Looking For You

In this tumultuous chatter
falling around me, leaves underfoot
crunching in the solid pain of chaos
the horizon, stretching from side to side -
and wide! - wide as a river in spate,
wide as my eyes
watching for you
silent, unnerved
by your fists, your mouth
the shadows you own
the various countries that are yours
in the timelessness of your body
I am lost.

I wake and I sleep
all in a dream, it seems
and somewhere
I have to begin to search
although
not for answers, answers
will come when it is time
Rilke smiles.
Irreverence, irrelevance
on the same hand.
Somewhere in this mess,
in the endless oceans of myself
I have to find the summer
to begin.
Only then
can I find the dried leaves, the snow
the reds and yellows
the autumns of leaving
and in all their glorious
chapters and smells,
the endings
that lead to endless doors.

Which one are you behind?
How could you expect me to find
you, in this tumultuous chatter.
In this horizon, this seasonless matter.

April 30 : Uncontained Endings

There's something about dying roses.

A sense of an ending
strangely poignant
in the crisp twisted petals
and the tangy scent of death.

And well, it's too cold,
the sky is too grey;
my tea is too hot,
my heart is out to bay.
And my arms are simply too goosebumped to hold you tight.

So wrap me up in some clingfilm
and leave me out to dry:
I'm a soaked out desert in a concrete maze
and today, I can't help but lie.
I lost all my maps and I lost all my guides, how can I possibly reach the light?

Floating in the empty sea
I watch the sun rise and I watch it set
the purples and reds surround me and fade
taking me with them to the land of the dead.

Marmalade stains on ragged blankets
line the lining of your heart.
Time seems to move in jerks and falls
sepia-tinted pictures mark the walls.

An abyss of beginnings, endings,
aftereffects (and mayhapses)
rises around the dying fire.
Someday we shall look back and smile
It'll happen, just give it a while.

My heart is full from this night
and my eyes are on you.
Let us walk away from this day
as uncontained as you.

Morality and humanity
sit by the ashes of our souls.
Mark My Words and In My Opinions
are tossed back and forth in rolls.

My coarse shirtsleeves fend off
burning smoulders from the fire.
But who'll be around to hold my hands
when I rest my shoulders in the pyre?

April 29 : City Boy.

From the thick-grilled windows
in the tall concrete buildings
caked with the dirt of hopelessness
you watch the streets, silent.
Four fifty-five. Tick tock.
An uncontained numbness is in your eyes,
lending a certain desperation to your lies.
But somewhere, your soul is alive.

Dappled remains of sunshine
on the rippling surface
green-clear.
The stones writhe under every surge
of white-foamed froth.
The valley closes in on you
and opens up her skies.
Silver ropes slam into the water
ploughing it up like
so much gunfire.
Wind crashes into your face
with all the gentleness of a scorned lover
and all the grace.
You gaze into the heavens
wet and still.

Shirt sticking to chest
clammy hands on solid ground
cold feet soaked into hiking shoes
hair plastered back, you smile.

With the sting of every raindrop
(like so many shards of glass)
you feel alive. Slowly cracks the precious farce
the layers and the lies peel off from sheer force
and you dissolve into the torrent of froth
that the river rages against the rocks. You dissolve
into the air and the thunder, into the mossy pine trees;
you are so much more than a City Boy.

What has a City? Neon lights.
Unpleasant smells and painful sights.
Grimy legless men with begging bowls
outside of fancy boutiques. Angry men.
So many crying children. Unhappy people
unsatisfied with their lives and their wives.
Empty eyed old woman with unreal smiles;
Black-suited shiny-booted clones with files.
A dull sort of heartache throbbing around the
skyscrapers and steeples and heavy court buildings.
A concrete maze leading deeper and deeper
into the heart of nothing. Aching.
And in the grey and the garish
you sometimes forget the reasons
you often clench your jaw and your fist
and tears escape your bottled heart
(brimming over in frustration)
but you cannot remember
(or perhaps you never knew).
And then nothing seems to be worth it,
nothing seems real at all.

But under the fiery gray heavens
under the stoic mountainsides
under the raindrops and the burning sunshine
on your soul, you will remember.
And once you live to be more than
a gray City Boy under grimy neon lights,
you might never forget again.

The precious thunder of the river rages on;
perhaps that's what happiness is made out of.

April 28 : Dreamcatchers And Wanderlust

Soft lines mark out
deep honey coloured eyes
in a hard smiling face.
Tinted glasses (the colour of the night)
perched upon beautiful little nose.
Shining self-consciously in a dull, lifeless crowd;
in her monochromed life, alarmingly bright.

Well-fitted starched clothes to work. Heels.
Businesslike, brisk. Confident and composed.
After all, a life to live: built up
so carefully from fragments
of cracked porcelain dreams
picked out and held against
the blinding lights of reality:
the commonplace ruins of practicality.
It hides well her inner romantic, in this melancholy city.
But beneath the shells and layers and memories
her soul is made of dreamcatchers and wanderlust.

Behind the dark-tinted sunglasses lie her secrets
(open sometimes to those who float above shallow waters,
open to herself some of the time against a solid, dependable life
mother, daughter, lover and wife)
a worldfull of chances and mayhaps
built up so carefully from a perfect life
a house of cards rising against the gleaming glass counters
as order falls, the tentative yearning for chaos.
Within the whirl of her embroidered Indian skirt
lie rugged mountains and infinite oceans
exotic-skinned people, deep purple sunsets,
skyscrapers and windbreakers and railwaystation tea
dizzy late-night drives on winding roads and
comfortable blankets against pine-smelling fireplaces:
after all
her soul is made of dreamcatchers and wanderlust.

She lives in the night sky, with the stars;
casting aside demons with a twist of her arm
she puts away fear gently on the windowsill, rain-stained.
Pale skin bruised, fat ego tight-lipped, integrity intact.
Smug about her maelstrom of adventure (sipping her chai
against the pounding pain in her skull, shining eyes
half tear-filled and half innocent eagerness)
she doesn't hold back. She lets it fly, her anger
and her pain and her endless sky-filled joy;
floating, she dissolves in herself
pointing at beautiful sight after sight
against this rose-tinted horizon
in her night-tinted glasses.
Her sorrow she holds quite tight to her chest
wrapped up in ancient insecurities
she is silent, gathering it all in a single
tightly clenched fist at the end of an arm
held quite open against the thundering wind
threatening to topple her over
today.

And she will think more and cry more
see more and sigh more
she will have more to regret
more to repress
but she will have lived more than anybody
in these narrow crowded streets and spaces
(against the tight-set faces, the long-healed traces).
With the risk and the fear, she pulls into her arms
all the joy of the world. Complete and untainted
(as it is only when it comes with a price
as it is just when it's undented and unpainted).
Joy that comes with the hunger for knowledge,
experience, good food and endless love.
Joy as gentle as it is proud,
as silent as it can be loud.
She smiles, balanced solidly upon shaky ground
floating simply on the ephemeral clouds:

after all
her soul is made of dreamcatchers and wanderlust.

April 27 : Fighting The Sky

Hammer-shaped thunderclouds
Preside singularly over rain dripped roads.
The pebbled black tar, soaked, holds tight to its chest
the living memory of a two-dimensional toad.
Pressed into the earth, with all the love of a passionate collector
driven over ferociously with all the pain-stained wheels
of a hundred steel monsters and garishly bright bicycles
soul squished into subservience under polished heels.

A hundred yards away
you lay
fighting the sky
with the might of an army
the size of a lie.

Grey roads lit up
with grimy neon lights
the city looks alive
(like a corpse, bright
under the shroud of the
prescient night and the
sinuous approaching dawn).
I sit, quiet, inured to your ragged breathing,
the sight of popping veins in your tightened fists
that inviolable look in your solipsistic eyes,
even your lurid words, acerbic to my ears.

And the maelstrom of the night
gathered her skirts about her, tight
grasping persistently in her slender fingers
the ephemeral skyline spread across an eternal horizon,
coming into focus with the first rays of light.

I watch over you as you writhe
I watch over as you cry.
I listen to your honest rants
And I listen as you lie.

Sometime when the still-damp roads
start filling up with dusty cars
zooming close and then further away
in the effulgent light of the early morning
you sigh.
And I pick you up in my weathered arms
silhouetted against the nebulous sky
I gently arrange your porcelain limbs
upon this tautly stretched car seat
your pristine (yet pallid) face looking up
your shaking hands unwilling to accept defeat.
I prise your stiffened fingers off my scarred arm
and slowly touch your face. The car groans and jerks,
and I have one hand upon the steering wheel
one upon your precious china-like cheek
your lashes, dampened into triangles of a grief
unknown to mankind, lower until you are asleep.
And we are ready to begin this journey again,
driving into the far horizon (of my eyes and your tortured soul).

April 26 : Art And The Artist

Raindrops trickle down
reality-tinted window panes
exhausted legs crumple
onto an unmade bed.

Bare walls. Bare arms.
Tendrils of black hair
reach the small of her back,
arched like a taut-stringed bow.

Slender fingers settle the pillows
Pull at a plug for the perfect light.
She arranges her long, shapely limbs
around her, her grey eyes ask
if she's doing it right.

And you can see every muscle
move precisely, supple,
an ocean beneath the velvet skin.
And his eyes sit silent, just taking it in.

Erect in his hand, he holds
his tool of the trade
(his beautiful red-brown paintbrush)
and he waits.
With his paints gathered around him
in an order decided upon years ago,
a grimy cup of water (stained green and deep).
He watches her
silently with an air of detached awe.

Her mouth seems to never be still,
His hands move like moths around light.
He sees not her - he sees through her
into the light of her soul
behind the long still lashes
of her sky-grey eyes.
Her collarbones, the hollows
and the hills of her curves.
Her shoulders, gracefully
forming those arms, light brown,
gentle down shining in the twilight.
The straight arc of her spine
placed strategically
between the beautiful indentations
in the small of her back.
He sees the mole on her hip.
The birthmark on her ankle,
shaped like a shard of
freshly broken glass
ragged.

The paints swirl around on the canvas,
gentle, the brush flows as if by itself.
His hand is the crevices
guiding the river of the brush
gushing down the topography that
is her body.

He isn't himself,
he doesn't need to see the bills in the broken bowl
in the dusty apartment rise up to the roof,
he doesn't need to work at the smelly restaurent
down by the dockside or wait for a phonecall
from a family that left. He is more than
the sum of his individual peculiarities (the way
he scratches his nose when he's uncomfortable
how he hunches when he walks, his torn pockets
that lose him pennies, that he will never sew
his light-furred cat and how he scrunches up his
face when he laughs, his shoebox of tear-stained letters
safe at the back of his closet), he can matter.
He is a catalyst, he will see and he will move,
his eyes (with his own special perception of the world and
her scar-stained forearms) and his hands (his beautiful hands)
are the only parts of him that mean anything. He is an Artist.

She isn't herself,
she can forget the cursed whitewashed walls of this
godforsaken studio and the magazines that rejected
her and the men that hounded her down till she relented
and slept with them in the salty mattresses and the thin
blankets, hard like stale bread, she can move beyond
the repressive childhood and the bad decisions to get out
of her town, to mean something to the world and fail
all over again, like her mother said she would.
She is more than all that. She is Art. And she
watches him with open mouth, in awe of his awe
of her. This is all she wanted when she asked them
to photograph her, not fame or money, she just
wanted to be Art in somebody's eyes for a while,
so that she could be Art in her own grey oceans.

She is still.
He pauses, looks at the foggy grey outside.
Sliced up by electric wires, into disorderly gashes
of rain-coloured sky, stretched out so far, so long
that the melting horizon looks painfully ephemeral.
He never wants to leave this room
she never wants to leave his sight.

April 25 : How & Why Mechanics For A Cynic

"He who has a why to live
can bear almost any how",
said Nietzshe, and I appreciate it
but somebody's whys to live are
so often, so inextricably
connected to their previous hows
that to assume otherwise is unfair.

Whys stand chances when there's
porcelain tea sets
to break in the acts of rebellion
(not when the single steel plate will only
bend, and the food might fall next time
you get a meal).
Hows stand around
in varied levels of undress,
watching the scenes,
callous. To dreams and whys.
Whys live in joy and cookie jars,
Hows hide in unexpected places.

And I have whys, a hundred whys
packed up in my closets and
inside my socks. And hows and I
don't have to meet much.
But I see it and it hurts.

Whys don't save the fallen girl
killed because she's beautiful
(I thought you weren't supposed to hate them,
isn't that how it went?), the man who
was shot in the head. Hows come quietly
to the doors of the weary
and slip them out as if they were never there.
Old people with dreams die. Young people
with lists and boxes of whys
get scarred and scared and stay still
for too long to live life like it's meant.
Babies starve. Mothers watch.
Helpless to the onslaught
of ever-growing hows.
"Raped and mutilated body has scars
which show definite sign of struggle
on her part - how brave"
See, for whys, it can often get too late.

April 24 : Luminous Insides

The clock ticks past
and hourglasses crack
it's that time of night again
I knew it would be back.

The moon sits quietly behind
the skyline of my personal
first floor horizon (antennas
and ugly buildings line it
for a straight 360 degrees).
The stars, shy, hide behind an
overwhelming blanket of
pollutants and the floating crashed hopes
of a monotonous, repetitive life in the city
(which is worse, I do believe).

Our house is warm,
Our nightsuits on.
The streetlights are stark
but the silk curtains drawn.
The lamps at strategic locations
light up our den with a dull yellow glow
(dreams aren't broken here, they're made,
every day is similar, in the happiest way).

I can see you sitting here
across from me, in
matching jammies and a beer.
We would talk about beautiful things
and I'd tell you about my day
(and my fears and insecurities
and regrets and guilt and)
we'd hold hands and arms and faces
and you'd make it all okay.

Your eyes shine bright
(but that's not the lamps,
its your luminous insides)
your smile is wide. (I wish
you were here, because the
night is too sacred to go on
without you and I'm not enough
I shall slink away from it and wait).

And why I don't write a poem about you
is that I'm afraid I could never do it right,
I could never do you justice.
Not you,
with the luminous insides
and fearlessness,
your matching jammies
and spontaniety.
You with the zest for life
as I could only hope for.

So I slink away from the night
till you return, and then bask
in your glow. The night might
accept me then.

April 23 : The Magician/ Beginnings

In a slow grey-white memory
at the back of my head
I see her.

Running up the stairs
on her slender little legs
(two steps at a time)
with a plump little friend beside
she smiled.

Her eyes were large
on her small face.
Her voice shrill
with the innocence
of childhood.

Words came easy to her
pencils lived happily
in her little-fingered hand
the world was big and scary
but she was a happy kid.

She ran down the stairs
(in the depressing gaudy colors
that murderous schoolteachers
paint the furniture to make it look
like they aren't doing a terrible job
of growing these kids up well)
and she framed it in her head.
The words. The sound of them.
Selecting, regarding, rejecting.

The poem was about a magician.
The rest is a blur.

Her parents hugged her and
told her she was wonderful
(and they went on doing that
all her life).
And she was proud too.
Of herself.
Which is the best kind of proud
that you ever can be.

A decade later
a lover of words
a fanatic like never before
as the hammer of that
painful peeve of every poet
(writer's block, they call it)
rested upon her head
(where are the words?
Why would they leave me
at a time like this? Am I all out?
Is it over, am I dead?)
she threw it back
and remembered.

And because she was
technically challenged
and couldn't convert that old file
to read it again
on this stupid computer
she clenched her fist and her jaw
and hated her life.

But reason prevailed
and what matters
matters.
Sometimes it's important
to go back to the basics.
Go cycling down memory lane
with child-proof pepper spray
and watch for a while.
The joy of beginnings.
Of things meant to last.
Of happy memories
from forever ago
and poetry written
with staunch large-eyed
love for the written word.

Post Script :
And magicians never fascinated me,
I couldn't write a poem on one if I tried
(I did try) so then sometimes we surprise ourselves,
don't we? (seven year old me, what is up with this?)

April 22 : Nighttime.

Falling through doors
flat long spaces
flying through large
incomprehensible places

I pause.

And in the dark
(it's the shroud of the nighttime
a sheen of velvet clad dreams
flecked with stars and celestial beings
like you) I shut my eyes.
And I stretch out to you
(the far, deep corners of myself)
and I float.

Blurs of trees pass by.
People blurs. Dog blurs.
In the daytime when I am still
my mind is still and calm
they will mean more. But
I let the blurs blur past me
in a desperate attempt
to seize something
which I lost long ago.
Streetlights zoom
in onto my soul.

And if I open my eyes
to the blinding darkness
perhaps I will see your eyes
(a sickly grey, flecked with sad stars)
and perhaps I won't.

And when the nights grow longer
beneath my blankets and my leg
fidgets incessantly but my eyes
are still, you will sleep.
When the piano keys
fall off with the sounds
of breaking hearts and
the moon swells up
with fattened sky and
gentle arms rocking it
to sleep in the gentle hammock
of the precious nighttime.

April 21 : You and I

The night was threatening
to tear right open
at the stretched out seams
at the end of that day.
You know.
Your arm across my shoulder
and my hand so inextricably
intertwined in yours
I thought I'd never get it free.

And I was glad of it.

I did get it free
and I did leave
eventually,
unceremoniously.
And you walked away quietly
after months of magic
and never seemed to look back.
You swept yourself away
into the ocean
and left me with ruins
of sandcastles and seashells
tangled seaweed in my salt-dried hair.

But that night you held me
as if I were precious
and behind your hundred lashes
deep in your flecked eyes
I could swear I saw the distant sea
for the first time, the sorrow.
And I'd broken your heart
a hundred times but never as much
as that day, I believed.
And we talked and we laughed
as if nothing was wrong and
the day passed in a single blink
(of eyelashes glued together
into tear-shaped triangles).

And we had regrets and
we made mistakes and
we stayed apart for far too long.
But when I hugged you for the last time
something broke (and yet, something was
mended beyond repair, deep inside).
And you wrote me things I always wanted
to hear (but I was too afraid to listen and
you too afraid to speak). And I wept
and I shuddered and I wiped my snotty nose
and prepared myself for a new life.

And you never asked again and
you never spoke again and you left
(although you didn't have to) the moment
I did. A ticket, far off, to somewhere else.
And you smiled at me distantly from behind
thick glass panes, and you went on with
things I never knew you needed. And
you grew.

Once,
you saved me from uncertain dark days
with your warm glow from afar.
You walked down long streets
and forgave me often, you
make me laugh at the smallest things
under this wide incomprehensible sky.
And now we're familiar strangers
in a strange sort of labyrinth
where thick-hedged walls
lead back to where we can't go
(I see you cross me but I must stay still,
your mind is suddenly a painful mystery)
and the sky gets darker
with every passing starless night.
Perhaps it's better to sit
silently behind you. I'd
hate to disturb your search,
your incomplete lamp-lit life
(but I can hear you breathe,
can't you hear me sigh?)

April 20 : Invincible

I am invincible
as long as I'm alive.
And those words are beautiful enough
to almost put an agonized mind to rest.
Because they are hopeful, they are crazy,
and they are infinitely true.

Who says you can't fly?
In the right moment
(Off the high-rise building, not yet
a bloody heap on the concrete tiles)
You are a bird. You are.
Afloat on the fluttering edges
of the wind, of the sky,
of a hundred quiet butterflies.

And cynicism seeps into the
crevices of a happy mind
(slowly, steadily, but surely)
an addictive drug and such a poison
to the mind of a self-proclaimed idealist.
Cynicism seeps into the well-meaning smiles
and the helping hands, every honest word
and the crazy, endlessly inconsistent world.

Wrapped up tightly in layers of
(judgmental, precocious) myself
I will never grow.
But who can afford to shed
one's shell when it's all we're sure of
(defenses built up
over days and months
decisive sub-conscious decisions
and angry tears),
who can be open to the world,
and all it will hand out,
thoughtlessly, selflessly,
maliciously?

And in my head
I will walk in forests and mountains
at midnight, I will swim naked
with the moon. In my head
I will drive to nowhere
and live there for a while.
Try new food. Love a lot.
Talk to strangers on buses,
decide on obsessive future crushes.
Call old lovers and kiss them smilingly,
Take new friends on ridiculous road trips.
Be unafraid and loud and
crazily, wildly, wonderfully happy
and sometimes sad, very sad.

But in reality,
I will be quiet. I will sleep a lot.
I will eat from menus decided years ago,
and never do anything new to my hair.
I will read in front of my bonfire
with Maya, my cat. Never travel
by public transport. Never learn
how to drive. Shy away from strangers
and hide away from friends. Be proud of
the same things I did ten years ago.
And I will be content, and satisfied
and I will be happy, and I will be sad
But I will survive. I will smile occasionally
at myself in the mirror, thinking
'I'm not doing so bad'.

And in my incapacitating fear,
in my cowardice,
I will be a sort of invincible.
Inside I will be vulnerable
(but my sleeves will be long
and my heart locked up
somewhere deep inside)
but outside, I will be
protected, I will be wise.
Well, I'll be invincible
(admittedly, a dull sort).

April 19 : Patchwork

Perhaps,
when I get up
(woozy from the headrush
and the strange fatigue of
being awake)
the world is different.
Puffy eyes and guileless smile
watch the sunlight prance about
(my hair my legs my dirty foot)
and the world seems as whole
as the sky is wide.

An exquisite creation
of a single polished piece of wood.
Flawless in the way
only sleepy eyes can see.

And perhaps, as the day goes on
building up on all the emotions and striations
and dissapointments and fluctuations and frustrations
that days are fundamentally made up of
the world changes somewhat.
As memories slide into your mind
refusing to be evanescent, ever
realizations and regrets never far behind
perhaps, as you plodder on respectably through today
finally reaching the time when
reasonably, you can call it a day
and fall headfirst into blankets that don't judge
by the time the stars are out and the moon is high
the world is quite different.

Through the crack of open window
you can see the deep blue sky
laced intimately with twinkling stars
and it isn't whole anymore
it's a virtual spiderweb of faults and cracks
a patchwork of fallen stars and dreams
woven together by a schizophrenic lifetime
and the world is strange
and half asleep, you're more awake
than ever you were.
Nothing is whole
(but nothing incomplete)
every misfit fits into the jigsaw
in a profound sort of way.
And craning your neck
you can almost see
the fluttering edges
of your patchworked life
closing in on you.
Gently.

April 18 : Tomorrows

Sleeping, eating, watching, learning.
Falling, laughing, waiting, hurting.
Sometimes
wanting
(things
like flying to the end
of where the earth meets the stars
or your eyes meet mine
and the stars all collapse
and letting go
you know
or strawberries and things)
sometimes wishing
(that today was longer
or tomorrow shorter,
little things
like matters of life and death
or big things
like milkshakes and smiles).

And today
this moment
is only mine
and that lends a certain freedom
to the cages in which I live
alone.
And today
this moment
is now alone
(this here)
and jumping into the sea
holding hands with you
is always the best thing to do.

It's a tough business
responsibility
(entailing trust and reliability
and patience and wisdom and love
and well, who the hell
knows what that is)
so we will think about that someday
when we grow up and
stuff.
But for today
let us cycle to the end of the world
(or the street)
let us read with hot chocolate in our hands.
Let us cuddle in warm blankets
(sing to me, please)
under the stars in a distant land.

And maybe I don't want to remember
the things that must be remembered.

We'll yawn in the afternoons
and yell at strangers on the street
we'll be silent when it's dark
and be lonely alone.
And because I'll have to trust you
(and be patient and wise)
because dependence is for those
who know themselves enough
to be faithful. That's why I'll
love you (like I love the moon,
from afar) but leave you
when the stars are out and
I'm tired of today.
Tomorrows,
I've learnt,
are better walked into alone.
Saner calmer bigger truer.

April 17 : Almost Rain

It might rain.
In the telltale shimmer of
dying flowers, the
petals on this polished floor
scratching against the wooden door.
Clanging bottles. City sounds.
In the bottom of my glass
(when almost nothing is left)
all I see is your resentment
(those eyes, oh, the knives)
Perhaps that's my fear, oh dear.

Monosyllabic and cynical
the line of conversation
hangs on a string so loose
that my words never seem
to reach your ears.
Or yours mine.

Thunder against the windows
fluttering leaves (and lives).
I'm afraid to say
what I really want to
(there will be no entanglement
this illusion will shatter
once taut, our strings will
break with a touch and that is why)
I am afraid.

The wind rushes at the walls
with the anger of a thousand horsemen
and I clench my fist
under the table
and I tighten the knot
of my legs till I can almost
feel nothing anymore
But I smile at you gently,
comfortingly. Because that
is what you deserve. My love.

Lightning
and then it's all so bright
blinding
for a second your eyes
for a second you seem to
understand
and the flash passes and
I might die
here in this booth with you
tonight.

The night is dark
my insides are dark
and I can feel the searing pain
in my eyeballs
only when I let my lids droop.
I might just collapse
into this night
(and then will
my dreams and ambitions
and fears and nightmares
all compress into a point
somewhere where I am
or was
and create a vortex
sucking everything
into the infinity of darkness
that my presence left behind?)

The glass panes rattle
with the effort of staying whole.
So do I
perhaps (hopefully), so do we.
Sitting unburnished
in the dark still night.

April 16 : Don't Worry

Don't worry,
we all live like that.
Slowly pulling out days
from the wad of chewing gum
that is our life.
Stretching them until
they are taut
and suddenly,
they break away
(quite suddenly)
into unknown tomorrows.

And patchworked timelines
of fuzzy histories
live behind us
into clean, new days.
When all of us has been
broken and ground
into the ground
all that will remain
will make you shudder
but keep you sane
in the sorry state
of sanity that the world endorses.

And glasses of water will be drunk
and many stale meals eaten.
Cross legged some will sit
but we will sit on our haunches.

And those who run as a way of life
will never be able to stand the paunches
of men who gave up (or tried and failed)
and decided to sit down.

So, dream.
In concrete jungles
and inane conversations
piss-stained walls of remorse
silent voices once hoarse
days and months and
lives gone by;
old drops of bloods
on sanitized sheets
and ashes on somebody's
mourning mantelpiece.
Grieve silently
for the sea,
if you can.
If you know how.

April 15 : This Porcelain Evening

The moon sits fatly

in a hundred puddles

in potholed roads and broken hearts.

The city feels old tonight,

It doesn't seem much will go right.

The seams of this moonful night

sit taut against the rest of our lives.

The sky is low above our heads

grey in a melancholy way.

Your soul sits quietly in a corner

further away from either me

or you

than I have seen it before.

Where are you?

You run through streets

dark and winding

evading me and

grinding

the sidewalk with

calloused feet,

through murky infinite streets.

Break this porcelain evening apart

all it will take is a nudge

or a look,

the wrong kind of words

or the right kind of book.

Don't be afraid,

touch it, the moon

tonight it is yours alone.

See through me

into your own infinity

I never wanted to bind you,

I never thought I could blind you,

All I wanted was to quietly

walk behind you.

Someday when you reach

the end of yourself

and begin the arduous journey

back home

know that I will be at your bedside

with your head in my lap

and your eyelids

(with the universe, or a single moonlit night

encased behind your dark, thick lashes)

will droop 

and I will catch your consciousness

in my loving arms

I will never let down your expansive soul

if ever you let it fall

unto me.

April 14 : Of a childhood

Of a blood-red bottlebrush tree,
of a sturdy little house,
of mangoes in the summer,
and the occasional mouse.

Of lemon shaped soaps
and smiling goodmornings,
of somedays and maybes and
tacky fairy wings.

Of footballs and markers
and silly bunny ears.
Of long car drives
and sometimes angry tears.

Of poetry in the night time
and dancing in the rain,
of long forgotten holidays,
and an old grandfathers cane.

Of dreamy eyes and films,
of books, salads and shoes,
of laughter and rugs and beer
and shorts and pants too loose.

Of grassless gardens all year,
of paints and ideas and poses.
Of happy children and schoolbags,
hugs and tangled hands, and roses.

Of a beautiful mother,
Strong and brave and wild.
A Good Man for a father,
Happy nostalgia of being a child.

April 13 : Oceans

I know it looks like I'm here,
dealing with my life.
But really,
I'm far away
I'm quite alone
in a distant blue bay.

My toes are blue
(but my feet are beautiful)
my hair flutters gently
(so silky, so long)
around my body
(so perfect in the blue).

The water is still
as I float. Empty.
There is beauty
somewhere here
I have known it before
seen the reefs and the fish
the smooth rocks
I have seen the underwater
in all it's glory and color
I have known the weeds
counted the leaves
exotic and majestic
the starfish and the shells
to the great grey whales
the purple sunsets
with wine-haired mermaids
and white backed gulls
I have known the beauties.

But today
beauty perhaps
(for once)
will not suffice.

Today I want no color
(just the endless blue of wavering dreams)
no fish (no life at all), no rocks.
I want only fluttering sand below me
and everywhere else, undulating blue
(today, I'd say, I don't even want you).
I will float
(half-conscious and numb)
I will float
(a flying rag-doll, so mum)
I will float
in the oceans
of my sad finite soul
(I try so hard to put away
the mountains of my
infinite wild heart
for today, just for today).

And today I don't want to find anything
in this sea (not you and not me),
today I perhaps simply want
to lose myself for a little while
in the gentle rocking rhythm
of this serene unending ocean.
Perhaps I need it.

April 12 : Happy nights

Slowly and steadily we shall descend
into delirium. It seems to be more
a sense of falling than of rising.
The night begins, arbitrarily
at some point in twilight.
The lamps are lit,
the glasses full.
Suitably dressed, we are,
bedraggled and harried,
the days are long.
And on sofas which see
the days of our lives move
steadily, steadily on;
we now sit and cuddle
the pillows whose fabrics
we handpicked once.
The lighting is yellow,
the music is set.
And so we settle into
known patterns
of nights that never
seem to happen to
anyone but us.
Happy nights, full
(like our hearts)
of laughter and talking.
Of beautiful music.
Eating and drinking,
we talk. Smiling, we sigh.
And it's 3 am but it's too early
(always too early) to ever get
away from this room. If you crane
your neck you can see the stars
(although the stars are really in our eyes).

And someday we will look back, so happily,
and a part of us will sit in the twilight. And
we could not possibly have chosen this
(most of us), but here it is. And if we had
a choice, we would choose us. And we
know, we know just where it hurts, we know
where to prick with maximum efficiency. We know
how to drive each other up the wall, but we know.
We trust. We fight, but we (always, always will,
not dramatically - but just because it's how it is)
we stay. And we stay happy, because we've figured it out.
And the nights move on, and perhaps there will be days
unhappy and nights so long they never end,
but as long as it lasts, this time, let it fill us (the edges
of our infinite souls) and complete us,
if only
for the future (and the past) in which we might
have to remain incomplete.

April 11 : No Man Is An Island

I always thought I would sail across
frozen oceans alone
(when I needed to).
And the stars were mine alone
(when the night smelled of
dreams and fresh rain),
and somedays with fairy lights
could not be shared with the world
because the world could not
Understand.

I laughed with people and smiled
a lot, and I loved thoughtlessly
and I believed in goodness -
but the sky was mine to keep.
That, I would not share with
stupid people. I would share
conversations and sitcoms,
sarcasm and some books,
but secret notebooks of
thick paper where I stuck
butterflies and rainbows
and rose petals and poetry
that was mine alone to love.

But No Man Is An Island.

And so maybe I can live with
the world and also
keep it at bay,
but when she came,
smiling and loving
the things I loved as mine
(mine), she came to stay.
And we found some and we
built some (and we made it up
inside our cloudy heads)
and the ship we will sit in
is yellow and flowered
(since No Man Is An Island
and thus we need to sail across
frozen oceans) and not alone.

And dried palash flowers
tangled in sea-dried hair
we will cross all them oceans
brave adventurers that we are
(together), on a ship made only
of joy and smiles, and wisdom
(that came through pain) and
love. And we will eat fresh
strawberries and we will smell
like rainbows, in purple sunsets
we will sail through life (only
our flower-tangled hair will
fly in the still oceans and
the seagulls will know us
from afar).

April 10 : But in the real world

We are not free.
Not at all, not even
a little bit. We cannot be.
Inside of us, perhaps
we have the possibility of being free
(and then, only as free as we let ourselves be)
but in the real world.

I talk of constrictions set by society
and boundries and limitations and
the place we are born in, I talk
of death and natural disaster, but
more than anything
I talk of the crisp green pieces
of paper and how freedom
(of walking and talking and
living and doing what you want
because you love it)
does not exist.

You can eat what you want
(if you can afford it)
and you can go wherever
(as long as it's within
your budget, ladies and gents)
and you can read and write
and you listen to what music you like
and you can have just as comfortable
a blanket as you wish you to sleep in
and you can have the freedom, too,
to explore your potential and learn
and fill up the spaces of what you can be
and achieve and give back to the world,
yes, you are free to do this
(oh wait a minute there).

And you can tell me that
I'm not as rich as Him or Her
but that doesn't stop me from
doing what I want and love and
will achieve because of determination.
And I agree. I don't want to work for money.
Money doesn't make you happy, I like
to think. Idealism. Philosophy. Morals.

But what of he who drinks
from a trickle of dirty water
what of her who can live only
by living in a cage and selling
all that she has apart from herself
- her body - and what of
her children, condemned,
who were born in a brothel
(and for what fault of their own)
and have no food for the day
and what of the father whose baby
died in his shriveled arms (curled up
right next to his broken heart)
and of the man who had to throw
his mother (how much he loved her)
out of his one-roomed house so
his children could live to see
a better day
what of he who freezes to death
wrapped in a blanket only
of frostbite and frozen tears
(while somewhere we sleep
with air conditioners on so high
so we can cuddle in thick velvet blankets
in the peak of summer, warmth)
what of them?

Maybe inside of them they are free
(I hope with all my heart that they are)
but in the real world.

April 9 : Of Cages And Obnoxious Paint

And aren't we always confined
to cages (that we ourselves
have made, struggled to reach
and then locked ourselves in,
with the finality of passing
from a world to the next -
a gentle way of saying death)
and don't we always rot
in places which aren't really
where we wanted to be -
but are, still, somewhere
which in our ambition we
mistake as better than nowhere
(although nowhere specific might
really actually in some sense mean
everywhere, in all it's majesty)?

And I struggled to open that
bright yellow tube of paint
and I pulled and I teared up
I bit and yelled and scratched
I tried to cut it open with a blade
and twisted it up till it was a gory
mess (although it still looked beautiful
to me, lover of paint) and halfway
through this I checked the label
and it wasn't primary lemon yellow
(that was the color I knew I wanted)
it was really yellow ochre, and the outside
was simply a lie, inside it was a dirty
mustard, nowhere near a yellow at all
but still I fought, unwilling to accept
defeat (ah, human nature, is it not?)
and thoughtfully I let my face arrange
itself into the sorrow of not getting
what I wanted (although it wasn't true).

And what is it about us that makes us this way
fighting for things which we really (deep inside
and sometimes outside too) know aren't what
we need or even want or will accept at all?

And I've shut myself up in cages and
I struggle, sometimes, to remain in them
and why do I want myself to be constrained
when in the end I want to be somewhere
else (not here, perhaps not at all), and
inside I really know it yet still I let
myself bleed. And for what?

April 8 : Inside My Head (And Out)

Unable to start something new

before I wipe out the old.

I can live in a dump

(inside my head

and out)

but I must clean up

before I can move.

I must empty every drawer

and sift through the piles

of debris that gathered 

over years of neglect

(inside my head 

and out).

I must wipe it clean

to let new dust settle.

I must throw some -

vehemently crumple it up

stuff it in the trashcan and

never ever let it out -

and pack away the rest

must put away precious memories

wrapped up in old cloth

in shoeboxes in bottom drawers

(inside my head

and out).

I leave behind 

some of it, and

recreate some as I look back

in the drawers (of life).

Build up new piles

of papers and rocks and

pencils and socks

and broken remnants of

computer parts and glasses

and notes that meant something

but are now illegible 

and bills and books

and keychains (and smiles

and tears and hugs and

music and feelings

and smells and sounds

and moments and days

and walks and despair

and perfect kisses and

phone calls and 3 am 

conversations into the 

heart of forever and memories

all memories.)

So precious - so painful.

Every day they hurt -
the loss of them, perhaps,

but every day they 

make me smile - and

yet I would live them 

the crumpled chits and

chocolate wrappers and

conversations and smiles

flower petals that meant 

something (perhaps everything)

when I slid them in this drawer

(in this pocket? in this life?).

I would live them all again

and I would be my crazy self

loving posterity 

and I would save them all,

I would pile them all up

if only to clean them out.

April 7 : Ode To A Girl (I Love)

Her long brown curls dance around her laughing face.

She smiles, and I see
the whole world in her eyes.
Her eyes hold the stars themselves.
Shining. Full. Complete. The world.
Stardusted and rainbowsprinkled,
a suncoloured world if there ever was one.

She's beautiful in a million ways -
but the most beautiful (more beautiful
than her smile, than her wrinkly hands,
more beautiful than her eyes with the stars)
is her mind. The most beautiful is her joy.

And she knows not how she spreads
life (and love, too, and joy), and she lives.
She's sad sometimes, low, but she doesn't know
- doesn't know how the light within her (the
light, shining with the power of a thousand stars,
- all tucked up in her eyes, of course), how the
light within her is bright, too bright
to be dimmed by a day (or a year
or a lifetime, or more).

We shall live a lifetime (or
so I hope) of happy walks
through purple sunsets, with chilly
breezes on long sandy beaches, and
mountain streams bubbling along
through mossy rocks and caverns
(and we shall bubble along, I hope,
our own mossy paths and turns).
And we will (I know) look to the sky
and keep the sun for ourselves - we
will float along in the clouds, higher
than everyone else. We will
(we will always) go back to being happy,
for the world (and today, and tomorrow)
is too beautiful not to be (forever, happy).

And I hope I can tell her someday
(through long winding grassy paths
of forevers and sunsmiles) how she
helped me along (silly me, little me)
and reminded me (just now it's been
so little, the time, but it will be, someday
a long time since I met her, and then)
that the important things in life are always
(always always) the little ones, that
being alone is better than being unhappy,
that the sky and the trees will love us still
(children of the rainbows that we are)
when all else (all else) fails us.
And I hope someday (far into the future,
perhaps, hopefully only, when we're old and
cuddle with cats and flower-patterned blankets)
if she's ever down so low she can't
pick herself up, I hope I can remind her too.
Someday.

April 6 : Himalayan Trek 2012

The stars shone
(hundreds of them,
thousands) through
the thick blanket of
darkness (darker
than evil, darker
than darkness herself)
cast over the night.
They pierced through
the 8 pm blackness
with ease (so many,
oh, every inch of space
was taken up by the
shining points of light)
and danced overhead,
in constellations we
marked out in our journals
(and constellations we
will never see) and they
were silent. The fire blazed,
higher, higher into the sky,
crackling and sparking,
throwing light into faces.

Faces that shone
with the simple joy
of being at that moment
then. Faces that grinned
and faces that laughed.
Still faces, with the
overwhelming silence
of the night time and the
silhouettes of the mountains
against the infinite sky.
We sang, swaying
in the light of that night,
we spoke, shining
with the heat of the fire
and the cold. We hugged,
we giggled, we held hands,
in the face of beauty
so powerful - we loved
each other, and the sky.
And we lay on the ground
(but really, we lay
in the sky) and we pointed
out sights more amazing
than the last, and we
were silenced.

What is it about people
and wanting to save memories,
hold them and keep them close
to your chest so they never escape
(except sometimes to your dreams)?
I was in that moment, swaying
to the music of two dozen voices
I love, I saw those faces lit
by the light of that night, and
I loved them ever more. My
hands were warm and my back
was numb, and my heart
was so very full. The mountains
laughed with us that night, grand
and tall. The sky loved with us.
The stars knew us and liked us
the better for it, and I kept that
moment (with the heat and the cold
and the love and the songs) in my
little cove of memories, deep within,
because it was too precious to lose,
now or ever. The stars knew it too.

April 5 : Dusky Rose

Her shoulders shone in the
elegant evening sitting-room light.
Her fingers were slender and still.
Her dress was the color of a dusky rose,
and her eyes were the grey of the sky.

They all saw her glide gracefully along
and pick out strawberries from large blue bowls.
She was quiet unless spoken to, and always
always said the right things. Her legs were long,
her knees not brown, her smile a perfect curve.

Her mind was beautiful, they said, trying
(unsuccessfully) to not talk about her arms.
Her hair was the color of the starless night
(the stars were all tucked up in her sight -
her beautiful, sky-grey eyes). Together,
all, they admired and envied her. Looked.

Her collarbones were splendid, majestic;
her cheekbones high and lovely. Her skin
was the brown of sleek, supple, waxed wood;
her mind, they said, was divine. Someday
she would be old; her wrinkles would stretch her
and command her fragility until the wood melted
into leather and the shine wore off. Someday.

Until then, she clasped her second glass
of pink-bubbled champagne, her feet poised
upon the floor (almost ready to perform).
Until then, she smiled absently at them,
Quiet in her blanket of many-petaled beauty.
Her eyes (sky-grey, with all the stars) slid
around the grand room. Never stopping.

Her mind was underwater, with the
colorful fish and the deafening silence
and the smooth rocks and drifting thoughts.
Her slender fingers (upon her starched dress)
were still. Collarbones out. Feet poised.

April 4 : The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul

The clock ticks. The sun sits fatly in the still blue sky.

And I clutch my cup
swaying to the music
my mind meandering
through lanes and
untrimmed hedges
of sepia-toned memories
that I put away safely once
in shoeboxes and envelopes and drawers.

And there's nothing to do and
nowhere to be. There's no one
I want to say these things to,
                                least of all me.

So I pull the curtains on the world
and I pull the curtains on myself.
Leaving me in a dark, dark room
with nobody at all, nobody to be.

The music is slow and the music
is sad. The lamps are bright but
the light is still. Who knows
when the sun set? Who knows
when it will rise again?
My lamps are bright
and my light is still.

Happy memories,
of laughter and smiles
and being close, of
moments so precious
my glasses misted over
and I wanted to save it
(and I did but only in my head)
- they too fade. They too change.
Like roses, fat and red once,
now pale and limp and sad.

Now there's simply joy...
joy you had and left behind
and joy you would have had
but don't. Joy in his face and
joy in her face (unmirrored,
of course, in yours). Joy
that will never be yours
and joy that went it's own way
in the labyrinth of untrimmed hedges
and grey cement buildings, paths
that lead nowhere (and thus
lead everywhere - everywhere
that you will never be or know).

The clock ticks. The sun is gone.
It is that ambiguous time
of no light and no dark.
The curtains are thick
but I walk out of the room.
The sky is yours (clear
and still and painful), but
the sky is mine. I want to be
(and achieve and live) so much
but all I am is you. And all you
can ever hope to be
(and achieve and live)
                             am I.

April 3 : Chai with the Sky

The quiet happiness of the Night Time.

The secret smiles I smile
to the moon. The secret things
I say to it.

The way the skyline of hills, soft
(lit by a thousand lightbulbs
blinking confusedly at you
lit by a million hopes
and dreams and fears
of awake peoples)
is dark, darker even
than the dark night sky
(lit by the light of trillions of stars
and the shadows of planets and
things we will never ever know
or the infinite nothingness of the cosmos).

The silence of the moment
complete and perfect
in the white roadside flowers.
Pleasant conversation,
laughter, wonder,
joy at being alive.

Cars come. Bright lights
against the bright insides of our eyes.
Why are other people awake?
This is Our time of night.

An infinite number of constellations
sit in the sky. Bright balls of fire
(and hope and heat and hydrogen)
dot the dark, deep ocean
Above. Somewhere
a man with a white beard smiles
at what he made (or
thinks he did).
The trees are happy too.
And the stars smile
and the moon smiles
and I smile back
(secretly).

We drove. And when we found chai
and woke up the sleeping man
and I burnt my tongue and almost
dropped the glass and we talked
about how I scared people

I wasn't having chai with you.
I wasn't having chai with him.
Really, I was having my private Tea Party
with the forces of the universes.
I was having Chai with the Sky.
From my warm spot in the car.
But she knew, wise sky that She was.
She had tea with me too.
In Her own wise ways.

And we drove on.

April 2 : Monster

Dark and quiet, it sits.
It gives no reasons, no excuses.
And I always like to know
reasons. And excuses.
So I tell it not to exist.

Monsters do not listen, though,
Monsters live on. So I say
it doesn't exist if
I don't want it to.
Vainly presuming
that I have any control
over what happens inside of me.

I don't, of course.

And I'm afraid.
It's a silly little monster.
An unimportant insecurity.
That guides me and constricts me
and knows me and binds me.

I can't kill it and I can't ignore it,
I can't live with it and
(because, of course,
all it is is I, made up
of my fears and
hatreds and lies
and all the darknesses
of me that won't be
suppressed)
I can't live without it.

So, ever so often
I am reduced to hiding
from myself.
Hoping to win over
this thing
that is nothing
but myself.

And what if
(oh god I hope not)
it is a big part of me?
What if I think I am all sunshine
with some dark insides, but
really
all I am is dark insides, monstrous
with a sprinkle of sunshine on the edges?
What then?

April 1 : A Good Time

Beginnings.
It's a good time
for beginnings.

For somedays and forevers,
wrapped up in blankets.
For ifs and buts and nevers
to be quietly put away.

For typewriters and fairy lights,
pretty music - ah, all this joy.
For forgetting tear-tinted sad nights
and perhapses and marmalade.

Because Now is the Tomorrow that we muttered about
(although that
was in a far-off purple yesterday),
And who ever knows when it will come again?

So curl up (for now) under the stars
in your private clandestine sky.
Among the sunsmelling springtime flowers,
I'd say it's a good time for home.

It seems to be a good time for sleep,
and a good time for forgettingness
(let it, upon you, gently creep).
I'd say it's a good time to write.

Time

Time unfolds herself,


                            That precocious wide-eyed

                                                             wild child

                                                                       of the Universe.



She is an infinite


paradoxical sea


of Patience.


So still as she crashes


from rock to shore -


harsh, a hurricane on the horizon.






She is flawless, unflinching,


She is true.


Infinite in her silence,


in her ever-forgiving violence.


An Eternal Fool.


As innocent as she is cruel.






The sands of time


slip through her unassuming fingers.


The sense of falling


around her swells and lingers.






She treads gently,


For the soles of her delicate feet


step over the grains of times past.


Bruised by unfulfilled dreams,


Marked by a multitude of memories vast.






Unlike you, she is comfortable in your skin.


She finds all your fears, sees through every sin.


She knows you watch her warily;


She knows you, and she grins.

Restless Thoughts

I shall fold up my soul


And hand it to you,


For I trust you to take it


And teach me to be true.






And when is it ever time, really?


When is it okay to leave?


When is there love ever to spare?


When is it fair to believe?






That endless blue sky struggles,


Through the grey it breaks away.


But will my particular infinity


Be what you need today?






And the sun rests behind


The silhouettes dark;


Brilliantly bright, self-consciously white,


Impatient for darkness to alight.


And the birds fly around


The silhouettes dark;


Swiftly along, their hearts still strong,


Many a broken wing in the throng.






And the beast was always


Within. And it's shape was always


Yours. And all I am is you,


And all your suffering is true.