Tumors

Fuck, no

2011-12-13T05:22:00.000-08:00

Rimbaud's Photograph

2011-11-28T00:29:00.000-08:00

I rest my hand on a book,
a memory of your long, bare back,
arms sprouting like tired branches,
from your shoulders- that deserve more adjectives.
A vague shadow irritates me, fills up this room,
Silly, a scent of delusion, an urge
that lies dead,
with you.

I see your young face, thin pursed lips,
no history to it, not yet, no
You were far too young
far too quiet
and wrote letters instead

I never spoke of the heart,
it was a tad bit used, and almost
worthless; and you
were just as tired with
your round eyes, punctuated
every now and then
with a heartless
blink

There were a lot of stories
between us, hanging upside down
(like weary bats in sunny afternoons,
evading clouds of dust)
But neither you, nor I
knew how to tell one

I settled for a handshake,
a customary sigh

I now keep small photographs,
of significant people,
(people
I might have loved at some point,
in my silliness)
and I keep them in a secret pocket
of my journal;
I take them, and overleaf
I scribble a word;
behind yours I wrote 'Patience'
as if it were
the last memory I had of you,
A memory where,
I was left waiting

I think I am in love again,
this time around though,
it really is a stranger

To Die

2011-11-21T01:44:00.000-08:00

Staring into the flickering light
of a burning pyre
I think
of human hair on
my pillows seated like monsters
scattered all over,
a hopeless scribble
on a dead, wet shore.
Warm skin, delicate fingers,
and the rest of it
going up in smoke

when will you cease to be vacant
dear soul?
let go of this hunger,
it lies in a breath
that has forgotten its lesson

The Importance of Being Sorry

2011-11-10T04:58:00.000-08:00

When Oscar Wilde published The Importance Of Being Earnest, he received immense criticism for it, attacked as lacking substance and not raising any relevant social issues; fellow Irishman playwright GB Shaw said it was "his first really heartless[play]", though now it is known as one of his most popular plays having beat down Lady Windermere's Fan and An Ideal Husband. He left a lot behind to be spoken of, paying a high personal price of imprisonment for his homosexuality. He deserves an apology, as do a lot of us. A lot of us live and die, yearning one and not ever realizing it. An apology is the most effective remedy- at the risk of sounding overtly sentimental- for most of our wounds, and an earnest one: almost an elixir.

I rather dislike it when people use 'appy polly logies' instead of saying what they actually should, even if its something trivial. It sounds to me as though the whole of sesame street ate some bad beans for lunch and burped their neo-colonizing crap free into the world that needs no more sunshine. Though at least they made an effort towards teaching our kids (what am I saying, we were those kids) some manners, the value of apologies. Some people have such a terribly hard time apologizing, its incredible. They cheat themselves out of things they know full well need but take for granted. Though it is true that apologies don't necessarily reverse a situation, they don't always bring things back to one, they don't perpetuate any particular goodwill often what they do perpetuate is insincerity, but it is important that one feels sorry. For a child begging on the road, for a rickshaw-puller not having enough change to break a hundred rupee note, for the streets being littered, the lack of a sense of a shared space (I know, I tried to reduce the number of articles, doesn't work any other way), for small poor children amusing themselves in a pile of odorous garbage. How else are we to affirm that our conscience exists? Compassion, value for human life, love for the fellow being, woman, man or animal, and if not that then love in general for people who have made a welcome difference in our lives, changed the course of an unpleasant expected outcome. Then again, I'm delving into abstractions. I was never one for apologies myself.

I never used them sincerely, and if I ever did, it was mostly an exit strategy, a desperate plead to make it all stop, or simply to evade a situation. Often one finds themselves in a state of despair if they cannot figure something like that out, and I say that because I took a while myself. I'm certain there are a few out there who believe their situation is novel, but in truth actually, nothing is. None of our problems are for that matter, there is always a greater suffering in the universe, one just has to observe- which is also, a lot to ask for considering our self absorption, our nonchalance, our arrogance. By virtue of their being a greater agony, human beings have every reason to be happy. If I may, there has to be an overarching narrative of our lives, of the presence of our material surrounding like Balzac's novels, as opposed to Dostoevsky's vertical depth in his narration, a presence of a dialogism, an indulgence into one's own psychological intricacies. I'm sure its worth it when one possesses the maturity, but it is also a lot to ask for. Everyone then wants a soundtrack, a penthouse babe, and it goes downhill from there. Because I see people everyday who take their environment for granted, people who get annoyed because they have to adjust another person on their seats in the trains, haggle with rickshaw-pullers knowing that neither of them will grow rich or poor with those ten rupees- that the poor of our country are raised like orphans despite having parents and then pushed into the world with no sense of right or wrong; every situation has its own ambiance and to not notice it, to skip it, to miss it- therein lies our very first reason to feel sorry.

I almost got away, every time with my insincere apologies, my arrogant wide-eyed rolls. I suppose girls have it easier that way. Apologies in which case can have unprecedented, unpredictable consequences, probabilities. I mean anything, rather everything can go wrong when one lives a stable life, an ignorant life that might seem so beautifully perfect, so deceivingly contrived. I spoke to Sho about this yesterday and he said something that I feel everyone needs to hear.
"Ignorance certainly is bliss, but you know what else it is?"
"What?"
"Ignorance."
Which is so startlingly true, and living in the complexities that we do, we have to step out of a world that is a construct of this ignorance. An ignorance that is so perpetuated as superiority by the white christian man, by the fashion brands we wear, by the guitars we strum, by the cocky music we hum, by the bigotry of the BJP, by the shamelessness of Modi, by the lack of respect practiced on a mass scale by team Anna for our democracy, for most us who choose the easier way, that to live and die, and do nothing in between.

I realize a lot of these things are glaringly obvious and often somethings are so well understood that the need to mention them dissolves somewhere with time, but believe it or not it is just as important to speak, think, react as it is to fart, shit and eat. But before that, one needs to be apologetic for all those times they have stared contemptuously at a girl for wearing garish clothes, at a man who digs his nose in public, for not having done anything upon seeing a child being slapped in public, a girl being teased, Keenan and Reuben stabbed to death..

I could go on.

The importance of feeling sorry has to have its provenance in our personal realm, it starts there, it should. With significant others for instance, apologies are not only cumbersome, they are contextual, situational in which case neither love, nor anger are justly characterized, defined. One can rationalize fear, apathy, contempt, happiness but not love, not anger. These are two extremes in this abstract spectrum, it is almost as if the further one tilts to a side, it gets progressively harder. Apologies in relationships- and I mean the conjugal kind- come naturally, easily, out of one's emotional investment in it. I tell people I detest petty arrogance, don't care much for pride but the truth in fact is, that I struggle with it myself. Nothing is ever enough, always desiring more of something that I dont even have a right to expect, solely because it is too much to ask. Of anyone. Childish, I know. By dint of that I feel I deserve said things, that space in a persons life (this is not restricted to only consummating relationships, I'm talking acquaintances, family members, that weird lot nobody gives two shits about). We are proud of our money because that works out as an excuse for ignorance, about(of?) our physical attributes, our misconceptions about our underdeveloped intellect and so forth; one can really drive people crazy with that.

Often one does it on purpose, realizing only when the consequence takes form. That, should be the first thing to be apologetic for. We owe it to ourselves, in the least.

Making

2011-10-29T23:16:00.000-07:00

Light, come through
to reach the earth, struggling
in between leaves,
of trees, of books, of the pieces
that make a being;
The brazen wind of your soul,
revolving with her
arms around the neck of,
thighs around the waist of
a hard broken texture of the bark
A smooth, callous sight
of a serpent
taking from each other
a breath, a breath,
no more.

Hunger

2011-10-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

Life goes on, its the evening, blades of grass wrestle against each other, winter descends upon the curb, the sun no longer exists, the sky asks, 'Is that alright?'
I tell it to go away. There are moments that create themselves, that last as incidents, barely, I believe they do still, and think of the moment when one lays down next to someone for the first time; a culmination of things seen over and over in one's mind, played repeatedly, wound, rewound like a tape recorder. They dont exist anymore, do they? I laugh. No, it is much more than that, its the end, here. People cry, the world resumes in the fragrance of my pillow. He still has to turn over, wake up, look at me. Who is alone? Not me, not yet.

A Rhyme For Death

2011-10-18T04:31:00.000-07:00

There is a foot on your shoulder, a moth up your nose,
A train up your arsehole, and shit between your toes,
You dont seem to reckon, the fright one feels
When poetry loses its rickety heels.
Do not bother with mundane pretense,
For lovers and friends can be dense;
They leave a pigeon dead on the road,
and cry till someone swallows their load.
It makes one angry, it makes one shrill
One pines for love, and all that swill.
It all truly is a theiving game,
A death in the evening,
A glorious name.

Gyanprasad Doesnt Have Shoes

2011-09-29T13:12:00.000-07:00

Gyanprasad sits at my station
with his weighing scale,
and awaits unhappy people
to come check their burden on this earth.
They dont want to know anymore,
which means, he has to go hungry
Another day.

I greet him every morning and give him bananas
that my mother gives to me hoping
that I will eat them and fatten up,
just a bit.
But alas! daughters will be brazen
and hope Gyanprasad doesn't know the truth.

He speaks Hindi fluently,
and even bhojpuri, I think
I have never spoken to him,
I know I never will.
I'll only wonder to myself
Where all my old poems might be,
that spoke of lovely things,
isolated things,
sad things.
I realize then, that Gyanprasad
does not care about me.
Poetry isn't all that there is to life,
life isn't all that there is to poetry.

Circle

2011-09-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

I

You may walk into a room, flustered. Don’t call on me, Ill be staring at you, across the hall, behind a curtain, a particle of dust; Grey, alone. People will turn around to notice you, when your back faces them. They know you’re anxious. You’ll hear a clinking of glasses, and stand still. The room will be swarming with men in ties and women in heels, there will be an effusion of light, time will slow down, so will you.

II
A woman stood in dumb stoicism when she saw you. What did you say to her? Nothing. You win a few dollars, and a dime, because it’s pretty, like an Indian smoking his feathers. She doesn’t look at you anymore, she has a husband.

III

I saw it happen, a man in the clouds, watching a mountain from afar, because one has to pay to be close enough. He thinks poetry is dead, it tells on your tattoos and your abdomen. My abdomen is thick, coarse, there’s a child sitting on it, crying. I don’t know why, she doesn’t talk to me anymore.

IV

This drawer has underwear, this drawer has dust, this drawer has cockroaches, this drawer has books, this drawer has jewelry and photographs, this drawer has sighs, this drawer has fools, and this drawer is empty; your turn.

V
Love notes in the classroom, passed around, they belong to no one, addressed to no one; he misses the sex-

in well lit rooms, ah.

VI

He is making a film, he wants someone’s fantasy. It makes no sense to use one’s own; he believes it will kill old people, inevitably cursed with their trembling nerves.

VII

I think of the word ‘Fasla’, it sounds hilarious in my mind. Many people died in his family, he says, he wasn’t aware on his journey to the funeral and made jokes, funny ones as a child, when he didn’t have to worry. I tell him I’ve never seen a corpse, he marvels.

VIII

It is not that I excuse myself for being selfish. In fact, I fail to rationalize harm. It is not conscience. It is my will to win. Why bother, its never true. Why is mother alone? Father is not home yet.

IX

I like women’s necks, how slender they appear from the back. They seat their bottoms, flat, thick, slim, masculine, barely there, on benches, I stare from behind, no broad backs or vulgar breasts. They sit with their friends, children, husbands, lovers, books, notes, perfumes, and letters. I gaze vacantly, still.

X

Stranded at a station, it is raining loudly, in bits often. The sound grows within me, beating hard inside an empty chamber. I cannot hear myself think. Hemingway is telling me of Ezra’s sainthood. I have to listen closely, before they do.

XI

She shared my sorrow with you, did not invite you to alleviate it. My adventure, my journey to end.

XII

There is a phone next to her pillow, it is not going to ring.

You silly shit.

Two or Three things I Know About Her: Coffee Scene

2011-07-24T01:24:00.000-07:00

"It's not where you take things from, it's where you take them to."

-Jean Luc Godard

Sur L'etranger

2011-07-23T00:11:00.000-07:00

Aliénation n'est pas la même chose qu'être un étranger, et de l'extérieur de ses toutes réelles, seulement il n'est pas.

Je vais commencer à lire les histoires de Guy de Maupassant demain, je fatigué de Camus, et je fatigué d'être fatigué.

Verdict: Réalisme Européenne

For second year, if most of you are confused. I was lucky have to have the option. I know Google translate has made it easier for you; I just want people to know that is hardly the point. I also want people to read as much as they can, and stop saying that they dont have the time. Its aggravating, and I find my friendships disintegrate simply because of something as superficial as this.

Souhaitez moi bonne chance

Another personal, yet completely unnecessary post

2011-07-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

I just had to tell you dear readers. How does one come around to even give a shit? Terrible pace with the previous ambitious reading list I tell you, there are far too many distractions in this world. Im confused whether I should capitalize every first letter in the title. Its really arduous and stupid to mull it over.

Enough petty bs, I am sort of shitfaced too. Apologies are in order; something tremendously weird happened today and only for those of you who remember Journey Back Home/Journey Back Home(Day Two); Tarnettar Ji was sitting in my drawing room today on the sofa- I had just woken up. He'd come to conduct a small transaction, my father owed him some money, and he saw me. His eyes started twinkling again in that endearing way with his brown skin crinkling around his eyes and he said, "hey, I read your blog! All I had to do was search my name, whats the anonymity for? Oh, and Im going to assume most of that was fiction because Im too old to quit smoking now, and quite frankly they really are my better half."
"Im glad you like it, not really my best work though."
"Oh, well. I saw your poetry in Nether. Congratulations, is this your first time getting published?"
"You do get around. Yes, it is."
"Well, honestly I've got to thank you for this post because now whoever looks for me online will know who I am before what I do, and I assure you, nobody in y life has ever made me look this interesting."
"I can only guess."

Quite obviously I was startled yet I was relieved, there are a lot of things one wishes they could explain to themselves before doing it to others because it was obviously all fiction, that old nonsensical rumination about hills and the weather and what not; maybe this is too.

Nothing In Particuar; Hi.

2011-06-13T00:09:00.000-07:00

Reading list:

- The Wasteland and Other Writings by TS Eliot
(Im almost done with the critical essays and most of his poetry other than The Wasteland. Its a little dense. A bulk of his poems are in French.)
- Invisible by Paul Auster
- Old Goriot by Balzac
- Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
- Oracle Night by Paul Auster
- Huis Clos and Other Plays by Jean Paul Sartre
- Ravelstein by Saul Bellow (This one Ive started and stopped with so many times it's injustice, really. But what can one do? So many distractions. Bellow is a true post modernist; there are a lot of references to Greek mythology, Vedanta, Philosophical and Political discourses I have to look up. Bellow came from a world of intellectuals and unless one can call themselves one they are not really doing justice to his writing. But hey! We're all learning here.)

I was contemplating doing an academic research (Sort of thing? Oh, you wannabe.) on Batman comics, the original Bob Kane ones compared to those of Neil gaiman, Alan Moore and (Ugh) Frank Miller. I canned the idea on the premise that not only am I lazy but Id also end up spending my days reading comic books and sipping nimbu paani without actually getting down to writing about it like a literature student ideally would.

So much poetry around, wah.

Nayi Sarak on Sunday is paradise, it is easy on my pocket; what with all this socializing I'm bound to go broke much sooner before the month is over. I went with Barud yesterday, nice fella. I dont know whether to like this weather or not because the weather isnt sure as to how it feels about me. Gives me time to read. I'm glad the first year of college is over, almost.

Apparition

2011-04-06T08:16:00.000-07:00

The crowd had carried you further by then,
Held betweena shoulder, and an elbow,
Further lost,
in the babel,
You cried, looking for a flower
A face, a farce.
A dream.

In that time,
The abbatoir quietened,
in your honour,
after a blind,
soft pause,
it said,
Here are your flowers,
your dreams
replete with temerity,
dry them in the sun,
let them take their time,
take them, their leaves,
their lives, their juice
and blood,
and choke on your smoke.

You left,
without noticing,
without a word to me.

Stonedrunkstoned

2011-03-17T22:53:00.000-07:00

My head is buried,
True and deep,
In a promise,
Sorrow keeps.
For in this time,
I shan't be frail,
and count on rhyme
to leave a trail;
But if and when,
it starts again,
No bird shall know,
Nor a friend.
It shall be written
Onto stone,
'The only living,
are alone.'

Kitty Litter

2011-02-23T03:57:00.000-08:00

Humiliation tucked in domestic violence behind doors and the rampant raping of dogs in strange alleys by men who don't dare to rape women but eventually do, the city glowed with streetlights under the cirrus flames of the sky, pulsating with a smattering of doubt every now and then. She had reposed in a coil, lying almost dead like an aborted foetus, still breathing, still alone. It had started to come back, slow, in gaps, but in truth equally. They had not been seeing each others' faces in the morning, except on the breakfast table when one of them felt like it, neither did their room smell as thick with the scent of love as it did a few months gone. The lights had dimmed under an even dimmer sky, he had said to her, dreaming about days gone.. "Our love has lost its spring and descended into a bitter chill that rots everything within the human soul. I'd like to stay, but I'd much rather leave." That was it. She begged him not to speak any further, jumped into his arms and wept like a dying dog uttering in soft whimpers "Don't do this to me.. can't we.. start over?"

She moaned until sleep came to visit her grey winter morning. He was still there making tea, or not. Staying, certainly for he wished to see her sane, wished to see it safe for her to be left alone. He wasn't to be blamed. He had often accused her of being disinterested, disinterested but not uninterested, he did make that distinction too when she asked for it. Each time. For someone like her to give into emotions like this, lose composure, be swayed, of course it made him want to stay. More for he was scared now. He'd much rather leave though, as he said; there was nothing further to necessitate this except perhaps the incident two weeks after.

He had family, that he never spoke to but loved in the silence of his room at night, sifting through old wooden toys and yellowed letters, he'd let out a routinely sigh before she and him made love. He crouched like a sleeping lion over her afterwards and she, well, she held him like a hippie starved of love in the cold breeze of this magnificently silent universe.

They had been inventing structures to follow this up with, like writers do so they don't fall short of detail, or dont spill out and look like fools. This wasn't necessarily honest, but it was prudent. At least it seemed at the time. Never did they speak of a rotten day, treating it like sour milk, tossing it out after one sniff.

..instead they lay bare on the sheets, furiously kissing until dawn. He'd been dead three days already. She never figured how he had anticipated the fact that the alley cats would mourn this. They multiplied like a splitting shadow over floor lights, at night, when she sat alone, feeling the chill enter her robe, she'd watch them, envy them. How truly they mourned, refusing to eat. At times, she forgot to put food out for them, at times, she'd pretend. At times, he'd get flustered, at times, he'd anxiously pull out their only dinner freezing in the refrigerator and leave it out for them, in case the winter refused to acknowledge that their paths were just as selfish as theirs.

They had been his only friends, and she, his only ruin.

*

One cold, almost merry night, for it couldn't have been completely merry- she was unhappy- the wind blew hard and forceful, billowing against her discontent, it could swallow an entire cat. This was her thought, not mine. That is why she wasn't smart in the moment she chose to mention it. For in another, he sped past, rushed outside. She anticipated a sleepless night impregnated with the feeble mewling out of these orphaned felines.

Twenty minutes past, there was no sign of him. The TV too had retired, all one saw was a glaring motif. She supposed it was hard for him to stay that night, there hadn't been enough milk in the house. A mere few sausages and bread, bent cigarettes for dessert, some. That too was strange, because they usually rolled theirs. He showed up the next morning. She found him asleep in his own vomit and bile. She didn't ask, she didn't want to, because she shouldn't have.

"Tippy, you should sleep on the bed." She said.
"The winter is coming to a close.." He conceded. "..They are happy and you are too.."
Smiling, he drifted off into a fools slumber. He should have helped her finish breakfast. Though he meant every word he said in this notsoconvincingbutheartheavy state of his. He did end things the next day. News of his death arrived soon. They found him on the street, asleep, in his own vomit and bile.

His flesh held between the grasp of the mouths he fed, his decaying carcass had stunk up the neighborhood, they said.
"it was allergies" They said.
Stupid cats, she thought, ate into everything she wanted for herself, a simple TV dinner, a simple man.

*

She stood there, mouth open, lips parted, cigarette in hand, terracotta earrings de-caking, forming a mud pie around her ears, they weren't baked well, she had been duped. Realizing this, she took to the fact that she was one of those people that is chosen by incident and is the worst person to ask for any advice.

She also realized, that old age and loneliness would never compel her to own a cat.

Derail

2011-02-16T07:34:00.000-08:00

Day after day,
After twin, after night,
And I am done,
With illusions spun,
by poets merciless,
Not knowing faith,
Believing anyway.

Piggu.

2011-01-12T03:16:00.000-08:00

This morning Id gotten up with my nose all clogged with mucous, its almost as if I had been drowning in it. I walked myself to the commode and little Mao was waiting there. These little things, I tell you, just give me the fuzzies.

That Whut-happens-if-I-look-into-this-shiny-thing look

Photo: Debbie

Such a Cliche

2010-12-31T00:47:00.000-08:00

I

A lull has descended upon,
These paintings sitting forlorn,
They speak to me no longer,
Of things asleep yonder,
Failing my Memory,
Within silent reveries.

II

I find myself alone,
On a night where, mist
Rises like a demon,
hoping for a song.

III

It is a foggy morning,
like the one yesterday
and the one day before.
The land is covered in water spots:
it's raining.
Grass, like trees,
has begun to brown
awaiting autumns attempt
to renew them.
The local trains
move slow and cautious,
some in deep slumber.
Some, as human containers
parked away like spice boxes,
on a busy kitchen shelf.

IV

On sleepless, still nights,
I read about rivers and women,
Stories of men,
That hardly exist,
In these saintly brawls.

V

I hear sleep,
in a room faraway,
Where a mystic watches over,
Swaying to the silent breathing,
Almost falling,
Always still.

VI

Sounds of love, from the death of days
Deep, buried, slow.
Sounds of love,
In unnoticed corners,
craving lovers, craving ghosts,
Absent almost.

VII

There are statues,
and there are statues,
Some stand with indignation,
Uninspiring and pedantic,
Some with vulnerability,
Exuding sexual ambiguity;
These two philistines,
made themselves see,
Without being seen,
now free, so free,
so alone
and so dead.

VIII

Drunk on youth,
Because there are things,
Unmentioned yet,
Not at least to those
Who need to hear them.

IX

'Let us braid hope, and paradox'
'let's not'
'Will make for a strong whip'
'...or perhaps a noose?'

X

This is not,
one of those almost winter evenings,
Where crows are a plenty,
The sky drains,
It's hazy sorrow upon the eyes.
The moon will be overhead,
rambling of evenings past,
an embrace trapped in the wind,
somewhere.

My train arrives soon,
On the other side,
And this epistolary,
seems to scare none.

Pictures Atop Happiness

2010-12-19T05:18:00.000-08:00

Stray ahead, no, stay ahead, or a stray head, or head straight

2010-12-09T10:56:00.001-08:00

I often wonder why the human capacity to discover new truths never ceases to burgeon even at the risk of finding oneself deeply ruined. (sorry college girls, no one broke my heart.) It is as if satisfaction colluding with happiness is true only for simpletons, philistines and the illiterate. I explore to discover, and subsequently regress while the others around me are often found discoursing to discover and then seek cheap recovery; surprisingly, they succeed. Its a stately principle if you think about it. In retrospect, that is.

Before I

2010-11-10T05:04:00.000-08:00

Before I leap off,
Into an oblivious and strange distance,
I want to hesitate,
Because there are corners,
Unmentioned, still
Beaches, unworthy of lovers
Temples, unworthy of priests
Writers, unworthy of literature,
Religion, unworthy of men.
And
Ghosts, unworthy of stories.

Before I begin muttering,
To myself about mundane,
Late nights,
Frequenting my waking life,
I want to shudder,
For I have no company,
Witnessing this slow death,
That crawls smooth and persuasive,
Like a sharp river,
Swimming into my ears.

Before,
God flings his clouds in the sky,
I want to see his messenger birds,
Bouncing off happiness,
Free, looking at these lovers,
Happy in the wet sand.

There are some October days,
Weary and beautiful,
Sitting by a window
Like a sad woman,
Winter adding to the beauty,
Of this melancholy,
And I wonder,
What if there was a bird,
That said hello,
Distracting you
As I just did.

Song

2010-10-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

I
Gentle, lonely birds,
Teardrops and salvation,
Come here in the sunlight, mellowing.
Women, walking fast, trying to catch
The trains, wheezing and fumbling
With their toes,
Startled,
Ask me where the journey ends,
How dare I know?
When dogs drink from open water pipes,
And children sing with crinkled eyes
How dare I know?

II

Feathers descending on lovemaking lovers
Dictating lyrics, wronging lives.
Smoke from the ash, or ash from smoke?
I mesh, and drown.
Feathers on the sunlight,
Wronging lives.

III

I flew,
To the window beside you,
That separated one october day
from your shadow on the table,
I hung there, dead and happy,
Like a waltz thats been dragged on,
As many poems have said before,

Once in a dream,
Once here.

Parichay

2010-10-26T23:45:00.000-07:00

Hungry

2010-09-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Moon,
Foreboding, looking
At me, melting like a wretched,
Lovable, sensitive boy.
There are no authors left,
To reek of such silly pain anymore,
For everyone sits forlorn,
Pawningoff their pain in poetry,
Weeping like insecure women,
Penning away their selfish lives, drunk.
Shooting, shouting, breathing
Sighing, whispering,
But then again,
When has poetry not been ostentatious?
If I were you, Id sit at home alone
And say, forget.
This is the end of an era,
The lamp needs a new lightbulb.

Whatever is tonight

2010-08-26T10:56:00.001-07:00

What is love like, in a little corner where death isnt proud without a twinkle in the eye?
These dancing people, are implorable creatures, looking for anonymous arms, and that, my friends, is the lesson of the night.
Why, not just this one, but several other drunken evenings, ridden with rum, rain, poetry and disdain. Tonight, we're certainly dancing, for in my mind, I am no longer honest, and no longer myself.

The curtains keep moving,
Like nothing is wrong,
whispering slowly
"It's merely wisdom coming on."

To This Lazy Jazz

2010-08-15T04:23:00.001-07:00

A broken piece of the evening,
Seeps into my room like a mystic,
Chained to the walls,
Like a hungry slave,
Screaming "Aye!
There will be someone
who will never forget
you lied.
Someone is carrying
Your dancing feet
On their shoulders, and
you keep on dancing,
Punishing, for they
Had no answers for you."

Like a lover,
Or another kind of lover,
Sadness sneaks in and,
It makes a secret place
Like a lost windy tide,
On the sidewalk.

For the last time, I tell myself
I will look at it,
Only to kill these few moments,
Until I got bored of it
And found another age
To count.

"Look at me, love.
Just this one time,
And then you may leave."

Now, there are books to read,
Pages to write,
To be filled with memories,
And saddening contemplation
Reconciling these moods,
And other such flaws
In this garland of mist
Under my eyes,
Because there are people
I foolishly believe to exist,
Who want to read ordinary things
About ordinary people,
Like myself.

A Poet's Rain

2010-07-19T23:37:00.000-07:00

A poet's rain is a Purgatory,
Where ships are salvaged from the sea,
And notebooks turn to hell,
It breeds all those phantoms,
He considers despicable, and several visions,
He wishes
Were not just visions.

He knows how there is no real dawn,
It's an excuse for alcoholics,
Who fear the dark
Therefore, if a poet's rain ever truly
Was a place for sinners,
A poet would never fathom
The rain to be
His naked moon in the night,
Or nature's quiet hum.
It would reduce itself to translation,
One of cynical belief
Or non-fiction from a foriegn language,
A way of saying how it's just weather,
Put to paper,
The death of Summer,
A lack of yellow in the air,
Something that pays the weatherman,
And makes his doors creak.

But to a poet,
Rain arouses a memory
Mangled and altered
To convenience,
And therefore,
If it were up to me
To define this rain
I would say,
A poet's rain is nothing
But another song,
Disturbing his silence.

Daytime

2010-07-10T06:30:00.000-07:00

If nights are blue then days are red,
True to the extent our logic spreads.

Strangers

2010-07-07T21:43:00.000-07:00

The needs of strangers,
Come towards me slow,
Like days when emptiness
Came disguised as sorrow,
And the water moved in quiet ripples
Asserting its silence disapprovingly,
There were days when these strangers
Pulled me close making dull promises
With clenched teeth and tightened wrists
And everything in my body sank into the sea
At night, these promises grew around me
Like sad ghosts hovering over my thoughts,
And mundane offerings made by mountains,
The Deodars on them with pleading arms,
Tried, hung and buried in their own fur;
Perhaps this is how nature
Acknowledges the dead
Portraying them as lamenting entities,
Annulled into a tree.

Journey Back Home (Day Two)

2010-06-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

I find it more convenient to write about what happened the day before as opposed to recording incidents like one does in a log book. This isn't a log book, its my journal for fucks sake. Yesterday morning we left for Deolikhan, the location where our purchased land supposedly was. 5,400 feet above ground level crowned with deodar and walnut trees. The moon was sweating its charm away, the stars bright and melancholic let Trinetra uncle remind us how his Punjabi friends could never say his name right.
" Arre, TARNETTAR, sarak kay kanaray kanaray chalo nahi to dakaanay band ho jayengi" (Oh, Tarnettar, walk on the side of the road else the shops will close). His twenty year long stay in mainland China has turned him into a China man, mannerisms and everything. If it weren't for his betraying brown skin and curly hair.
Before heading towards Deolikhan we made a stop at Almora to make the purchase. Diwakar uncle was the most patient one amongst us in the car, including the driver. The journey had been one of the longest and most trying things of my life, or at least it looked like it. Technically, the longest one was my trip to Muzzafarpur, Bihar. Three years ago. My grandmother had died, Id never met her before, not in my conscious memory at least. My only correspondence with her was restricted to the telephone and that too wasn't as often as most other children's conversation with their distant grandparents is. She died of an insulin overdose that she forced the doctor to inject into her. Therefore, instead of feeling a sense of remorse the most I felt was just odd. About the fact that someone Id known was no longer on this planet. She was the first person I knew to die. Obliquely.
They found jagged photographs of Deb and I under the pillow on her deathbed.

*

I made them stop the car on the way uphill. I could see the driver was in a desperate state, his bidi(Tobacco rolled in tendu leaves) had not been lit for over two hours and his coughing just grew stronger and more mucousy. I don't know what smells worse, the tobacco or the burning scent of the dried tendu leaves. Either way, I couldn't care less. I had to hurl. I did, and the vomit found its way on my shoes, some on my hair. I would never figure out how that happened. I hate it when vomit cakes up though, especially on myself. The roads were as confused about their course as they were about what level to be on. If this is what development does to a place then we should just let things be in their pristine state. I don't want to see any shopping malls, or litter on the street. Its depressing.
These roads ran like rivers only except the fact that I was treading on them with my vomit smelling shoes. My father required some Polaroid photographs for the registration forms. The thing about a sparse town is that everyone is acquainted with everyone. No two people are similar. It's remarkable.

Diwakar uncle had been chatting up the white skinned shop owner as if he'd known him in his previous life as well as this one. Perhaps he did. The photo developing gave us twenty minutes time until we got what we wanted. My father's specific instruction of a larger close up of the face and no shoulders included. We moved on further to business then.

After having climbed those very many steps we reached our destination; welcomed by monkeys hanging from trees by their tails. What was less believable was the fact that such trees grew on an uneven cemented ground like that. It was a gigantic castle that once belonged to a king: The hub of Early Indian life, it appeared to be a village which included all facilities both modern and somewhat ancient. Clerks sitting out front in the veranda typing away mysteries on their blue black eagle typewriters, birds and dogs coexisted in this unbelievable arrangement that included several species of people too. Blazers and ties, kurta pyjamas, golf caps and overalls, and then some disguised as former minister of Uttarakhand Mr Keval Sati.

Keval Sati of UK. Heh.

*

Upon this arrival, Deb and I in our lackadaisical fashion rested our blobulous posteriors on a cot, and that is pretty much what we assumed we would be signed to do. Little had I known (Ever, actually), that I was the older sibling and therefore was not exempted from the same banal responsibilities she was. Adults always make it sound like a high official rank. I eventually had to find my way down that uneven set of staircases,alone. All the way to 'Modern Photo Developers' where I had to instruct him to do the work all over again in sheer frustration. We can never follow instructions, can we? He didn't have a choice but to keep smiling at me because the expression on my face defied the one on his paper like skin spread across like a wrinkled sheet where two slits lay like loving scribbles for eyes. He gave my fathers portraits more priority than the other customers who frequented his shop all the while I was there. Surprising how they were done quicker than I was.
It's Pahadi culture, people are polite. No matter how big a liar may stand in front of them. I ran up those stairs like Tarzan on a mountain. Not so difficult, but certainly tiring. my mother stood at the gate anxiously waiting for me, her curious concerned eyes looking at me with indignation. She and I walked together towards the office-in-a-castle. Our castle. I walked up to my father and handed him the portraits proudly without a word. Our parents disappeared leaving Deb and I alone under the sunlight filling the emptiness of the building, us on the charpoy under a dishonest shadow of the porch.

To keep ourselves busy we resorted to our own favorite earthly objects, I had some fiction and Deb had her headphones. No, seriously. Those were headphones that looked like black buns on her ears and reminded me of Noodle. From The Gorillaz. She even had choppy short hair like that. Little cute animal.

I spotted our mother nearly ten minutes after, standing next to a light eyed man, and another who wore a conspicuously purple shirt. Neither of us said a word assuming that she would eventually find her way towards us. Au contraire, she didn't. Annoyed, Deb criticized ma's habit of bragging about her work and her willingness tro talk to anyone at all who even pretended to be interested. In comparison to father's inadvertent projection of self importance. I got distracted by an Assamese lawyer speaking to a layman right in front of me. I could tell by his attire he was a lawyer, by his accent that he was Assamese and not Bengali. He spoke of a woman who hammered at rocks all day for wages, her husband would snatch her money, get drunk and beat her like an animal. Everyday, every night. I'm certain this happens in other parts of the world as well, and this certainty prevents me from feeling violated. Only sometimes. I'm equally prejudiced against such men, all over the world and their indebting good will.

After she took her routine beating she would cook for him and retire to the floor with a pillow and her children. She made sure that all they saw of this violence was the darkness, and just the darkness. Outside and within.
One balmy evening . She returned as usual, took her beating and shoved it right back on his face for dinner.

"chalegi thanay? (Wana go to the police?)"
"Haan, chaloongi, Piayakkad. (Yes, I will you, drunk)"

At the station the husband got threatened with insults, profanity and castration if he was spotted this inebriated in the future. She lives on the pavement now, with he children of course.

Now, that's a happy ending.

*

By this time, my parents were no longer a droning sound in my head but in fact had materialized, not just those two. Diwakar and Tarnettar uncle had accompanied them this time. Along with Mr sati of Uk.
Obedient children found their way to their obedient cars. Pretty and white, pretty and red. Maruti and WagonR. Enough said.

We resumed the journey for the place this entire trip was about: Deolikhan.
The landlord of this entire land, Id like to refer to as 'Deolikhan ka Deota'. (Lord of Deolikhan). Tarnettar Joshi, Cheeni ka Vidwaan, Trinetra Joshi, Pahadi Insaan.(Tarnettar Joshi, scholar of Mandarin, Trinetra Joshi, man of the mountain). My father openly criticised his smoking habit, sometimes it nearly brought him down to using profanity. Nearly.

The night had fallen over us like a deceptive drizzle, the moon was projecting its powerful beam at us lonely crearures, lonely and together at the same time. The Deodar Trees at 5,400 ft whispering a tale in their solemn breath in the almost cold weather. Id taken my shawl out by now. Deolikhan was a winged moth opening it's aeronautic extensions wide, rowing through the air then suspending itself in the background which held it together.

I hear Trinetra uncle breaking into a song in the distance. He does it more often than anyone I know. I learn that he is lonely.

I walked up to him, he looked like an old woman's ghost, his photochromatic lenses acknowledging my presence in the night. I informed him that his name was annoying to pronounce.
"My Punjabi friends call me Tarnettar. Arre, Tarnettar, sarak ke kanaray kanaray chalo nahi to dakanein band ho jayeingi". His hold on language, all three of them actually, was exponentially better than the one on his walk. Puffing out ripples of smoke, an almost dying man.

Deb and I in response to this statement burst into a cluster of yellow soap bubbles and crazy daisies, all alive, all hung in the air like fireflies. There was childish laughter around, Diwakar uncle proposed this to be the perfect place for poetry. I considered it a poem. We looked over the Deodars into the solid, sparkling horizon of the dark. My heart fell into my stomach, I swear I even heard a splash somewhere. It felt like the first breath of fresh air Id taken in all these years that Id lived an existence in ignorance. Dried Deodars and dried Pine, nature made fire bombs. Deodars growing as markers of Godly residence. (Deodar, from Deota) Standing tall to remind man that he wasn't allowed here.

Journey Back Home

2010-06-25T01:33:00.000-07:00

There is something about a train journey that has stayed with me ever since the first time I ever sat on one. Perhaps its the maddened and maddening, the bustling, growing crowd at the New Delhi Railway Station. Perhaps not. These aren't people, these are locusts. One gets a whiff of counrysmell, and I shit you not, it doesn't smell too good. Especially when one awaits a non-a/c chair car that is about to be treated like a passenger train after some point. The lavatories usually read 'Please avoid using the toilets at the stations'. You need to be an Indian to know why. For the rest of you, Ill let it remain an unearthed mystery. I have a sister than complains like no one else, earlier it was assumed that the throne was rightfully my mothers, only to stand corrected. Deb wasn't aware that this was a no a/c to top which, we had a half an hour more of people breathing like Komodo dragons on our faces. It didn't look good, especially to her. It's strange, this thing, to be tucked away in the conveniences of a suburb. Affluence has its way of instilling a certain class mentality no matter how fiercely glued one might be to their principles. The pungent scent of excreta on the railway tracks (Whoops, its out.) was omniscient, it was the scent of the bloody air. The English language had no polite euphemisms for this stark eventuality of peoples everyday.

One wasn't certain, which side of the platform was to arrive that enormous human container, the so called harbinger of escape, hell away from hell, the Kathgodam Express. Five minutes prior to it's arrival I realised that luck was something that worked in a nation where destiny was left hapless and made alive through convenient superstition. We were on the right side of the platform. Those who weren't thought it apt to jump off the other side and walk across those defecated-on rails, to come on over rather than walk all the way around it. In decency. As long as it wasn't as bad as the Lucknow stampede. There are shortcuts, and there are shortcuts.

Upon the trains final arrival, my father required some help lifting our wheeled trolley (designed by foreigners to be used in ways they would never fathom. No seriously, a parenthetical statement is necessary in this case. Its no bloody airport with sharply dressed maids we call hostesses), the crowd growing livelier as if it had been awaiting a premeditated stampede and had to make sure that not a single one escaped alive. I shrank inside a little corner within myself. There were these two confused goons sitting on our seats. This felt worse than the time I heard about my relatives having destroyed my grandmother's will and forged a new one. The crowd behind us grew impatient and stickier with the humidity. They weren't just impatient, they were livid. with an insubstantial, naive anxiety. I focused on Yann Tiersen playing in my head and regained my calm. We won our seats, got seated and it felt like a victory in a game of chess; something I rarely chanced upon. That always used to make me think whether I was actually that stupid or whether it was the birds outside the window eating fruit next to the chess table. None of those actually, I was as impatient as these losers.

I lunged forward and occupied the seat by the window. It was inevitably anticipated that Deb would speak up in protest but surprisingly she did not. Not yet, at least. It didn't matter. She liked it all the same, hated it all the same. The commotion, chaos within chaos fitted together to make sense. Only failing, and flailing and wailing. Sardarjis and non-saradarjis, gaudily dressed women, little children with kajal and lipstick, crying infants and silent ghosts huddled inside this container we locals colloquially referred to as 'Bogie', and collectively these bogies making a long and entire vehicle the locals and non locals called the Kathgodam Express.

After about Fifteen minutes, the only noise was that of moaning infants and food sellers' shrill cries. And then it was all over.

Distracted by a man using a watering pipe to remove the shit stuffed in the groves of the rails, I pictured a world full of sadness for him, a world that truly and literally stank of everything it was, and the shit too. The cobble stoned pathway between the two tracks was being severely exploited by women and children who earlier either failed or refused to cross over and step in muck for the good use of time. It takes a silent being, a solemn being to lead the way, nobody had thought of it until a scrawny , thin child with an almost tonsured, very brown head walked down that road, a broad and proud back that had neither a train nor any time to owe itself to. The train ran into motion moving amazingly backwards and Baba had by now befriended Kuldeep Singh of seat 108. he had already had him talking of his enormous garment business in Haldwani, the riches that his brother had accumulated frequenting Sadar Bazaar and China back and forth over the years. Life had been kind to him, or so I interpreted from the statement "ओह जी, जब तक मुझे दाल रोटी व्हिस्की मिलता है, ठीक है!"(Oh, jee, as long as I get my bread, soup and whiskey, all is good). All Sardars are the SAME. There's only gradation in the levels of literacy. I wouldn't be surprised if Manmohan Singh Mitwa from the SAARC conference quipped about the same thing. Except he would recite a few lines of poetry, either Urdu, Punjabi or English to justify the use of his tamed joy.
Then slowly Mr Khanna of a neighbouring seat joined the two. Honestly, I had lost interest in their conversation about India's cultural past long ago but anything sounded better than the atrocious music the Indian Railways thought to be playing in the train. Unbelievable, really. My phone had run out of battery so there was no question of any other distraction.
Except. I had with me Arundhati Roy's only work of fiction lying lonely and desolate in my bag. Like a cloud of yellow waiting to take me away. I cannot say there weren't things i did not like about it. But i would mention something like that in a circumstance when I'm asked to critique upon it. I honestly like the book, no matter how overrated it might be. I began to go through its pages of wisdom, sadness, intimacy and humor not stopping until the journey ended. Except for the occasional game of Guess Who?. I lost most of the time, Deb won. Most of the time.

We deboarded the Haldwani station and had a car waiting for us , I dint have the strength to even raise my head and acknowledge this man's hospitality, so incredibly exhausted the journey had found me. We hopped on to his car, I spoke nonsense, not knowing, almost oblivious, to the fact that it was no chauffeur of Trinetra uncle's who would speak little English and could barely afford himself some decent dental care. This was his neighbour, and my sister managed to convey this through her ruthless, disapproving facial expressions. Momo, my theater teacher once told us at a workshop that you cannot convey an actual statement with your eyes, like if your dog dies you cant say 'I'm said because my dog died'. But at least you can convey that you're sad. We had stopped by a roadside sweet stall to get some मिठाई (Mithai-sweet food) or Mishthan as my father put it. They both mean the same. Only you convey some purity when you use the latter.

*

Trinetra uncle's house was very welcoming in it's own charm that its incomplete , deformed, almost broken self exuded. He had a black bitch as a pet too. He named her Yin. Quite predictable for someone who acquired the kind of scholarship he did in Mandarin, spent twenty years in China, had Chinese Chairs, tea, pictures of the Great Wall, himself on this great wall against the Great Wall with his wife. Wrinkled and ruined with water, windows that were shattered by a storm from the previous night had shattered his sixty six year old strength to keep the house awake. This was no home. I knew, and he knew. And Yin kept barking because she didn't know us. A dog is not as fierce.

His brother's dog had given birth to five puppies, he kept two and had sent one away conceding with reason that he couldn't raise himself and to raise these two was a task that only a youth with the strength could accomplish. It was not strength here though. It was more about his willingness. He seemed to laugh at it. I could see that he himself wasn't convinced. His white tufts of hair struggled in the breeze. We cruised through the following hours without my tired eyes noticing much except for the occasional nudges I got for saying things I shouldn't like how maybe the Bhindi was a little undercooked.

*

Deb and I found ourselves a room on the first floor of the bungalow with a massive balcony and not a single daring particle of carbon to cloud the view of the stars that shrouded the night like an infinite, favorite cape. They actually twinkled over the solemn silhouette of the foothills watching us like giants. There wasn't another soul in the depth of this night, a dead car parked somewhere in a field of wild grass; nothing more, nothing less.

We retired to our room with our bags. I took out my lighter and some rolling paper that had stuck to itself because the moisture somehow had caught it somewhere. She took out a pudiya of ganja and quietly placed it on the cement ledge. It was a ledge for now. In reality (or so our less inebriated, less tired selves would infer) it was a compartment made in the wall for perhaps a tall and very wide closet meant to hang corpses, and house insects. After some blaming and bickering, some anxiety and fear, two joints were rolled, the door of the first floor balcony locked shut with ourselves ready to run to the second floor terrace. Had there been a room on it like the first floor, it would be another massive balcony. But hell, it wasn't.

It was a wonderful night. I'm certain that its like this all the time and if you have the sensibility, you might just feel it slither like water inside your ears, the stars that tingling sensation of the cold, the air the garment that clothes one in sheer beauty and the company of the person you love the most. In my case, its my sister, in my mother's it's my father, in Deb's case it's her best friend and in Trinetra uncle's case it's his dumb girlfriend in a Gold Flake pack. Not that I'm one to complain. We returned to our lodgings, she slept like a log to the sound of music. I could barely close my eyes. I slept though. In bits, like a dying candle.

*

Matin

2010-06-16T00:32:00.000-07:00

This morning,
Drenched in calm,
Wakes me to thoughts
Of last night,
Staring out the window,
Dreaming still.

2010-06-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

I have two guinea pigs, and the feeling of being a little prince under twilight. No, seriously. Forget things of consequence and make believe some sweet, sweet love.

Moving

2010-05-14T02:18:00.000-07:00

I lost the lines
That came to me like
A rebel flame in the wind,
And now if I remember well,
They were about rooms,
The rooms in my house like boxes
Affirming peace in solitude,
wearing one out,
Books seated holding my strings.
Loosely.
And my notebook,
Sly as ever.

I on my bed,
After many days of absence,
Resting with
A heart full of sorrow and;
A head drenched in thoughts,
The lonely air of this room hung
Like crippled day trodden bats
On my skin.

A yearning, a desire, a space,
Whatever,
Its all replaceable,
Even closure.

Dry Days

2010-04-29T02:49:00.000-07:00

Your body dragged
Across long and weary deserts
To poetry you don’t understand,
Dunes high as hope, dry as legend.
How can I leave you,
In these difficult days,
When I know I cannot do without you,
And you, without me?
This dark room finds us strangers,
In the scorching day of the desert,
The darkness saturated with cries or songs
Perhaps misplaced perhaps not
Maybe happy, maybe broken.

Crime

2010-04-28T23:23:00.000-07:00

I got out of bed,
Early this morning,
As I
Found a poem stuck inside me.
I had a history of crime,
To have held on
To a thought I found
Inside my pockets
Burning my fingers,
And not placed it instead
On a modest sheet of paper.
But to have held on to it,
Until it remained there
And finally died,
Escaping my memory,
My hands, My pockets.
And now that I have
written this down,
I am at peace.

In Retrospect

2010-04-09T03:59:00.000-07:00

A road, endlessly horizontal, finds Sunshine clad in dust. Caught in his polluted thoughts, unable and unwilling to take responsibility of who he is. There's a change in his weather, some poetry the sky whistles into his eyes, he couldnt quite fathom. Things dont always have to be in congruity with each other to make sense, asshole. He knows, and he lets the sky know.

*

Sky is away, he's always been away. Tea, he pours into his kitchen cups, made out of his vanity, his flaws and all those several cracks, vociferous and angry, speaking of his deficiencies-- for his mother and himself; Now, virtues like sharing and courage are pleasantly endearing. Thank you, sky. No one will ever know.

*

Peach is brooding in his apathy, only to find a chaos muddled with his priorities. He's a lover, he says. "Everyone's a nymph, and you're a secret". There's a neon mask hung from his ceiling, everytime I ask him if it glows in the dark, he'd tell me it would and we'd both know it wasnt true. A copy of Exile and Kingdom lies in his bookshelf. I'm too proud to ask for it, and it's almost time to go home.

*

Fairy flutters about, like a flamingo in all his elegance. He speaks happiness, he's always here but not really. Look in his eyes, almost dead, his hair like a moving mist burdened with knots and heavenly demons he likes to call nostalgia. We laugh, and laugh, and laugh until we are left rolling like gogos in the grass: Listless, tired, helpless and empty.

*

Sha sits, one foot tucked behind the other, his knees pointing towards the sky, hands clasped against his legs. A fire speaks of his memories,a little distant, a little warm but never healthy. Afar, he fills it with sadness but he doesnt let the others know; solitary lover. Mumbling to himself, he decides to rush back upstairs to familiar lodgings, his familiar books, and furniture. He drowns in an ocean of his sheets letting his stress swim in his universe of songs cradling his silhouette. His days now misplaced in his sleep. I think I love him.

Rise

2010-04-05T04:07:00.000-07:00

There is a sigh tucked in
Somewhere in a mindless song,
As a drowning man, seeking redemption.
This morning, amidst lonely shadows
In the stale sun
My feet touch the cold floor
Singing me this song,
In these obscure, brazen thoughts.

We're together in this changing weather,
This morning that comes to rescue,
With melodies crashing against the shore
Of my ears,
Crawling back into his mouth.
Heres a happy day,
I am about to waste,
Knowingly, acknowledging
With a yawn.

Void

2010-03-26T02:41:00.000-07:00

I

Throw these old things away,
The smell of the dust settling on them,
I wish they understood,
How the longing of a woman
Does not take long
To clothe itself in spite;
Or disguise it as such.

There is dignity involved
In role playing games
Where harm and damage
Are never the same things
Where damage is inevitable,
And harm merely looked upon.

The soft, nearly tender song
Of the candle beneath my lover’s desk
Carving silhouettes
On my beatific hands.

One comes back to hope.
Only to see a ghost rise;

II

I think I will sit beside my days tonight
The same moon watching the same sorrow
Eat me slowly
Ruin the things it always has,
Apathetic,

Not noticing for once
Warm spotlights in the sky
Resounding within
Virgin cirrus castles
Embedded with histories
And empty echoes.

Hours

2010-03-18T23:22:00.000-07:00

Evening summer birds fall,
From the sky
Like leaves in autumn,
Lifting my carcass together,
When it rains upon my death.

Faint sunspots slowly dilate
Occupying my shoes,
Tumefying as I walk further
Into solace.

Good morning, I say,
Good morning, it says,
Beware of all these antonymns
They make a listener out of you.

Its evening now, and the sun
Is no more,
But what of you,
And your dying zest?
The day counts down
From morning, to noon
To night.
These are all there is
And all that you cannot
Fold inside your palms.

Point No Point

2010-03-15T08:46:00.001-07:00

This is one of those solemn situations where I decide to put into public view my thoughts on things without the fear of counter criticism. Without being brisk, isnt that the point of opinion anyway? John Rawls died responding to it, well, not exactly, two days post his decision to not do it. Makes one think about purpose of human existence, really. Even Sir Francis Drake for that matter, he did what he was born to do. Circumventing the earth on a boat (Or was it?) and to be the first one to do it is no jest. When one is too lachrymose to even mention what is bothering them, it isnt the sorrow really, it's lethargy. I was told that I should do exceptionally well, only to laugh at a few worms who value this intense garble of loqacious pretense. Here's another sunset down the toilet.

Moving on.

Jackson Pollock, I dont know if its just me, but I cannot fathom any artistic credibilty in his work. The only thing that perhaps, I would attribute to his ouevres is his novelty. I wouldnt be able to replicate those random strokes, nobody would. Americans, yeesh.

An art critic who came over to my house a few months ago, gave me a remarkable insight on how one happens to judge art, how strongly personal experience affects the way one even perceives it. It is very difficult to rid oneself of bias when it comes to giving an honest opinion. That one meeting really made me think about a lot of things that I wouldnt spare a thought to. American art, I feel is very opaque, dangerously bordering on insensitivity. Why, because if I place it in context to what Mr Chopra said to me, I would, in my naivity believe that Americans live in a stark denial of their past, as colonisers, murderers. A strange degenerate population, a society that has been surviving on its insularity, arrogance and self consumption to the extent that the rest of the world with its primitive problems seems negligible, a joke. Then again, Im sweeping an unfair generalisation.

And to think of how shamelessly I've succumbed to it. It's a lie in the name of globalisation, and there is a lot more going on than one would want to believe. I urge whoever reads this to start reading Marx on Culture, its a small essay.

Thank you;
Now excuse me while I exhaust this joint under a moonlit sky whose vociefrous hues scream mine.

Happy Birthday

2010-02-25T22:34:00.000-08:00

Les poèmes De La Nuit

2010-02-21T01:05:00.000-08:00

Chair

There is a dead chair, sitting across
Solitary and anticipating,
Like one grandmother I never knew
Or another perhaps,
That I should have known.
There is a chair, sitting across,
Brooding,
with absolutely no one
To interrupt her.

Flags

I, running across a field,
With no harvest,
Plagued by a storm and
A Flag in my hand scouring
For a friendly mud hill,
Am no longer an adult.
For honesty,
Brought me home.

Query

Fan blades cutting across space,
Inquiring,

"Any lovers lately,
to swim in your bed?"

Space dissolving itself,
Like sugar in warm water,
Into my nostrils.

"not really, friend.
I've been living,
Too simple a life,
In too bland a world."

Contemplation

My heart if spoken of,
To friends and company,
Renders itself a lie.
But in the midst of a stranger
Or several,
There are genuine ideas
Being rattled off like toys,
For no price except,
An audience.
One that could offer perhaps,
Some half hearted condescension
And empathy.

Love

Embraced in the crazy folds
Of midnight,
Panting, desiring, enriching
Kisses,
Inebriated and frantic,
All over me,
The night like a hungry traveller
Plants,
Not having found,
It's redemption.

I miss you,
In my own time,
With your legs, shivering
In your balcony,
Brown and bruised,
Emaciated and hardened,
In the folds of
This midnight.

Fathoming the Depths Of Ignorance

2010-02-05T02:42:00.000-08:00

There is no conversation,
More dead than the one ridden with
My own pretence,
And if it were,
It would perhaps be devoid
Of any human truth.

A silence that emerges
Not for a moment
Of naive contemplation,
One that recognises a juvenile spirit
Or perhaps even young faith,
Neither the kind that remarks
Upon either peace or even
Humilty.

Not a pause offered
As consent, often
Bundled into a smirk.

This, in all honesty
Is not
Even an exaggerated second
Of death for one's ego,
Or even a moment when
These palms seek the burden of
A wrinkled face.

This is,
A silence breathing apathy,
One that is neither cruel
Nor distatsteful,

My nude anguish,
Doing injustice to words
Drunk with petty sorrow
And stupidity,
Consequently having hoped
For perhaps a few seconds
Of sincerity.

This, is death.
Truly,
For I know, of course,
I am not alive in the midst of
This haze,
In these few moments
That were meant for me,
For reasons,
I failed then
To fathom.

My Day

2010-01-18T07:33:00.000-08:00

I

My feet are the strangest things.
How does one develop affinity towards something
Because it merely
Looks, feels or smells a certain way?
Dew on my window sil, the stars humming a late goodbye,
Good morning, Sha.
Ill see you around the bend.

II

A dim silence has descended
Upon my books.
That await my departure,
And the day,
It's cold, timely
Demise.

Own

2010-01-06T10:39:00.000-08:00

"Strange moon, silver and plain, blurred with an angry mist. In this fog, you're all I see, standing beneath the arms of a naked tree. Clinging on to the last goodbye, I slowly wipe my forehead, my contours. Half aware, kissing you against the parched winter sky, drowning in its entirety, drowning in the folds of this city, drowning in the beautiful obscurity of this night. A light goes on in a distant house, and I hear Tv."

"You know I wouldnt let anyone else sit with you in the rain, beautiful. Gazing out
the window, the glass fogged up, the wind blowing softly against the trees, the white smell, and your curls in my face. Not fair that this is all becoming about you, not fair that you're leaving so soon."

"I had made it clear to you. We'd be struggling."

"No."

Winter Rain

2010-01-03T23:15:00.001-08:00

Sha, My Sha

Walking into pathways
Of soft, gentle mist,
Grasping a handkerchief
And bringing it close to his face,
Hesitantly.

I said stay,
Watch with me this sun
Stuck in gray eternity,
Embracing it's novelty,
Feel my palm across your cold sweat,
Tell me silently enough,
You're not forgetting me
In the midst of this
Goodbye.

The blue slippery street,
Has fallen asleep in this winter,
One would do just that when
Nudity would not mean
Emancipation,
But conspicuous slavery
To the life
In this passive chill.

Sha has gone home to his mother,
And the memories of his dead dog.

I am waiting in this rain,
And he tells me
He is the only one looking.

There are his cold sandwiches that I want,
Still.

A Generic Greeting

2009-12-31T22:08:00.000-08:00

The year, as I have hoped and now in certainty, will find happiness cascading into doves of smoke and spiraling into the sky piercing like a dagger of irrelevance. But what matters, really; as that is what we have been trying to adhere to, is the ambiguity that follows. Positivity intact? Of course. Chin up, look forward and wave to the new year. There is adevnture ahead.

Dee em tee, deee em tee, do do do el ess dee.

2009-12-26T02:20:00.000-08:00

Doesnt matter if you're shivering, or if my spine is erect, doesnt matter if all the colors are saturated enough for us to believe we merely exist in this maze of irrelevance, doesnt matter if your lips part and let out a warm fog, doesnt matter if I travelled all this while, doesnt matter if we're stuck in this cycle of mad chaos, if my mother will never know me for who I am, doesnt matter if I do not perform, doesnt matter if my art is waste, doesnt matter if I've let a lover down, doesnt matter if youve never been here before, doesnt matter, doesnt matter if my swans have died, doesnt matter if we didnt switch the lights off, doesnt matter if the bindi stuck on my window has lost its color, doesnt matter if my food is stale, doesnt matter if the only sense I have is smell, for all I know your sweat will always get cold and I will always know that there is thyme around me somewhere.

Worldly Matter

2009-12-16T22:58:00.001-08:00

Love, in quiet slumber,
Tell me when to enter.

3 Nights Ago

2009-12-09T03:01:00.000-08:00

3:00 am

Having fever is like being high in perpetuity, one feels there's no blood left in the body and on sleepless nights, tend to get the feeling that they'll die within a few hours if it held on, cannot decide if one feels either hot or cold. Bathed in sweat, looking out to the sky thinking, how much more beautiful it seems tonight, how much closer.

3:15 am
It's just this morning, my fever is okay. I'm warm like a radiator, drinking water, taking medicine whenever I feel the need to. There is no prescribed dose. My mother is far too arrogant to take me to a doctor. I think Id rather not anyway. I wont be able to tell the difference.

3:30 am

It's a sudden morning. Having taken several rounds of my house, wandering into their rooms like a particle of dust.

They all look like a bunch of carcasses when asleep, not knowing, not thinking. Go look.

4:00 am

Everything is still in this profound silence. It's as though the plants have been trying to convey something just being there. All night, I've been looking, observing. It's all strange. If one keeps staring at something too long, it doesn't look like anything. Like when one keeps saying a word over and over they forget what it means. They've broken it down to a sound. Music.

No matter how easily, one forgets they need sleep.

What do you see in front of you?

4:25 am

I cannot see the moon on my side of the planet. These are one of those strange nights when one feels likeLe Petit Prince being a lonely inhabitant of a planet, travelling the universe, exploring human emotion, searching, finding happiness, living a dream within a dream and eventually disappearing without letting anyone know.
Doesn't one wish to disappear completely for just a little while and look down on the world from far away, just to see how it works without them? Does it even exist.
Who is the first person to wake up and discover you in that garden maybe smoking,maybe thinking.
Because for all this while everyone lay dead asleep, one disappeared for them.
One owned the world.

4:50 am

Music emerges out of silence, swivels around your head, and takes you away into the dotted universe.

6:00 am

I can hear the morning azaan.

Letter

2009-12-05T16:48:00.000-08:00

Never feel afraid to touch the cold spaces within my soul, madman,
As you did walking towards me, disjointed toes, your feet
Dragging your shoe to the last funeral I was to see
Balding, age sketched on your skin like marks the wind
Leaves in the desert,
Deep set eyes yelling out sorrow
Defying the monologue of your smirk.
I fell short of courtesy,
And proudly so.

On Death

2009-11-23T10:09:00.000-08:00

This isnt farewell, merely an embarkment on a quest for a parallel universe where you and I will witness each other from a distance, gaze, and walk past slowly not knowing we ever parted.

Diminishing

2009-11-21T00:31:00.000-08:00

You, firefly
Danced over my head
In disfigured circles
Cascading into contrast incessantly
In these hours of longing
And now that winters come
I lie on the cold floor,
When I tire.

“I miss you in my books.”

Wandering

2009-11-21T00:27:00.000-08:00

Sitting next to me, your naked soul
Teaches me cruelty
My night spent in reminiscent thoughts
Thinking or not thinking
Recollecting, picking from dust
Your dead words
But dreaming,
Owing to the breeze and
Our destitution

Unpresidented.

2009-11-18T02:05:00.000-08:00

Say wha?

My Land

2009-11-12T03:04:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it would make more sense
If I said
It is a cold night,
For its simplicity,
It is a cold night.

The nudity of this towering structure,
Built of profound cruelty,
And of cement lying too close.
Mouth to skin,
The palpability of the wind,
Redemption too busy,
Love too far off in the distance.
Feeble enough for its novelty to be obsolete.
What did it leave one with?
Words.
Words, always belonging but never
Strung together the way of a weeping murder,
Ravens,
Flung to the sky,
A perfect kettle.
And beneath, these bodies,
Farmer, miner, labourer,
Wives, children,
Listless, orphaned, wandering forever.

I cursed you only then
For it to be late now,
For you to find me a burden,
Incessant and yours alone.
You knew always how,
I,
Never wandered
Into anyone's existence
Aimlessly
As you did mine.

Prayer

2009-11-06T03:27:00.000-08:00

I shall never lie,
Like a dead pigeon,
Shamelessly, not cooing away,
Not being heard, or being told
To keep shut.

I shall never arrive
Like an empty battleship
Bringing home numerous
Flawed questions and
Sailors,
Half dead, more wounded
Within me.

I shant ever tick endlessy
Like an hour needle,
Often stuck, mostly
Repeating insanity
By definition,
In an endless cycle.

Never will I bear any atrocity,
Never shall I fear a man,
Never could I live in doubt

Bound by nothing, I shall be
And if someone did question

'Woman, whose injustice? What for?'

I shall utter,

'It's none of your business
I'm not here to fight you.'

Gift, tonight

2009-11-02T08:39:00.000-08:00

I loved you with every song in my heart,
As the cold evening licked your tired flesh,
I waited till it descended upon me.
I thought for smaller moments, how singular beings, we,
Meshed into the same entity.
There was no you, no running, no sunset
No stopping, no I.
My fingers coiled against your arm,
Ear against shoulder.
This nearness never enough.
A hum of these modest, naked trees in autumn.
A desperate wind, whispering
I, for you
Here, forever.

Here's An Honest Warning, Neighbour

2009-10-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

An unsettling cloud of dust,
Will swerve past and I will,
See your shadow loom somewhere
In the wind.
Mother would nearly faint of anxiety,
When she wouldnt be able to reach me and,
A dog will howl into the endless night,
My sister would be faraway, weeping
In the black rain staring at your corpse.

Not knowing whether to wipe herself
When she reaches home.

Or to let anguish fall into mother's lap
Free, and entire,
Hear her shriek
Of mad company.

...

The rain has a sound
That slowly
Pushes off a distant cliff,
These things and I
Hear
A faint thud.

Fearing Matter

2009-10-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

I sat in a dream,
Witnessing my house,
Dissolved in a wreck, dead in stories,
Dust sitting upon a garden, one by one
On blades of yellow grass, and aging leaves
Brown and terrible.
Waking up,
Morning after morning not believing
It was perfect,
Looking for hope in the sky,
Never having
Kissed the earth.

...

Those bound with the mundane,
Often invited my fingers,
To touch their sleeping eyelids,
Never lovers, yet always knowing,
How to thank war,
For coming in the way.

I didnt know how,
Eventuality meanders its way through
To find itself babied
In the lap of light
Yet,

In offering I had a garland
Of cold dust,
Bound by a thread that
Tightened its hold with time.

Choosing

2009-10-12T05:31:00.000-07:00

Envy is a plague, not withstanding my judgments on dignity. It made me weaker, and thus, more cruel.

You, moving as warm, placid fluid seated in clustered patches of sunlight ran out the corridor. Laughing like a child. I found you shivering of happiness, clad in translucent drops of sweat down the tip of your jaw, and on your knees, finally looked down. I chose you for you hardly wanted to justify, that hardly being the question. The air constantly churned by the blade of your voice; if you found me staying it was only then that you fit the bill to be the author of my solitary days.

No More A Longing

2009-10-09T04:29:00.000-07:00

The soft wind and the earth, trapped in a passionate embrace find life to be a beautiful metaphor at this moment. To have chosen this night, no reason. Only the wrestling in my hair, the blue sky and a cold, putrid moon falling like gray dust. Not wistful, not hoping. For questions on rainy nights like these ride the scent of the air.

Downstream

2009-10-04T09:32:00.000-07:00

Amidst all this dust,
They found my breathing eyes,
Crippling and naked.
Darling limbs immersed,
In the music of the frogs,
Riddlers.

The lights disappear
I hear busy parents,
Sounds.

Here, facing myself,
I stand,
Clear as water is, clear as mirror,
Candlelight flickering,
Dancing on the these torpid tiles.

I have often seen a river
Of solitude and passive
Gazing at moving trees,
And clouds going up as smoke
As I seep into the abyss
Of your opaque skin,
Wasted, brown and breathing,
A space evolves
Into steam
Over my teacup.

Bloop

2009-09-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

What entered
Dancing into my meadows of eucalyptus
And mad inebriating fragrance,
Changing orphaned hands into screeching maladies,
Civilization knew a meaning.
That,
To let it be.

...

As seasons do relax,
The autumn breeze
Pours in witnessed years
Into my palm

Time remains nothing but an irksome heave,
My days, old rags,
My afternoons nothing,
But an omniscient sigh.

Things to do

2009-09-09T01:54:00.000-07:00

1. Annihilate self before becoming a melted puddle of black shiny crystal; so fuzzy and hot in its being that it pushes any positive light that comes its way into a pool of dark, sad abyss subsisting in a subliminal universe that neither you, nor the scum on the soles of my feet wish to see.

2. I should study right now, really.

Late, now

2009-09-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

Whenever you forget,
The niceties of apathy;
Recall the regret,
Crawling within thee.

Dust

2009-09-01T03:34:00.000-07:00

Ive come to watch your Piano gray
Seething in the breath of may,
Singing away to the joys of noon,
Forever to me, attuned.

Mother

2009-08-25T06:16:00.000-07:00

If you look for love outside, you cannot have mine.

What...

2009-08-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

... a meaningless day.

Creep In

2009-08-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

Walking alone
A grey morning,
Reminded of your skin,
Burdened and tired with thoughts
And pardoxes that I
Do not wish to hold within.
Ego, the great, solitary whim,
Or
Greatness itself?
Assuring happiness.
Either of them might know.
I don't.
I just don't know.

New Rain

2009-08-13T05:10:00.000-07:00

The string keeping man and his folk together
Is as good
As a flame simmering
Within cold monsoon evenings where
I would sit together and warm your many hands;
only not more than one at a time.

You've been to my place, Seen my walls.
I'm getting a new wooden bookshelf soon,
Will you let me paint it scarlet?
Or leave me a filthy violet
And candle wax to deal with?

The Obscure day
If I may,
Seems tiresome of late,
And my journeys home, increasingly worrisome
For the weather has drenched me
In its own dilemmas and
Irrelevant paradoxes.

I look down and feel,
My feet to be the strangest things
As I shrink into chaos
Trying
To climb those awful many steps,
Reaching easily,
The doors,
All unlatched.

Tick a Tock

2009-08-09T08:04:00.000-07:00

1:00 am

Yellowed, lonely and a brittle Kafka. This is the last one reads your love from here.
The fools I know are as easy to offend as they are to please. I'm sitting here, generally assuming a happy abyss. Your age begins as mine ends. What, of all this is true? I'm scratching all the scabs out.

2:00 am

I need to go to the clockmaker by the dim sum shop with Arjun. My watch is old, blackened silver with a dusty dial. Devoid of life and yet strangely, breathing peaceful.

3:00 am

The phone beeps.

"I can never acknowledge the nuances when I'm looking for beauty. As of now, life feeds on life. Get this in the morning and fill your lungs with love that survives underwater"

I'm told.

.

2009-08-01T02:10:00.000-07:00

Read me, like you read the dead.

I Was Stuttering, Then

2009-08-01T01:58:00.000-07:00

I cant tell the line between a lie and actually believing out of this hollow, resounding treble. One lies awake anticipating a mad haste, misconstrued images, disfigured stories. All, a faint quiet breathing, warm, continuous and sleepy. A constant jabbing in my eardrum to silence. 3 weeks, dark, breezy nights. A drunk moon, an erring, a conscience singularly defeated by prudence. Choke, quiver, push, thud, breathe, blink, close in: dream.

I should cry like a woman but
There are mad, amoebic clouds,
Flying,
Into a reverie.

Should one ever force sleep or even laughter, I shall deem him a sinner like one disguising romance. Or a hypocrite. Or even invisible.

Outer Space

2009-07-24T05:44:00.000-07:00

Je serai fatigue.

Opaque

2009-07-14T07:08:00.001-07:00

Today,
In the chill of these woods,
I found a cloud on my window,
Seated in my vision.
I felt a certain mist,
In the power of constraint and
I was so blinded
I could not see,
The trees were green because,
It rained a while ago.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

My Nose is Clogged With All This Monsoon

" Why is the evening so suddenly dead? "

A quiet rush of love swivels around in quantities that measure
An obsolete universe.

In the blooming of a flower and the sun,
I sense a music rushing in every cranny but
my dry palms that beg for it to sit within.
There is a flower in whose beauty and no fragrance
is created a cloud of color and wind seeping into my nostrils,
up into my brain, exiting from my ears.
Entering furrows
That had been left dry for months.

Flight

2009-07-12T10:32:00.001-07:00

I pinched the butter paper etching a silhouette. One that of a river for mere self amusement, turned to look and back. Folded the two corners together. Small, pudgy fingers bombarded by strategy. Sitting in a room crawling with moonsmoke and dishonest eyes,
I,

Tore the sellotape, joined together.
My first love letter now in flight,
Only,
If there were to be no heartache,
Until further notice.

Stuck

2009-07-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

To those,
Who spelt apathy
With an alphabet of the nymphet,
I stole another angry stranger from you.

...

Stuttering,
Running in between
Two doors
In a hallway
With speeding bullets
Clad in wings,
And fury.

Capsule

2009-07-09T02:59:00.000-07:00

Encased in my cupped hands,
Half asleep, almost dead,
Little sparrow,
I felt you breathe
Almost happy.

Ha

2009-07-03T10:33:00.000-07:00

Dear Fungus,
I've forgotten to remember an infection that plagues innocence to merely render it a semblance of its provenance. A mere humble request: Teach me the technique of a madman's reverie. When to see a pandemic as elusive as one explosion. Make me one of cocaine, one whirl and Im a mushroom cloud. Point no point. Sensible, unmisted clarity.

And ha.

Entering

2009-06-28T23:34:00.000-07:00

How easily, evening has poured its warmth inside me, blurring the horizon between its edge and things besides the point. Clumsily engrossed in losing itself meadering through chaos. Desperately, seeking sensibility to attribute to itself.
There is a teacup.
Women come by staring condescendingly, walking past. Then stopping. Mercilesly exploiting cigarette stands for excuses. Standing still, breathing lightly.

"stop smiling, fool. I've seen better smiles on dead fish hacked to bits."

"Oh, well."

Hold

2009-06-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

One realizes loves arrival upon witnessing the innocence of a little boy, to finally submit and let the world resume in the fragrance of her hair.

Cardiac, you're under arrest.

2009-06-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

Slowly, becoming a victim
Of his own mind
Silently, gathering
The unexplored territory of happiness,
Unnerving the self
To the lows
Of a lover.

To Sal

2009-06-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

In between anticipation and
A distant whisper, sunk
Amidst gratitude
I must warn you.
I may keep you,
However,
I don't know about the happy.

On Keeping Still

2009-06-21T01:18:00.001-07:00

Say, you sat down, neither of us spoke; Out of mutual consent you handed me your cup of stirring dilemma in an estranged warm darkness. As unfortunate evidence dictates every once and often, you spoke-

'drink'

Cafe

2009-06-21T01:09:00.000-07:00

I build my small cafe tonight, something somewhere you'd perhaps stop by. Do no let me down.
I've seen you sloughing through the chilly September. Your gray sweater, the seams lose at its wrists. Telling me as you did every once and often-
The last I saw of you.
I'm sorry. Sorry, that I am.
That I have nothing to offer but this apathy, within your old deserted chamber of humming, whispering, happy dreams.

You came home, stretched your palm
Giving and not wanting,
It wasnt only you.

The whole of Paris danced, remained with us.
Resting in a silence that had everything to offer to us, but peace.

Slow

2009-06-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

Dead room, quiet.
Mother walks in with a wrapped eclair,
places it on my desk
and walks past.
Exits through the window,
out in the air.

Encounter

2009-06-15T01:05:00.001-07:00

“I see nothing but frivolity upon those stilettos, lady.”
“If that is what you think I do, flowers are anything but nonsense, sire. I may as well take my business elsewhere.”

Subliminally...

2009-06-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

..lets call it a red universe.

First

2009-06-10T02:47:00.000-07:00

You turned, swerving
with your delicate ankles,
Leaving me transfixed.
As you turned,
Pretending not to feel
Anything
At all.

...

Cotton curtains in the cafe,
Wrinkled and drooping
Against the raging afternoon
Keeping us company
In this warm, arid wilderness.

...

Wait,
I had to ask
If I could stop by again.

On Apathy

2009-05-28T01:30:00.000-07:00

Something came for me at the door
A while ago,
Another daydream on my doormat,
Like a child
Strangely orphaned.
I swore to then,
Lose my way,
In the silences of this country,
Where its inhabitants digress
To explore in solitude,
The relationship of a man
And his sentences.
Of a Woman,
With
Her raging prejudice.

Moon Spots.

2009-05-23T10:17:00.000-07:00

The last time, I saw you.
Sitting, scribbling sad
Rusted love poems.
Every evening in my balcony, darkened
By your own contempt.

Dying,
With time,
Disguised in angst,
Pervading into loneliness,
Sorrow and all those words
That have been concocted
For animals like yourself.

Disguised in screaming apathy,
Saving, collecting,
Mooching off my love,

Disguising
Existence.

...

Disguising existence,
As living.

...

I wonder if they'd write a book
On you,
If I ever asked them
Of holding within,
Opaque reality,
Of rockets that go up in the sky
Masquerading
As hope.

Stoning A Coconut

2009-05-19T05:41:00.000-07:00

Fighting. Struggling. Suffering. Never winning, never losing either. It's a placid existence. A dispassionate, impassive and pathetic state of anticipative brooding. Suppose one entirely obliterated their conscience, suppose we all did; would it ever facilitate an acheivement we perceive to be a idealistic, more or less, a utopian society? Hypothesising a structure before us, stoic, void of diversity, homogenous in its entirety leaving nobody anything to work towards. I doubt if things would appear to be any different. (What is apparent, anyway?)
Its like asking early man how he ever got to know that a coconut was a coconut and not a paperweight, how he knew that a shell protecting the fruit had to be cracked open before it was of any utility that we primarily view it as.
There are numerous such contradictions and complexities in the human mind. Curiosity perhaps is merely the precipitae of ridding oneself of frivolous dilemma. If you ask me, Id say that is the worst definition of curiosity that mankind has perhaps ever seen. But even so. Search for that infallible little grain of truth if you please. I couldnt care less.Man is, simply put, a desperate, hungry, fraud. I bet you global warming, he probably didnt even crack open the god forsaken coconut. He bore a stupid little hole from the top and made good use of his tools (Shove, shove, into the great white, and there's the fruit).
On my way home from school, I often find a shaggy, dusty haired, silver moustached (Wait, let me finish) gray bearded, monsterishly sweet looking beggar. He has one and only one blazer that protects him throughout the year, it's tattered and used beyond repair. What makes the solemn fact of his existence so exuberantly whimsical is that he reads the same newspaper on the same red light and the exact spot and time almost all days a week. (The days I fail to see him, I allow my mind to veer off topic and blame the afeem that is the life of the damned)

What a stoner.

I doubt if he even reads(For he reads it upside down, at times). However, I do wish he did. Early man, as he did, bore a hole in his coconut and fed himself for days. In your eyes he is a madman, in his own, he is sufficiently normal. What is happiness anyway?
Same news, different shell.

Ma

2009-05-09T05:24:00.001-07:00

A person came by,
A moment ago, to look
At my ailing mother.

There's an empty bed,
Laden with ma's cloth, so tired.
Books,
Carving a silhouette,
Of the river of anxiety and disdain.
Spare her, flowers and
Facetious cards, with fingerprints
On the back.
Touched once too often,
Glanced at every now and then,
Holding attention for three
And only three seconds,
Creating a freedom
Of sad possibilty,
One after the other.

Hiding.

2009-05-07T01:03:00.000-07:00

Moments when you sit theorising the mangled concept of haphazard emotions; making you softly and slowly realise that you've finally hit a wall. Keep talking on the other end of the phone, with your words chosen, well formed in a way they reek of thirst and that alone.

I listened, without understanding.

What good are words, and words swimming in the air. Whose provenance is the mind of an alluringly deceptive lassie like yourslf? What good is merely seeing you and not being able to sense a touch I have already over and over in my mind but not really, no.

"Let us do this."

I settled for it. Incoherence darted across this cerebrum as a deer gone wild, upon having lost his vison. Swift, free, anxious, unaware. I settled for it.

Infinitely bewildering(in its entirety) how each whim fell solid and it never was a task to have taken it. One simply did, mere obligation. In minimal easy terms: Love.

"..I could be imaginary?"

Moments, again, when I almost drew out my hand and pushed it against you. Then at a pace, right through. Human relationships have a way of decaying after enough time to have accomodated the demon of introspection. Why was one being tested? Why when it was known that transience was the only permanence? I'd wanted it almost an eternity, perhaps. Oblivious, that it lived somewhere. Unaware that the mould had finally set.

After I hung up, well, we both did; I walked through the wood. Careless enough, to have been living, cold enough to never even have tasted existence (For I was never bound by the sea. As long as 'they keep coming'. The salt in the air gives me a rash).
The earth seemed flat all the way till the bus stop, a style it acquired, a newness telling me that I wouldnt reach the point i started. Virtual space is continuous, though. Not particularly wise for a girl in my community for an almost empty bus to take on. The sun had begun to set. Swift journey. The pungent scent of vomit would have given the character of defecation a real run for the money. Maybe it was just me.

At best, so far, conclusions in my sad blimp of an existence have always sped towards the contrary, as if stuck, sadly enough, in an infallible pre-determined pattern. This time I somehow felt proud.

Strange, this hiding,
Ushering from the rock,
At the crescendo of a mountain,
Whispering,
As it always had been.

Good, one ran. Excellent, one hid. Perfect, one arrived.
After a sudden warped moment, the boy finally sat quiet today.

...Shazar

2009-04-28T03:21:00.000-07:00

So old, this one event,
Certain.
Stretched across flame
Like a piece of weary taffy.
So murky, this guilt,
It doesnt allow,
My desired shared of solitude,
To insist.
So very pathetic, this final ultimatum
Seeking a hue,
Multiplying
At the cost of something
As ambitious
As existence itself.

looks to side

2009-04-15T08:25:00.000-07:00

Look at me,
Fresh cut grass
From your meadow of neglect,
Oh look,
Another icycle hung
From your cave of dispassionate
And silent brooding.
Look, How you've tossed me
Away,
Like an old, tattered rag doll
Glistening,
In this brothel of rejection,
Where light has met irrelevance,
With time and eventuality.

Moving past

2009-04-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

Lost in the consolation,
Overwhelmed by the magnitude
Of mystery and emptiness.
To live, in a house of cards,
Wild trees, swaying in lament, in dreams,
Sleepless road, as one of you.
Winds beckoning, sixty kilometers,
And rain.

Cigarette in hand, revelling in colorful(well, seemigly) conversation on the phone, acknowledging a distant me somewhere in the dark with apprehension. Hard for me to make out what expression you had on your face, your eyes covered with the side swept hair. Funny, for a perilous moment I thought you were someone else.