Secret

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you
because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.” 
(Roald Dahl)

Silence. Have you ever heard the mystifying silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you don’t have the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak; or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully. Autism is one such silence.

The world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. And the language of this unexpressed silence is autism. It is neither a disease nor a disorder. It is about having a pure heart and being sensitive… It is about finding a way to survive in an overwhelming, confusing world… It is about developing differently, in a different pace and with different leaps. I believe God created autism to help offset the excessive number of boring people on Earth. In fact, nobody is purely autistic, or purely neurotypical. Even God has some autistic moments, which is why the planets spin and the galaxies swirl.

The reactions of the many should not affect the actions of the few. Being different is what sets you apart from everybody else in this world. It allows you to be unique. It allows you to process information in ways that people will never understand, and see things in ways that others would find unimaginable. It allows you to break free from the mould of society. You are beautifully unique and uniquely beautiful. You are not the same as anybody else, yet you are not different from them either.

Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it. This verse is one such moment of secret expression of love between a soul who is deemed ‘silent’ and another who could read the silence.

Asymptote

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
(Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that were supposed to define us as human beings, and propel us to greatness. But have they? We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but we haven’t yet valued humanity. We assign numeric values to each other, demarcating our universal existence with lines and borders that have no meaning. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment.

We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We may not share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive.

From cosmic perspective, every one of us is precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. However, there are people who are discriminating by nature. They live inside a box and think people who don’t fit into their box are weird. I believe this lot of morons are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human – in not having to be just happy or just sad – but in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time. We are all ordinary. We are all special. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all zeroes.

Zero is the number people often feel, more so than one. This verse is the retelling of the story of an entity that’s considered a ‘nullity’ by the society, but through determination, courage and love, it proves: even ‘nothing’ can truly be ‘something’. 

The Poetic Inception – A Monologue

“A poet in his senses knocks vainly at the gates of poetry.”
(Ben Jonson)

No human experience is unique, but each of us has a way of putting language together that is ours alone. Youth really is an intriguing period in one’s life. If one adds writerly ambitions to the difficulties of youth, one must possess an exceptionally strong constitution in order to cope.

Whenever we sit down to write a piece of poetry, our minds are flooded with a million remembered ideas, a billion derived thoughts and a zillion words to link them with. Whether we should follow the rules or simply let our words flow in any form or direction remains the greatest internal fight. The seasoned poets do not face such problems, but the novices or the untrained ones (like me) sometimes go through real dilemmas in choosing ‘what to pen down’ and ‘what not to pen down’. Added to that, distractions of various kinds commove the thinking process and unsettle the mind. Tranquility is sought after. Compromises and sacrifices become quintessentially necessary. In the end, forced eliminations often drain out the core thought that was the source of the written piece initially.

Most poets (rather creative people) often meet an untimely end, due to their obsessive and eccentric nature. This unorganized piece of verse is an attempt to map the mind of a poet embarking on a noetic journey to create a written piece. It has a dual layer of monologue to highlight the dilemmatic nature of the mind. The words written in italics imply that they have a louder impact on his/her cognitive process, and punctuation has been minimally used to bring out the continuum of musing.