Here’s another poetry edition. I found a couple of poems buried in my drafts from last year and figured I’d share them. I solemnly swear I was not on drugs when I wrote them. Just me trying to pin down a few thoughts that felt too slippery for prose.

They’re about attention, awareness, maybe identity if you squint. No big agenda here. Hope they land for you, or at least don’t make you roll your eyes too hard.

1. Clenched Fist

I clenched my fist—
tighter,
and tighter. 
So tight it hurt.

After all, 
I had to protect 
that which I was holding.

"But you’re holding nothing," 
you say. 
"Your hand is empty."

Indeed—
not unlike 
how I hold the idea of myself 
in my mind.

2. To Be It

It is.
I see it, I notice it.
I see myself noticing it.
Then something shifts
and I am it.

But then it goes away,
And I’m left with a longing—
for moments when the recursion stopped,
when there was no meta, just it.
Then I let the longing fall away.
It returned.

Again, I was at it, chasing it,
that stable and steady presence.
But how can it chase itself?
It already has.

Until next time,

— Aayush

I’m trying out something for the first time, and that something is poetry.

To be honest, until recently, I never really “got” poetry. A poem was mostly just: sentences with bad grammar, song without the music, and required reading from high school.

That is not to say I did not appreciate good poems. Heck, some poems have even moved me to tears. But I could not comprehend why anyone would ever write them. That is, until a year ago.

I saw the Milky Way ring during a trip to Canada, and something shifted in me. I felt the urge to write something, but not an essay or prose. Sentences felt too structured. So I tried out writing a poem. It felt much more natural and the entire poem just flowed out of me in a few minutes. That poem is the one that appears in this post.

Then just two weeks ago, I went to SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and was really captivated by some of the art pieces there. The next morning, I had a similar feeling as when I saw the Milky Way ring. Another poem just “wrote itself” through me. (I will publish that poem in another post)

So here I present to you: The Siege of the Starry Sky.

The Siege of the Starry Sky

And the youth said

Living such a short span, we are all almost dead

Brought into this world without my permission 

I did not ask to be born

What is even the point?

Life is but a tribulation.

Nature isn’t beautiful; it is cruel

It is the survival of fittest and destruction of the weak

Society isn’t much better; it is a culling of the meek

And gentle

Only the strong, mighty, and glib may rule

But then I saw a starry sky far from civilization 

For the first time, saw not just a handful of stars 

But thousands upon thousands

And the Milky Way ring

I began to weep uncontrollably 

My hatred of the world was a wall I had built up

But that starry night mounted a siege 

An onslaught that the walls could not withstand 

The walls crumbled

And I fell in love with the world

Just a little bit.