Metaphors and Paradoxes: Poetry

Metaphors and Paradoxes

She was thirteen when she became the artist of imagery, metaphors and Surrealism,
Her exercise books filled with irregular verbs and Vincent Van Gogh’s Impressionism.
The stories of hopscotch and tangled hair, frangipani flowers in coke bottles,
Bubbling effervescence, dysfunctional family gatherings, reminiscent feuds, and sunken fossils.
The realms where dreams were a special pardon,
Yet whispers in banned libraries and undoing rainbow stories in forbidden gardens.

High school stories was a barter system of fears and dreams into the magic shop,
An angel’s laboratory but the devil’s workshop.
Vietnam War notes in shorthand, electronic structures in Chemistry notebooks, William Blake’s lost poetry,
Where girls were taught weight-diet graphs and 36-24-36 before boys even started learning their Trigonometry.

Where students wished to be Times New Roman font with the elegance of faeries,
Yet they were pixies licking milk and honey and Comic San Ms notes under the tables of libraries.
The ferrous liquid in their blood and flesh the colour of a thousand rose quartz,
 Yet dialling suicide helpline numbers instead of trunk calls to Hogwarts.
Origami into cages, alarms into lullabies, feathers of dreamcatcher veiled in dust,
A broken mixtape repeating Lumineers’s Cleopatra, a claustrophobic wanderlust.

She was sixteen when she became the art of metaphors and paradoxes,
Writing about stamp collection of memories inside the Roman cigarette boxes.
She was golden paper planes in a dark room like seesaws swinging in the backstage of Town Hall,
Her hands’ Indian famines, eyes’ African droughts, minute and second hands waltzing in a masquerade ball.

Her smile, god, her smile was a Dark Triad heroine disguised as Joan of Arc with armours and shields,
Flames of lithium chloride in strawberry fields.
Pomegranate stains on the knife of her self-harming best friend by the bedside,
A poetic epitaph of Julius Caesar scribbled by Brutus before he committed suicide.

You see, she was the artist and the art. Nobody told her that pain was not a metaphor for life.
So, when I told her, “Hope. Hope is a metaphor for life,”
She rolled her eyes and said, “It is not a metaphor. It is a paradox. Hope is the most addicting drug of all.”
It has been two years since I last saw her, she now lives in the hallways of my mind.
Inhaling. Exhaling. Surviving and whispering “I am fine.”

But tonight, I was inhaling the methane gas of pain and drinking a beer of social anxiety,
She whispered, “I hope. I hope. I hope.”
With beer stains on my lips and methane gas intoxicating my lungs, I closed my eyes.
Alas! Hope is the most addicting drug of all. ~ Enigma

Picture Credits: Pinterest.com

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