deserve to be preserved.
Time-Table
To all the teachers out there whose hearts worry instead of beat
I'm not gonna lie there are days when we see you as tyrants, dictators, rule-makers and phone-takers.
But we see you push open doors, from the times when you can't remember the last time you slept for more than 6 hours to the times when you sit and sweat with us for our homework almost like a mission, at the heart of the system, we listen, advance, envision our tasks to the last ambition, where you carve paths for us to make the right decisions.
Lesson 1 - Physics
When I'm calculating the motion of projectiles, I try to think of my destined miles. I think about what anchors our mass, the distance between you and me, and of course the force of gravity, the free falling pieces of land, suddenly I understand, I raise my hand and I say, "hey, it's okay if you go east and I go west, we're connected by resultants: you guide us, and we'll pass the final test.
Because we remember what you taught us in September, that when we stop procrastinating and start accelerating its easy to see that our final velocity will be greater than our initial, it's simple.
Lesson 2 - Math
Legend has it that students who are proficient in citing resources while sleepwalking 4 times more like to graduate
add on-time submissions and progress reports, these students become 13 times more likely to graduate on time, multiply by the restraint on the urge to binge your heart out while cramming for a test divide by frequent threatening borderline scary outlook emails
take the square root of reality, subtract deadlines and your social life, and there you have it, the equation of life we'll come to appreciate more than any Pythagorean theorem.
Lesson 3 - English
I'm in English class and maybe this is symbolism but there are women in my life who told me that life radiates from the palms of my hands, and that words are sight locked behind physical metaphorical iron bars, once unleashed become the motifs to our existence. You've told me that Nehal, that 'backspace key' on your keyboard is there for a reason, because the thing about life is that it's not defined by our mistakes, in fact, the legacy that you leave is the one that you make.
Because that day in September, you told us, that we are more than our outfit, more than our makeup, more than the sport I play and the one I don't, more than a GPA, ACT, AP, SAT. You told us, we are your students. And honestly? There's nothing we'd rather be.
Courage to care
It's there behind our conscience,
realizing what's happening
Looking but not seeing
the horror of it all
The strong urge
to take a step forward
Shout out and make it stop
the pain of it all
But the urge, shielded,
more like, cowering
Behind the hundredth layer of dread
And the fear of it all
Twitching hands,
words stuck in the throat
Stalling and contemplating,
the dilemma of it all
Now, when it's too late,
staring at the remnants
Of lost hope and promise,
and the misery of it all
Until it clicks,
Forcing me out
And as I stare and stare, it sinks
The gravity of it all.
Letter to the past me, for when the world makes you cry
Dear me from the past,
I wish this was like the open letter john-green style from the countless crash course videos on YouTube but it isn't. Instead this is the most literal condensed 3 minute crash course of life. I wish there was a soft metaphor to lower you into this grief gently, a cotton pillow padding spread for when you fall head first because you will. But there isn't. So here is an instruction manual of sorts FOR WHEN THE WORLD MAKES YOU CRY.
1. For when the world makes you nervous
Even if it is about raising your hand for attendance and saying your name, I want you to remember that your name, is an earthquake in waiting. Hold it in your mouth like the most dangerous secret the world is yet to know. Or those moments just before going on stage, when your throat starts to close up, your mouth becomes dry, beads of sweat shine on your forehead, know that behind your words, you'll go up there and learn to make your arguments so airtight that breath forgets the audience and nerves forget you.
2. For when the world makes you ugly
In your world you are the artist, this is the life sewn across your own eye-lids, see it the way you want to. Ultramarine shades of blue, color of your shoe, black inks of that tattoo... Abstract the mere idea of perfection and whitewash it till your every curve and flaw has the same color and hue. When they tell you that you are stars in the sky that burned too bright, show them you are the supernovas that force the roads you walk on say "I bet the streetlights shine a little brighter simply because she is standing underneath them."
3. For when the world makes you deaf
Constant overwhelming pulsating noise in the form of irrelevant opinions will splinter your ears like pieces of glass. I want you to turn yourself/become deaf and create a new walk just to exit this room of misplaced definitions and ulterior denotations. When people say "man Up" or that "boys will be boys" I want you to Michael Jackson moonwalk off the hate and distance yourself from people who teach you "why fight to remove our chains when we can simply compare their lengths?"
4. For when you meet Mr. Right/ Or Ms. Right
Because however many 377s may pass, loving the same gender will still be a territory trespass, smudge of dirt on an already stained glass, birth of a new target for society to harass, because they'll never stop hoping it's a phase.
Remember to be patient. Love stutters when it gets nervous. Love trips over its own show-laces, love is clumsy and your heart will refuse to wear a helmet. Love will come like riding a bicycle for the first time; scared and reckless so that your scars can tell the story of how you fell for her in the first place.
5. For when the world makes you drift
Mind you, you're entering a high school world where slogans on clothes carve out personalities so when you drift from your goals and have that first whiff of cigarette, know that Mum would smell it on you and give you a black eye. She'd say, "if God had wanted you to suck on a cancer stick, He would've made it legal, and did you really think Jesus died for you so that you could pollute your lungs and then get addicted to needles."
6. For when the world is moving too fast
And you find yourself becoming me
Know that this today will very quickly join the history class full of yesterdays. And you will have yet to face a space where everything we do does not mingle and interlace itself into everything and forms the mysterious thing that is time. So when life gets overwhelming and finds 13832 ways to make you cry, and quickly begin to resemble school detention, I want you to remember that we all face life at sixty minutes an hour, it's never too late to just close your eyes, listen to yourself and take a mini-vacation.
after all, a parallel universe doesn't have to exist in another dimension.
My Dear Melancholy
Nov 12, 2018
Scorching sunlight
Burning behind my lids
Struggling to open, managing a crescent
Against the pain, my muscles resent.
Across stretches of land, I see and pause,
bodies littered, dirty and tattered.
Like the occurrence of an apocalypse
Maybe it was.
Shrugging off another body,
I spar to get up.
To put one leg forward
And sit back and recall.
A colossal blur, nothing conspicuous;
Bombs, firing and overzealous enemies.
Depravity of the memories consuming me;
Suppressing it, still becoming more anxious
I reach and pull out a picture under the debris
Of an innocent little girl; innocuous in this show
"Keep safe" it said behind it
Little did she know
Crushing and suffocating
I stare at her smile
wondering; regretting; cursing;
so sweet; yet so vile.
My conscience, my sanity
In a precarious position,
There on the edge
of the hollow valley of lost spirit and annihilation
As it, at last, stumbles,
and falls in its glory
and hails and says
hello my dear melancholy.
You
A slam poem written for my World Scholar's Cup teammates
You are art;
not because you do this thing where you assign things to colors and colors to things; you define people with shades of hue and inks of the morning sky, but because art's supposed to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable and that's what you do. You hold my hand, force me out of the black charcoal line of normal territory, correct me like a damn grammatical category, and push me out of my comfort zone everyday while holding my hand throughout and looking me in the eye to say "Nehal, No Guts no Glory, No legend no story".
You are the stars;
when I look at the glittering stars in the sky I'm reminded of all the places we've been together. People say wherever you go becomes a part of you someday. I sure hope so, because Barcelona was where the horizon seemed to be stitched with a line of silver, Greece was nature's amphitheater where Greek gods and Percy Jackson met to have cups of tea, New Haven could at best be compared to our newly discovered heaven. New York, well New York was definitely not a place you describe with words. Being in these places we figured out that a parallel universe doesn't have to exist in another dimension.
You are light;
Because in the light of the morning sky, thanks to you I now only look at the libra, Sagittarius and Gemini part of the horoscope in the morning newspaper.
You are cement;
You help me build a sandcastle of cemented decisions and rock-hard commitments and proceed to remind me why I build way too many walls and not enough bridges. Then nudge me until I'm standing on the edge of the water fearing the impending leap, and gently whisper into my ears, "take the leap. After all, we are like islands in the sea, separated on the surface, connected in the deep."
You are the scar on my arm;
Because if you weren't there all those days reminding me to "bless up" and chanting 'you do you boo' over and over again, I won't be here rewriting and carving these words into my head because you deserve to be more than an unforgotten scar, a scar that has a hell of a story behind how I got it in the first place. Test results to you saying exactly what I want to hear to define our futures we had doubts we wouldn't even live to see, you tell me count on your stars Nehal, they will align, that if we don't try, we'll never know right?
To: Shreya, Prachi
figure me out
When I eat, I grow big,
When I drink, I grow small
Can you tell me, oh little ones,
Who am I of them all?
I can't be like humans,
As hard as I try
Since drinking water
Suffocates me and makes me want to die.
I don't think if you see
Air as an edible appetite
But my stomach sure goes gurgling
Every time I take a bite
Are you yet to figure out
my name and occupation?
Or should I open my 'hint manual'
And give you subtle indications?
I am very old by the way,
Just in case you wanted to know,
You can hear me sob when they throw sand at me,
Just to make me feel low
Some might see me as a shade of orange
Some as a shade of chrome,
Don't worry if you haven't got it yet..
I'll soon meet you at the kitchen of your home.
Apr 24, 2017