BEHIND THE POEM: ASKING MY KEYS BACK

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THOUGHTS OF THE POET

This poem is a ballad. It could, just like my other poem I DON’T LOVE YOU, be easily converted into a song. Feel free to sing along if you find a melody. This poem is a narrative. It’s a story of two people, written in a metaphoric way with the heart of the poet as the house in which the other person once lived for a while.

I have always admired analogy. I enjoyed writing this poem so much because I have said so much in this poem that multiple reads of this poem would provide different angles and layers of this poem. I have inserted metaphor along with analogy in every single line of this poem. I would obviously not want to ruin your own interpretation but I would provide a sample below.

You dusted off the unused house,

Opened the windows, let it begin.

The above lines dictate the fact that the mentioned heart (veiled as a house in this poem) had never fallen for anyone before. It was unused and uninhabited. So when it fell for someone, it came alive for the first time. It rejoiced and refreshed. Analogous to a closed unused house, whose windows were opened for the first time, the poet’s heart experiences its first breeze, rain and sunlight.

INSPIRATION

It is often weird how we sometimes think we feel a certain way about some things but when we sit down and try to talk to ourselves, through poetry or other artistic means, it turns out we feel in a completely different way about it. The inspiration of this poem came in a funny way. Back in April, I and my mother had returned from an evening walk. I hurried my way upstairs and unlocked the door, so that my mom won’t have to wait at the door, and went into the room. Sometime later, my mom came into the room and asked for the keys. As irrelevant, to the situation described in the poem, as it sounds, this was what egged me into writing this poem. I realized sometimes people take the keys with themselves, even though the keys don’t belong to them and this causes discomfort to the person to whom it actually belongs.

I laid the basic framework of the poem in an hour. I wrote the first stanza, just as it appears in the poem. The two lines which spoke the most to me at that point were:

The house is still owned by you

Even though it’s not on your name

At that point, I had no idea why I wrote the poem, what it meant to me or whom it was directed at. Having finished laying the framework, I began picking out different people who could have inspired it. I even went to the extent of thinking that probably I was impersonating somebody who I knew, who has gone through this. I saw how universal the theme of this poem actually is. I realized how most of the people who have experienced real heartbreaks have undergone the phase of asking their keys back, metaphorically. How difficult it is for someone to let anyone else inhabit the void, when their heart is still on somebody else’s name.

The sense of staying alone at a house is not so fearing to most. But staying at home alone, with door locked from the outside is relentlessly painful. It creates a deep sense of insecurity, bondage, dependence, severed of freedom and causes uncomfortableness of unknown magnitudes.

This is exactly when I realized the poem is not about “who”, it is about “what”. It is neither directed to one person, nor is it written from the point of view of one person.

Sure, when I began writing the poem again in December, and I revealed a sneak peek to my friends, some of them jumped to ad hoc conclusions, which helped me direct it at one of the persons I could have recited this poem out to a few years back, when I was actually at that place in my life. So four of the lines in the poem were written with that person in my mind. The four lines were:

The twist of fate, but, came uninvited

A storm shook up our roots, leaving us bereft.

Each time I sent a note your way

The sound echoed back with no effect.

Each of these lines, again, have several layers and mean different things when read differently. Anyone who has experienced this in their life, could feel these lines in different ways. This is what makes me love this work my mine, over and above a lot of other works of mine. It is a poetry both in a literal and a metaphoric way.

EARLIER VERSION AND EDITING

This poem mostly involved the system of writing in layers. First a framework was laid, next came the set of analogies that are to be projected. Next up was expressing it in metaphorical way. Next step was putting it all in the form of a narration of a story. So this poem didn’t necessarily have an ‘earlier version’.

Some of the lines that were edited or removed are:

1.   You dusted off the unused couch,

Cleaned the nightstand, let it begin.

You dusted off the unused house,

Opened the windows, let it begin.

Lines that were removed:

1.   Opened the window on that rainy night

The tiny droplets touched the floor.

Thank you so much for reading the poem and being a part of this emotional journey. I hope you like it enough to read it over and over.

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Thank you. See you soon. J