The Shooting Star and Other Poems

By Muskan Kaur

The Shooting Star

Once upon a time afar
In the twinkle family of stars
The fixed and fire chose to rebel
Afraid and tired of burning within
I sought to seek the distant planet
Blue and green; land and oceanic
Unimpressed by how my light
The way they say could breach through time
Through boundless space and lonely skies
Chased demons of colossal nights
And so, one day, I set apart
Breaking free, unchained my lust
Kissed the wind of solar burst
Falling free as it turned me dust
By last, I hit a concrete ground
Of a lonely island that soon could drown
No more silence, shadows surround
Wishing wishes on me so loud
Heaven should turn, sooner to bow
But what they don’t seem to know somehow
Where treason is a worthy doubt –
Peaceful is the widest shroud
I look above, then in the sky,
I see celestial troops align
How vast, countless, surreal minds
I miss my home of bounty heights
The core set cold has turned to fright
Now I miss the heat of a warm inside

This House

This house has no doors
The walls are same as floors
With a gravitational force
And thermal windows

Every smoke-filled room glows
In the ashen colors of a thousand infernos
And the deafening salvos
Are just the family’s ignorant snores
Which the acoustic false ceiling, of course,
Absorbs, so my conscience is but echoes
Of a morose chaos of bellows and remorse of sorrowful widows
Of deaf heroes bowed to the crowd of arrows –
No encores

The staircase narrows
To the basement shadows
Dancing on the coffins of the corpses of dead pasts now turned ghosts
With no throats and no toes, so each of them floats
Looking for hosts
Either that or I just overdosed
And am hiding from evening chores imposed and impossible to oppose
Than in case you’re a woman no man should on purpose propose
Exactly which is the case, mama, see, I am not most
If I really was what I chose
I’d be not human but prose
And the long strands of my hair would be roads and not ropes
Don’t ask me to hang on some more
Or the roof will collapse on our hopes

I always had fans or woes
Never a friend or rose
Unsure dreams, sure loads
Just shallows, never shores
Raincoats but no boats
Nor a bridge on this moat
So even if this house has no doors and certainly no peepholes
It will take me a while to escape this eyesore

 Ice & Water

The colder my insides
The bolder my insights

Like ice

The top is my suffice –
The throne of every wise;
The truth though, otherwise

Is I’m no different from my vice
I’m no different from mainstream lies
The inciting heat entices the melt in my insides

Unlike water

It can put out a hundred fires
It can power a thousand wires
But can’t drown a cube of ice

And so, this is how I can gloat of every dream I prize
Like on every stream of water can float a piece of broken ice

Obsidian

Your soul is a volcano
Though all our bodies are glass
Hell made you from magma
Rest of us are just sand

Your mind is Obsidian
The world’s but a shadow
You’re a dragonglass through a starheart
But our lead sleeves only wear snow

Your heart is a matrix
Not a stone, but an asteroid (Morpheus)
God of dreams, no sleep (Morpheus)
Always choosing between pills (Morpheus)
The world’s Eurydice, you’re Orpheus

Coarse, hard, brittle and fractured
So tired of being judged by your texture
Grinded and polished till the apache tears have luster
Like the yellow hair of George A. Custer

But your eyes are mirrors, like John Dee’s
An empire of tears, dark galaxies
Conjuring visions and making prophesies, since Aztec priests;
Communing with angels just to make them see
The evil side of their own souls before being driven to insanity

Diamonds can die
Set fire to sapphires
Turn ambers to embers
Hunt down the tiger’s eye

See now that I’ve dug you out, you are mine
Ignore all my wrongs for darling I have rights

Oh Obsidian rise
With the explosion that’s born when two stars collide
Viscously vicious, baby, spread like wildfire
We were expelled from the underground, but the surface is ours tonight

The Notebook

A notebook ruled
Had me ridiculed
More than the fact of being schooled
Miles of straight lines seemingly spooled
Where my rhymes otherwise heavily drooled
On my secret square, plain white capsule
As my weary thoughts incessantly puled
While my heart to pain was rescheduled

No concrete boundaries ever were so cruel
No space rendered my words this miniscule
It’s like a cesspool filled with linalool
And I – the best fool
To be swimming in a whirlpool

Graveyard

She liked roses
Red from all the blood from bruises
Of dead lovers, kings, their holy crusade

While she liked the garden
The whole of it
Daisies, lilies, sunflowers and weeds
Where each of their kind were hers to keep

Well, I liked the graveyard the woods obscured
The grass where fed on healthy manure
Of blood, bones and skin purpure; its purpose pure
The flowers won’t grow, but be borrowed
From those that showed for show or sorrow
I watched them go, the flowers lose their lure
There ain’t no life that can death endure

So she found a lover and so did she
As I watched grave flowers lose beauty
After I am long dead, maybe you will too agree
On why I chose to fall in love
                                                with poetry

If I Wasn’t A Poet

If I wasn’t a poet
Would I forget
Or would I regret
The alphabet

I don’t know yet

If I wasn’t a poet
Would I sweat a threat
Or would I combat –
The bureaucrat and diplomat;
The prophet and aristocrat
Without a single fret

I don’t know yet

If I wasn’t a poet
Would I still interpret

All those sunsets
In all those facets
Or would my mind stay quiet
I don’t know yet

If I wasn’t a poet
Would I still be upset
Digging life’s greatest secret
Before I hit my casket
Or would I just bite the bullet

I don’t know yet

If I wasn’t a poet
Maybe I’d be a comet
That would hit this small planet
Like a supersonic rocket
Till into space it’s all would plummet
Or maybe I’d just be a puppet
In a supermarket
Till a kid takes me home and calls me “Violet”
Before I drop and spill on her carpet

Or maybe I just don’t know yet

All Your Words

I.
All your words that went over my head
Didn’t really go over my head
They stayed on it, rusting with time
Into my bronze hair
And I still carry their weight

II.
When I was little other kids would exclaim and stare into my eyes
They said I had sunflowers in ‘em
I would look in a mirror for hours wishing to walk the garden inside my valley green iris
To telepathically move the sunflower guards to have a better look at the rest of it
But sunflowers follow the light
So do not blame me if my gaze follows you around

III.
I was born with paper skin
And ink blood
Believe me, the pen’s the knife
They tell me it is a sin to cut
But when you’re me, the sin is to not write

IV.
Do you know that my two lips do not perfectly join
There’s a small gap that remains between, that I always seem to hide
That two things alike shall never unite in me
I let you go because it was hopeless to try

V.
I am too lean, too lean
Don’t leave your door open just a slit
The ghost of me will slide through and find the coldest corner of your room
I need to know how you live in a heart like mine
Or are you just pretending to be alive?

VI.
I once had a heart of not stone, it’s no fantasy
But then there were one too many stones hurled at me
The one hit my chest, so now a stone rests inside instead
It could feel nothing, they said
His goodness, I thanked
Then I met you, a tide of the sea
You could’ve drowned me
But even you chose to leave me a wreck
It could feel nothing, they said

Closure

I hear the distance between us
Playful shrieks of little children wildly absorbed in the fun of their games, impatient honks of passing cars going nowhere important, distant whispers of a crowded town unknown in insignificance to the rest of the world
Do you hear the distance between us?
Tell me it’s not silence

I loved you in darkness
‘Tis not a bad poet’s metaphor, or a lover’s mad passion
If truth were rum, I’d never get drunk
And my love would never bask in the shameless light of the morning Sun

So dark, I myself couldn’t see
I couldn’t see myself
I couldn’t see myself in me

I loved you in darkness, just as a ghost
I gave you my one cold heart
And though it has since long been dead and can inspire no breaths
It is yours, to do nothing with

How do you move on in the land of the living? How do you forget?
How do you measure this distance between us? However in silence?

I loved you in darkness, did I jump you? I’m sorry you’re scared
I’ve been alive for a moment in the land of the living, and now I’m haunted again.

Confession

I wish I could confess
Not just my love, but this mess
This way I obsess
This distress I repress
This illness I possess
This weakness in progress
This firmness I profess
Feelings I can’t process
It’s like I’m the empress
                    of sadness
In the fortress
          of madness
And my queendom is endless

My rule ruthlessly relentless

No princes or congress or goddess or ogress

Can endow my hollowness a conscience, it’s pointless

I point less than I erase

So my pencil sword has a finesse

To massacre the bold masses

Of emotions now joined forces of the cold and carcasses

Yet, I cannot convalesce

And when all my fears coalesce

I might acquiesce the quietus

It’s obvious, I guess
I cannot confess
Nevertheless, I can take no advices
The uncertainty of dices is my life’s indices
I am but my vices
I am behind and beyond amends
Yes, I cannot confess

Muskan Kaur is a twenty-two year old Philosophy student from north-east India. She started writing poems in English at the age of twelve and most of her work is a reflection of inner conflicts and delirium. She aims her writing style to be a medium that provides any struggling audience with mental health problems something to relate to.