here

where I am now, it is fall. I am feeling full with so many lives, old and new, jostling against each other. there is too much to make sense of, and no time to do it in -- time wants different things from me, wants me to make and read and move swiftly, slicing through the viscous air;

                                   I cannot do it though, I plan and plan but do not know where the time goes, I inch viscously through air and arrive at the same places again, try to gather moments and maple leaves, count the colours the trees are exploding in (carmine, blood blush, ochre, terracotta, lime, chartreuse, gold), get work done in time even though it is work that gets done outside of time.

I am happy to be here. slowly I will move the right way. now that poems are real work, it is hard to share them here for the quick slick sharing of the internet. I want to hold on now to the poems, stay with them, comb them and sand them, share them with all the gentle people around who read them kindly, and work on them until they shine (in blood blush, gold).

                                   here are some words if you are here for the words. some days I will end up writing here, sharing some strange pale fragment of my life that fits nowhere else. if you are somewhere, across a sea, you can hear me. hold me kindly. I am trying to learn and be 

Half-here

I am only half-here, arms straining with the wait for newness that is on it's way but not yet here, arriving, arriving. It is this aching wait that is worth it, once one is thrown into newness there is only the living to do, no straining no aching for a slick life to arrive. This summer was the strangest transit time; but I feel as if I have been in transit for the last year and a half, with the applications and then the knowledge of change that is imminent. I will be glad for this transit to be over.

B-pa died. I am trying to write about it because I do not know what else to do. Other minutes, I am working on various art things with a zeal that eluded me for many months. Perhaps it is desperation. But at least what felt like numbness for so many months is now shifting into feeling, feeling knifing into my eyes or dribbling down my neck, but feeling nonetheless: feeling that bubbles into words or images in my hands, that I can craft or let breathe or vomit out. It still comes as a shock sometimes, the deep way in which living is connected to making for me. It comes easy as air. I must write, I must draw, I must make, and in turn it saves me from the hardest days, from the long deserts and ravines of the restless mind. I am thankful.

note if you wanna be a writer and a reader

if you wanna be a writer or a reader you're gonna have to figure out how to stay still. how to breathe in real deep and zoom the heck in, to sit for hours in narrow light or wide light and do only that one thing at a time, to not fucking scroll, to not want to run away.

yes there is space for the aleatory for the angled birds for the pipe of light for the cinnamon smell. but there is no space for a head that cannot stay, that wants to pull so much marrow out of every moment that it must inhabit many at once. no. stay here with the thing even if it is hard. know that the world wants you to glance away quickly, to be flitting, to bang against glass and then the ground, to forget all. but you want to be a moth instead, the madness and the flaming desire of the moth, to know there is limited time but we will flutter at the light with all our might. stay here in this moment if it is silly. stretch your legs even if it hurts. don't smoke and laugh every evening into a slick night. it is a good thing to work. there can be love and peace and pause and promise all within the work. don't always take what comes easy - be kind to the self, kinder than all the world, love the self hard and wildly and through all the difficult days, but PUSH push gently push quietly push warmly keep pushing you are working and living and loving well but there is always a long way to go. be slow. watch a lot. read so you lose what keeps you sturdy. when you are unsturdied and tender-boned, write.  

spring

all over, the bougainvilleas are in bloom. bursting open like white clouds, or like innards, the most vivid pink. I wonder if the bougainvilleas in my house are blooming, even though b-ma is dead and b-pa is sick and everything seems different.

Venomous

Sometimes when K.

across from me in the dark

happens to ask, or even

before she does, or if not,

I wonder how faithful 

my memory is 

to the taut silver edges of

what really happened, if

the scorpion I saw once

on that windowsill, stilled,

really gleamed at the sting

with a vicious drop of

venom: did I see it

at all?

She tells me of snakes

in the field under darkened stalks, 

and I think to tell her of 

the creature that slithered past 

just this morning, 

a glimmer of light at my feet 

that vanished at sight. 

It left the faintest taste of 

green on my eye. She waits,

but I do not say, convinced

all at once of a bond I could not break

between that silver-green baby snake

and my curious, wondering gaze.

monsoon haikus

I sit alone in

dark library innards while

outside, monsoon light.

The slugs last night were

inching along in silver;

now, only dark stains

on the college road.

The air is full to bursting.

It must rain again.

wild loves

I keep slipping postcards and words

into the notebook I will never send you.

It is a thick purple, and has leaves hidden

inside the paper. I trace over them listlessly.

It was not as though I called you daily

when you were around. Somehow knowing

that you existed, in a kurta and bindi, wild hair

falling over your wild smile, was enough.

Love is never enough, that’s the thing.

I keep trying to slip you into boxes

you don’t understand and don’t need.

Your words are dim stars in my eyes.

I miss you wildly, but not desperately.

I do not need to call. You still exist, if

even farther than before. It should be 

enough. Love should be enough.

Dancing girl

My mother has taken to dancing

I mean she still stands straight
as a pole at evening parties
and full of poise at nightclubs

But recently in daily life
she has been wild

In the morning when I tell her
she looks like a vision
she does a little jig to celebrate

She must jump when she wears
a jumpsuit, of course

I read the words of another poet
(dance is a body’s refusal
to die) and think of her
over & over

She wants to see all the world
she pirouettes in bathroom chappals

When we drove through Scotland
she stopped the car where she liked
she couldn’t get enough of the sky
at Skye, it was too blue, too much
to hold in her body
She whirled like a dervish on the highway

And then at the Great Wall of China, she
couldn’t help herself, her joy spilled out
all over the countryside
She held out her arms till they
reached sun and giggled till she was red

Danced like the first girl at Mohenjodaro
toppled over onto ancient cobblestones

Reached home with two bruises
like continents on her knee
She is unfazed.

on shame

It comes easy
to me, for some reason,
that white hot ribbon
in the belly. A mistake,
or an ignored wave, or
an awkward gesture left
unfinished. But recently
I have been trying
to let go as easy —
let the cringe travel
up my spine, let my
abdomen clench itself,
face tighten in pained
expression, but then
let go, breathe in quick
and then breathe out
real slow, careful to expel
CO2 and also all
the other bad things,
the pellets of self-hate
that gather in the gut,
the fear that freezes,
the shame that burns
everything for a small
silly reason. Breathe it
out, remove it from
this body. Make space
for new mistakes.
Nobody was watching
anyway.

the dream

trying hard to work on so many things right now. and working mostly, but finding it so hard to focus sometimes, just flitting from thing to thing, finding myself in that terrible trap of scrolling scrolling scrolling

but stay          stay with it           follow the thought through

i am going back and working on the poetry, trying to shine its edges, empty its extra corners, arrange it well for a guest in the house, for all the new guests in the wordhouse of my poetry that i am hoping for. but it is hard, and sometimes i go back and worry that i am emptying the rooms of character, that i have polished too much and i do not feel a fire in the walls anymore. i am worrying the words coming out of my mouth these days are bare and suave but have no flame, no passion in the belly. i do not want to arrange words for the sake of it, for a music that does not char my ears, does not worry me hard and make me shiver in the nape of the neck.

i feel that poetry lives on the edge of experience; that you find it if you inhabit the margins of the moment. as if you are there and not there, very hard. either living right in the heart of what is happening to you/what you are doing/what exists, or watching it from a far distance, feeling things only through a membrane, a glass sheet. i balance between the two. i feel the moment most viscerally, in the red and slick of the body, in the bonewhite and long muscle of the body. but i also sometimes float in a white nothing, watching the body as if from afar, thinking slow floating thoughts. there is the moment, and then the words of it, the small rocks guarding the edges of what happened. i want to gather these rocks.

i worry that i become quiet in academia. i know what to do with sentences so they sound an easy ripple. (i want to learn how to make the sentences sound like a thunder rush and wild cavernous bellow sometimes too). i feel like i hide myself in a cupboard before i venture out to write an essay. i call back for advice often, but from the dark and narrow space. i want to write loudly, full of my self(s). i want to write my essays loudly, i want to write my poems inhabiting them with all my slim body, my angles of light and sound, my fierce feelingness.

to do this, i must be less afraid of the words, of the rules, of Knowledge and its gatekeepers. i know some, and i will never know most. i must trust my work (n.w.). i must write hard and big and then hold on to my wordrocks, must fight for them. i must watch the world; i must defend the windows' right to look at passersby (mahmoud darwish). i must believe that i can do something with words, that i am not trite irrelevant callous bland unimportant. i know some things about words. how, when they are put together, can change things, can make a thing taste or smell or feel different. how they are read on the page but swiftly they make their way into the body, how they are read in the flesh layers under skin, on the light edges of skin. words talk straight to the body. the body lives in a large aquarium of language, its colourful weeds swaying like stalks in the field. the body breathes and floats in language. the white nothing the mind visits is a white nothing made of words. i want to make these words do things for me. i want to do things to people armed just with my wordrocks: i do not mean thwacking them over the head with them, but rather laying them down and covering them with the wordrocks, gently, smooth edges and all. running a stream through the wordrocks, making somebody experience the ripples and white foam of my words on their body.

i hope i can find in me the courage. to try hard enough that failing would slice right through my skin, would be a far and wide pain. to give this work enough of myself that i feel myself writing from my throat, my spine, my skin. i hope i am true enough to this that i do not scroll scroll scroll or find myself lost, small, flitting. i must stay with the thoughts. i must put all of myself here.