Words.

Poetry, it has been a solace, confrontation, confession and an escape.

I started writing poetry when I was 12. My first poem was a birthday wish for a friend's mother. And since there has been no stopping, as I cannot imagine myself devoid of poetry in my life. During the initial years I wrote voraciously, producing around two three poems a day, and when I look at them now I see the long way I have come, and how different I have become. Looking back at your own work is an amazing experience for a writer, because more than anything, it has a reflection of your forgotten self. How sensitive you were to some particular things, and how susceptible young age makes you. The words were different, inspirations varied from music to plants, and sometimes I feel, I was a better writer then because my heart ached and smiled very easily and effectively. But the change through these years has been for better, because despite the alterations and additions, words never cease to amaze me, be it mine or someone else's. Meaning of words and their emotional quality is different when you are a writer, the echoes and sounds they make in your heart and mind are louder and their effects are deeper. Experience of emotions becomes better once you have written them down or you see them written by some other person.
I, as a person would have not been the same at all had it not been for poetry. There were nights I felt disturbed and all I would want to do was hold a pen and write, maybe scribble something or the other. Just look at the wall, or a window in the opposite building and hallucinate either painful or exciting events. Poetry makes us honest, because it is indirect. Though for earlier writers it served greater purposes, but like any other fictional work, a piece of art/poetry is a reflection of the artist/writers mind and heart. But because you do not feel the necessity to elaborate a line after its inception, takes off a lot of burden. Like here:

"The low, loathsome
The hideous, atrocious,
The mad, insane,
The unmasked, accurate,
Eyes behind glasses, glasses inside minds, minds trapped in cages
Cages made of shrieks, shrieks from innocence
Innocence of the vulnerable, vulnerable and fragile
Fragile is their sanity"

Because of the honesty of escape that poetry provides, it takes away the responsibility of explaining my disturbed state at this time. What only seen are the words, without a context and conclusion. Sometimes, you can be foolish, talk about love like a little child and not feel ashamed, because you have the opportunity to hide behind the persona of the narrator and express your foolishness. Because maybe that is how love makes you feel sometimes:

Fly with me, my lover.

Hold my hand and entangle your fingers with mine.

Into the fields of love and passion, bathing in the river

The cold water brings us closer. We will run around and towards the horizon.

Let's fly. Like you and I dreamt as kids.

When the hindrances were jokes, and destinations a bicycle ride away.

Take your shoes off. I will take mine too. We'll feel the grass softly

Writing  little tales underneath. Endings we shall give.

The sunshine so bright will not hurt. Lying and staring at the sky.

Drawing pictures, writing words and making music

We will live happily ever after.

I find myself incapable of expressing so freely in prose and I highly appreciate those who can. It is commendable how they manage to expose their soul with careful wordplay, despite being elaborative. Maybe with time I too will learn to mold myself in that form. But until then, I highly enjoy this freedom and this process, where I manage to open up completely. From deep secrets to simple and serious issues that bother me. It has been therapeutic and sometimes I like keeping them secret and not share, maybe because they are too exposing, and then like any other writer, I form a relationship with those specific pieces, where I courageously penned down my heart. Shayari, is one of the forms that I absolutely love, and sometimes regret not being expressive enough in my mother tongue. And here is one of the songs I adore:

Koi yeh kaise bataye ki woh tanha kyo hai
Woh jo apna tha, wohi kisi aur ka kyon hai
Yehi duniya hai toh phir aisi yeh duniya kyon hai
Yehi hota hain toh, aakhir yeh hota kyon hai?

It is amazing and almost mesmerizing, the effect of words, the magnitude through which they can pierce and heal you, make you pleasant and sad, without them my being would be incomplete, and if I could spend my life working on them and their usage, molding them into living creatures who have a life their own, my existence would a successful one.

"I have hated the words and 

I have loved them, and

I hope I have made them right."