Three poems I wrote on the back of a mock test rough sheet

I'm not going to pretend this is a normal blog post. It's more like emptying my pockets.

During last month's Sunday mock I finished Chemistry twenty minutes early (don't clap, a third of it was educated guessing), and instead of rechecking I turned the rough sheet over and started writing. Three poems came out before the bell. I've carried them in my bag ever since, folded into a small square, going soft like an old currency note.

Pooja said under my last post that I hide my poems "like they're a crime". Rude. Accurate. So here they are.

1. Sunday, 9:58

The invigilator's shoes keep time.
Somewhere behind me, a pen gives up.
I know this answer, I think,
the way you know a song
from the wrong side of a wall,
all bass and no words.

Option C looks like a door.
Option B looks like a door.
The clock says choose, choose, choose
and my hand, the traitor,
is already shading a circle
that I will think about
for the rest of the week.

2. 6:15 a.m., foil

Mummy packs the paratha in foil
like it's a small warm secret.
I carry it past the gate, past the guard,
past three hundred kids who are also carrying
something folded, something warm,
something they can't say out loud.

Lunch is at 1:10.
By then it's cold.
I eat it anyway.
It still tastes like someone
believed in me before breakfast.

3. Rough work

Margins are where I live now.
The main page is for answers.
The margin is for arrows, ticks,
a tiny crying face,
a date I must not forget.

Nobody grades the margin.
That's why it's the only honest part
of the whole paper.

Why a rough sheet and not a diary

I tried a proper diary in class 10. Hard cover, nice paper, a pen I was scared to use. I wrote four entries and stopped, because every page felt like it had to be good. A rough sheet has no such pressure. It's going to be thrown away, so you can be stupid on it. Half of my best lines have come out on paper that also had a half-finished titration calculation in the corner.

There's also something about writing during a test that I can't explain properly. Your brain is already in a weird, wide-awake, slightly scared state. Normally I use all that for Physics. Once in a while I let it leak into a sentence instead, and the sentence usually comes out better than anything I write on a calm evening.

What I think poems do for a NEET brain

I'm not going to say "writing is therapy" because that sounds like a poster in a counsellor's office. But here's what I actually notice:

• They make a feeling smaller. A fear that is a big grey cloud in my chest becomes fourteen lines on a page. I can look at fourteen lines. I can fold them up. I can put them in my bag.
• They make me notice things. I now look at the guard at our gate, the way the corridor smells like chalk and floor cleaner at 7 a.m. Studying all day makes the world go flat. Writing puts the depth back.
• They don't ask for a score. My whole life right now is marks, percentiles, ranks. A poem can't be 142/180. It's just there, and it's mine.

My very unscientific rules

1. Ten minutes maximum. Set a timer, because otherwise I'll write for two hours and call it "revision".
2. No editing for a week. First draft goes in the bag, folded.
3. One real detail per poem. Not "sadness" or "hope" but the foil, the shoes, the guard, the exact clock.
4. Never rhyme just because you can. My early poems rhymed heart with apart so many times that I started to feel guilty.
5. Don't explain the poem to people before they've read it. Let them be confused. (I broke this rule in this very post. Sorry.)

About the reading-out thing

My friend at school asked me to read one in the lunch break, and I said no like four times, then did it anyway. I read the paratha one. Nobody laughed. One girl went quiet and said, "that's literally my mom." And honestly that's the whole reason I'm posting this. Not because I think I'm good. Because the foil thing wasn't my secret, it turned out. It was everybody's, we just hadn't said it.

If you write too, in any language, in any state of messiness, put one line in the comments. Doesn't have to be a whole poem. A line about your corridor, your tuition bag, your window. I'll read every single one, probably at midnight, probably while pretending to revise Organic.

(Also yes, I did go back and fix two of the answers in that Chemistry section after the test. One of them was right the first time. Typical.)