my name

It is strange but
suddenly
I cannot imagine
you saying my name:
it would taste so odd
but bitingly precious

in your mouth.

I have spent an afternoon
drenched in poetry and longing
but still I cannot trust my words
the way I trust my fingers
on your skin.

still thinking

"I don't know when I will ever come to terms with the fact that articulation is always a 'squandering', that I am giving away more of my self with every word than I can ever get back, balance out."

sentimental explanations

I spend hours on the silver sliver of my macbook: various and irrelevant musings. I edit old posts. Read about printmaking courses that I will never do. Put on my headphones and lick my lips, wondering what it is that my soul is asking for. Eventually when I put on Damien Rice -- after so many long months -- I smile to myself. There is something to be said for sentimentality, after all.

I sometimes wish I wasn't so easily distracted. I console myself because it's not the I at fault -- it's the whole jingbang of capitalist consumerist culture that wants us to flick our eyes from screen to screen, open-mouthed, and never think deep enough to attack the things that need to be attacked. This, then, is a revolution: to stay with my thoughts, to travel deep inside these musings, and create. To read a book from cover to gorgeous cover. To study all the wildly exciting things that I'm studying. 

I have a thousand misgivings about keeping a blog. There is too much, too much I worry about when it comes to the wild forest of the internet, of social media, of easy communication. Some communication cannot be easy. Yet as I scroll down Shinji Moon's blog, or Bhanu Kapil's blog, I am so fucking thankful that these women chose to put up random fragments of their life up on the cruel and vast interwebs for me to read, consume, devour, as it were. The final poetic product is important and often dazzling, but I often want all of it, all of the incomplete and aching words that go into making it before it is made, all the writing that must take place before the writing. Sometimes Shinji's final poem will touch a stutter in my chest, but her vast thoughts and politics pull out that stutter, touch it, force me to travel down the lines of my body until I can unearth it myself. If I can touch somebody in that way someday -- it will be enough. So I write, I reorder, I put up a fragmented biography, a broken archeology of my life. And to be honest, I create temples of posterity whether I am on this blog or off it. All the diaries, all the fragments, all the Evernote notes -- they are all evidence that I am fearful, that I want proof of my existence, that I want to create something I can hold in my hands, or reach back to with a click, and know that it will be safe, like a seed in deep soil. A dead seed, I understand: what is living about the seed is already running in my veins through this conversation; what blossoms in me someday will be a result of the thoughts I think now. So why this, why the obsessive, almost neurotic desire to document, to prove, to hide away? Why this desire for stasis where there can only be river?

What I tell myself today, smilingly, is that we're all looking for ways to stay sane, reasons to hold on and make sense of this vast existence. I could say it subtly or crudely, but here it is. If I could not, did not question, then I would have other reasons to go on -- I could give society all the keys it wanted and play my role as a Good Woman -- I could live day to day because of all the duties and obligations that piled on my back like secret creatures, and I could marry, have children, worry about them. But that's silly, that's not what life would be like today -- I could, I will, I must, have a career! An ambition! I will study, I will get a job, I might choose to marry a lovely man and have children. Worry about them. Watch my body rot away until one day -- poof! -- like a leaf on the wind it will soar beyond my reach. Life is so long, and so hard, and so often it seems so unbearably bare. What keeps you sane? What makes you wake up every day and do all the things you're supposed to? What makes sure you don't curl up into a foetal position and weep yourself to sleep every night? I don't care if it's crude, if it isn't the right philosophical question to be asking, if existentialism is passe -- fuck that, fuck academic sophistication, these are the words that lick my spine and whisper to me with fangs when I am unable to leave the bed. I don't know the big reasons and I am often afraid to touch the big questions -- I don't know how to say them right, how to hold them gently, politely -- and so this is how I stay sane. This here, the temples I build from corners of my life where the lazy afternoon sun burns all edges gold and bronze and a plastic bag flutters in the wind like a poem, where the landscapes of my mind are sometimes solid mountain, and sometimes the uncertain sea. It isn't much (but what is?). I survive (even thrive, sometimes). 

So here I am, as usual, laying out my excuses and escape planes, flyaway bits of paper that hide under my thighs, that I hold down under desperate palms. The words are all I have, most of the time, and I'd always like to do better by them. I hope this means something, I hope I can create some meaning. I am reminded of the things I don't respect enough because they are often the things that matter, that force me to look up, that render me unable to hide. My body is an ocean that I need to tend to, that will wear out and snarl me into acquiescence if I don't pay attention -- listen, hear my stomach growling right this second... I am unable to curl out the twist in my spine, unable to ease out the forest of knots in my aching shoulders. I need to be better to my brown skin and tangled muscles. My mind is a mess, is always a mess, is sometimes bearable, is often interesting.

Meanwhile I remember an old conversation with my wise-and-crazy cousin where he told me -- in all seriousness -- in the middle of an increasingly cynical and nihilistic conversation about politics, relationships, life -- that the only thing that can hold out against the world, that can stay pure, that can change something -- is love. At least that's how I remember this conversation. In my smoky haze I was amused, sceptical. Perhaps he meant it in a more serious and philosophical sense -- right now I am not serious or philosophical. I am sentimental. And the one part of my life I cannot touch with the rough fingers of angst or the bruises of hopelessness is that -- that word, too oversaid by humanity -- the bubble of wholeness I feel erupt in my chest when my body is laid against yours on a bed stained by afternoon light, the laughter over familiar things in which we've built a home for ourselves, a haven. You've punctured my solitude, as Maggie Nelson said, and I've never felt more hopeful about it. I try to work harder, live bigger, feel less drained and bent over under the weight of the world. There is much to be joyful about, much to read, many fragmented conversations to have with so many people. So many sunsets to chase with my silly sentimentality, my disregard for truth, my chest aflame with hope for this life...

moments from mcloedganj

o mother moonface

Trying

I try so hard to search for poetry in all the corners of dreary afternoons, and my head fills with questions like a brimming bowl, too much, too much, too much, all I have are the words and they are too little, too little. Suddenly everything that was compartmentalised comes together in a crashing and toppling, all the separate boxes of desire and fear and anxiety and theory and literature and ache, all of it is here and none of it is here -- the too-much-ness and vacancy of it all -- and I am left both wailing on the ground and also here, on my chair, perfectly still. Well, if you want to know, here are the questions: where does it begin, and where does it end -- this crazy romance with the words -- this wild hope that the words will fix it all, will pin the monsters into little black alphabets and leave me free -- what do I do with this hope, do I believe in it, can I afford not to? Why must my sanity depend on putting everything in a box, on understanding understanding understanding, unravelling knowledge that I can verbalise and somehow control, organise according to date and time and colour? The knowledge of chaos has not permeated through my thick skull -- or perhaps it has, and that is where all the fear stems from? I try to live my life like an exquisite, thick, work of art, layered with detail and craft -- so much to dig through, so much to understand and unravel -- the notebooks, the fragments, the empty boxes, the facebook posts, the pictures, the sequins, the bookmarks and forgotten tickets. I am my own archeologist, memoirist, observer, devotee, biographer -- I am my biggest project. I do this, I live like this, and then I have the gall to ask -- why, why am I so afraid of death?

Afternoon sun lights up fragments of my room, of the corridor, of the grass, in bronze shadows and gold lining -- it is what keeps me hopeful even now, at the onset of winter, when everything seems to be falling apart. The internet confuses me, excites me, leaves me bleeding -- is there anybody out there, listening? Should there be? I write and I write and I write, I craft my life out of my flesh and of the scraps around me -- I hide some of these stories in the folds of my clothes, and I roll some into fragile glass bottles and toss them into this sea, with hardly a second look for the aches that shattered against shadow-black rocks. I scroll and scroll, read something beautiful in the strange forest of the internet, and sigh. I listen to Iqbal Bano and Noor Jahan sing Faiz and I try not to cry, try to hold the vast gaping holes in my chest shut, try to survive it all.