1.
I remember my sister
Talking about cicadas;
How their ancient monotone
Is like a thread
Binding generations together,
And how cicadas emerge
after spending seasons underground
As if to greet a new world
Every time they gather enough courage
to see the sun again.

2.
I imagine myself
Dancing on a rope bridge-
A bridge I chose for myself.
I am
perilously close to falling
Into obsidian abysses
With every step I take.
But the two sides of my family
Are pillars
To which the ends of the rope are tied.

3.
My gaze
Passes around my house-
A long-forgotten fossil;
I blow away the dust
From my grandfather’s bookshelf.
The butterfly-stenciled wall
Of my room
Is a museum of artifacts and memories
I have collected from pavements
And rabbit holes
And souvenir shops
In a country
That is a foggy epilogue in my mind now.

4.
For a second
My breath catches
And I am a tourist in my own house.

5.
My pen ran out of ink today
And my mind
Wove its way to how
We are all just use-and-throw pens
Trying to write down every story we can
Until we run out of ink
And are taken victim
By the unending cycle of life and death.

—

6.5.
I think, what I am trying to say is,
There is permanence
in a world that is evolving
every second.

—

7.
No matter what happens,
On rainy evenings,
I will greet
Cicadas humming their chaotic monotone.

8.
No matter how much danger
I put myself in,
And no matter how hard I tug
at the ends of my rope bridge,
The pillars
Will stay rooted to the ground;
not letting me
fall into a volcanic-abyss
of hopelessness

9.
Even when
My own house
Seems foreign to me,
My mother’s food
And the aroma that dances in my kitchen
Will always embrace me
And welcome me home.

10.
All of us
Will run out of ink someday;
But that is not what writing is about.
It’s the stories we write,
And the journeys we embark on;
It’s the lessons we learn,
and the people we love.
It’s the life we live
And the life we learn to love.

A/N: Random list poem written at 2 a.m.?- check.