My Body Is A Prison - Zine

A zine by Varsha Panikar from their ongoing mixed-media series, Origami Folds, that employs dreams, memories, archive and photography to explore the human body, and uses it as a medium and metaphor for hopeless fragility and hardened impenetrability, from which emerges the themes of identity, dysphoria, commodification of the body, and denial and loss of autonomy as conditions of globalized society and cultures, through the lens of south-Asian, queer and marginalized bodies.

Trigger Warning : This piece deals with depression, anxiety, and body dysphoria.

Buy on Amazon Kindle below

https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09BXDWYPL

Transient Affair

First published in Love Portions, in the February 2020 issue of Rogue - The Zine by Ratio Auream Publishers under the publications One Point Six One Eight Imprint. Available on Amazon&Kindle.

Ice melting in my glass,

Beside a tray of smoked cigarettes

Where nothing but the ashes remain,

Quite like this emptiness,

Which refuses to go away,

But that is fine by me.

It is in moments like this,

Where I find myself wandering,

Wading the depths of this mind;

But by dwelling on it nothing avails,

Nothing ever;

So I shift my gaze onto the moon.

It is waving to my tear-soaked eyes

That mourns the night’s impending demise.

The wind, my only respite!

From my window, it comes through

With ecstasy and desire racing through.

In the world, where my heart has turned cold,

Your face shakes marrows of my bones.

Within the dark shadows,

Your beauty shines through.

So come, my love!

Let’s surrender to our deepest desires!

As the night composes symphonies

Of our lonely despairs,

Injecting a sense of euphoria,

Seeping into our soul’s phantasmagoria,

It feels like it might tune out every wrong

And ease my heart of stone;

Even if for just a moment,

Even if lasts a few songs.

So come,

Come and hold me close!

As we wander alone like lost children,

Searching for solace within affection.

Let throws of satisfaction relinquish this agony

That is forever tugging at the sanctity of my sanity.

Let’s dream of moonlight kissing,

The kind that still the echoes of our aching song,

And disappear into this nothingness together,

Stay entrapped in each other’s arms for now,

If not forever.

I know,

I know that these moments are brief,

That this is perhaps,

Merely an erotic coupling

For those who dared and dreamed,

And that is fine by me.

Such little time

To hope, to wish, to dream

Sometimes it goes on forever,

Sometimes, in a flash, it’s gone!

And that is fine by me.

Perhaps, it's better this way.

Some words I can never say,

Lest my heart melts away.

I sometimes forget who you are,

And you keep forgetting my name,

And that is fine by me.

I can feel the tears

Hanging from the window of your soul

As you quietly slip into the night,

Leaving behind dreams yet to unfold,

And though it rips my heart,

It is fine by me.

So, let’s dance behind these shadows

And return to the sunshine unscathed,

Until that thing that urged our passions and lunacy

Becomes nothing more than a memory.

Even though my heart does despair;

My sweet, my love

Let me look upon your face once more,

Take you one kiss at a time,

And hold you in my arms tonight,

For I know

That we might never see each other again;

And that too is fine by me.

By Varsha Panikar

From their series, “Bodies Of Desire”