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Lakshmi Seethapathi Iyer

Lakshmi Seethapathi Iyer lives in Mumbai with her husband and teenage daughter. She started writing in her late thirties, a few months after her mother passed away. She has written articles for a local newspaper and an e-magazine for young people and has co-authored a hand-book on employee volunteering. She also writes a regular blog reviewing the latest movie releases on www.notjustpopcorn.blogspot.com. She has written a few short stories and poems and has not published any of them, until now. The readers of her creative works to date have been her friends and family, who have been a great encouragement to her.

Her professional career has ranged from corporate sales to project management. Periodically, she would ask herself the meaning of her work in the larger scheme of things. When this nagging thought refused to go away she decided to do something radical, so she joined an NGO [a not-for-profit organization] despite not having a background in the social sciences. She loved the idea of impacting larger causes in her own small way, but soon the bureaucratic and political structure of the NGO world left her stifled. She then decided to rejoin the corporate world, but this time with a precondition that it would allow her to do community work within the corporate structure. So now she is involved with Corporate Social Responsibility for a large Indian company.

Apart from writing, she has keen interests in reading, counseling and travelling. She has visited many countries and has also lived in six different cities.



Albeit for a while

Sleep is like momentary death
And how I love it
It takes me away from my reality & even from myself
While I am still here
Albeit for a while

You are so fortunate
You can decide to avoid me when you wish
I am not so fortunate
I have to bear the brunt of me, all the time

So let me wait for sleep
My only true friend
My only reprieve
My only sedative

Come hither sleep
Suck me into your consciousness
So that I can escape mine
Albeit for a while



Silence!

You have silenced …
My whispers that tried to ensnare you
My thoughts that tried to entangle you

You have silenced …
The breath between my lips and your cheek
The aroma between your pores and my senses

You have silenced …
The pauses we shared when we spoke
The nothings we considered when we didn’t

And suddenly amid all this inaction
I see some action
Poised inquisitively like a Meerkat
Seeing a flood of words come my way
I smile in joy

Little did I know
That they were approaching me
To silence
My silence!



Unsung Hero

My love for you is an unsung hero
Unacknowledged, unappreciated, unsung

Dancing like a beautiful courtesan
Eyes fluttering like a captivating butterfly
Singing songs like a rhythmic poetess

Wearing the silly robe of an obsession
Wearing the gaudy ornaments of a whore

She did everything to keep your attention

Fortified with the armor of purpose
She survived on thin air
She slept without a wink
All this, just to make you think

Now that the sky is clearer
The silly robe has disappeared
The gaudy ornaments have been abandoned
All that remains
All that lies before you
Is my love for you
Completely unprotected
Completely naked

I hope you will give her a chance to live
I hope you don’t order her to the gallows
And just in case you have to murder her
Promise me a funeral to remember



Long Ago

I kept waiting for you, as …
My skin wrinkled
My taste buds atrophied
My eyes lost their clarity
And my nose forgot your delicious faraway aroma

By the time you stopped sleeping
With your eyes wide open
All that remained
All that you noticed
Were my wrinkle lines
Which I hope reminded you
Of the lines I used to write for you
Long ago



Come back

Oh obsession!
Now that you are gone
What do I do with my sanity?
What do I do with my clarity?
And what the hell do I do with me?
At least come back in scraps
If you cannot come back fully

Now I feel like covering myself in the heat
And I feel like undressing in the cold
When you were here
I may have been mad
Now that you are not here
How can I not go insane?

In your absence
Who do I love?
Who do I hate?
What do I spite?
What do I write?

When you were here
I didn’t realize your worth
Now that you are gone
I just cannot tell
If I am mad now
Or if I was mad then

So come back, dear obsession
'Cause the world feels like a bottomless pit
Into which I have been heartlessly spit

Come back and enrich my life
Take control of my madness
Water and fill my emptiness

Inside my head I can hear my own voice
Yes, I can hear a deafening scream
“Was all of this just a dream?”

So please come back my dear obsession
Come back and organize my sorrows
'Cause by cracking them into tatters
Your exit has made them matter!



Allowed, not allowed

You say we can make love
But we are not allowed to love

We can share each other’s outsides
But cannot explore the insides

We can embrace each other’s bodies
But can’t cradle their emotions
Or swim in their warm potions

We can turn each other on
But we daren’t smell of it to prove it

We can dwell in each other’s arms
But we are not allowed caresses

It is as if we are at a banquet
But are not allowed to taste the food

It is like letting a flower bloom
But not letting her perfume

Chasms already filled me to the brim
And now you are trying to overflow it!

I thought I came into your life at the best time
But now it seems it was the worst time

I feel like I asked you to jump into a pool
After you just finished swimming a thousand miles



When we met after a long time

Just as I was pretending not to notice
You reminded me that you were ten minutes late
Did you have to spell out how much we had lost
Before we even sat down to talk?

You admitted you had forgotten my face
Strange as this might sound
I didn’t remember yours either

I cursed myself for not remembering
Those long curly lashes
That curved to embrace the heavens
But fell short and touched your brows instead
How dare I forget that poignant nose
Which never missed a single smell
Except the one directly beneath it

As you sat before me
I saw the lips that had once kissed me
Now they seem so seriously pursed
As if to distance themselves
From any symbol of love, past or present

I tried hard to concentrate on what you were saying
But like little drunken letters
The words just dropped from your mouth
And fell straight into your pasta dish
Turning into garnished Italian phrases
The moment they touched the pottage

I tried not to concentrate on what I was saying
It was easy, because I do it all the time

I looked at your hands
I wanted to touch them
To see if they felt exactly like
What they had felt like the last time

I wanted to smell your cheeks
To see if they told me the same story
They told me the last time

I wanted to put my ear to your bare chest
To see if I could still hear
That distant elusive heartbeat

I wanted to tell you all this and more
But I couldn’t because I feared
That you’d quickly remind me:
“There are no feelings &
This ain’t no relationship”

So nowadays I constantly find myself
Telling my mind to stop thinking of you
And while it chews on this directive
I quickly grab a moment and think of you
One last time ― every time



Named

Till you gave my feeling a name
I didn’t know she was called “Obsession”.

I wish you hadn’t named her
Because by giving her a name
You validated her existence.
And armed with a firm new identity
She began parading it promiscuously.

Without a name
She would have died a premature death
And not the martyrly one she finally met.
By calling out to her legitimately
You gave her threads of longevity
That tied her to wings she could barely carry.

Had she been illegitimate forever
She would have fallen softer and sooner
But with a name, she was waltzed, wined and dined
And put on and gathered a lot of weight
Before she assumed her matronly gait
Falling finally under all that weight.

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