Done and dusted
So my first spoken word performance finally happened! And it was an opening act with a very dear friend.
Now there’s something I learned from Sarah Kay back in Pune — love poems work wonderfully for age group 15–23. My audience fell in the same group and hence, I wrote a love poem. (I basically wanted to write something easy quickly. :P)
Love
She loved love
Hated what it brought along
Mandatory emotional baggage
Fearful commitment
Useless expectations
Endless problems
That walked creepily on your small, tender shoulders
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Making them lean
Hurting them
Trying to make sense
And then slowly and slowly
Ruining your love
And atlast, complicating it.
Why can’t we keep it simple?
Like,
“I love you, Shantanu”
“I love you too, Harshita”
Why does it have to be hearts and flowers?
Followed by heartlessness and thorns.
Why does the guy have to propose?
Why does the girl have to be clingy?
Why does anything have to be labelled?
You’re a fucking bitch!
No, you’re a fucking monster!
You fucking ruined us!
No, you fucking ruined me!
So you turn to love
Shouting on top of your voice
Trying to bid goodbye
“Love, look! I’m walking away.”
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Love doesn’t look
Love doesn’t stop
Love goes on, leaving you behind
Making you heartless
Spreading the itchy thorns
That ache you
And soon enough break you.
And then one day you grow up
Love grows up too
Love looks new
And fresh
Like coming out of a hot shower on a cold day
Like the cold wind that blows towards a sand-clad bay
We wave at it
It waves back
We smile
It smiles back
We talk
And guess what? It talks back.
But this time, it all actually makes sense
This time, it does stay
This time, it doesn’t ruin you
This time, it keeps no promises of being forever
This time, it farts and poops and breathes
This time, it does just fine
But what’s different this time, you ask?
Well, for starters, you have changed.
And for maincourse,
Your expectations
Your thoughts
Your views have changed.
For dessert,
Your imaginations about love, they have changed.
Into a sweet, but tangy reality.
One fine morning, “your” love walks up with a coffee and says,
“Do you know falling in love with you was the easiest thing I’ve done in my life?”
You blush.
And you ask,“But baby, how difficult has it been staying in it?”
Surprisingly, “your” love has an answer.
“As difficult as falling out of it would be.”
~The end~
I realize that it must have sucked to read that poem. It wasn’t one of my bests either. But I’m pretty sure that Shantanu either performed magic on the audience or me, because the crowd went bonkers. I also performed another poem solo. I’m not sharing it here because it’s already a story I had written and posted here. I simply converted it into a format good enough for spoken word.
Now it’s strange that so suddenly, in a week’s time, I decided to do something so out of my way. But I read this somewhere, and it has just stuck by: “If something moves you, you should act upon it.” And spoken word poems have moved me for quite some time now. I just didn’t know how to act upon it and now that I had found a way, I didn’t want to miss it. So that’s my reason (excuse?) for doing what I did.
