No flowers for the dead

GazaMassacresDronesU.S.AShootingsDelhigang-rapeBalochistan(Bangladesh?)ShahzebShot
What is WRONG with us?
This year ends in 2 days.
Does that even mean anything?
Does this blogpost help? Does it do anything?
Where does it all go? Where is this going?
Look at us.
Law was stocked in the market and subsidized. Then banned.
Society is the prostitute you married to destroy her face with acid.
(How does one sleep tonight?)
Do
What?

Irrational.

If perfect sense came with the explanations for everything that happens to us, to the best of us, we would all of us write our lives out page by page, purging it of all skeletons, all guilt, all anger and every regret.  It is the questions that swoop, curl and move in concentric circles inside our head, the ones which keep us lying sleepless all night that knead our sense of contentment, coerce rest into near elusiveness and make space for anger. We stare into empty spaces, look through glaring windows, stop amid sentences and twist knuckles. We search for an explanation. We demand familiarity. In it's most basic, intricate workings, the mere human mind is taught to assume that familiarity is knowledge; that only if an idea rings true to the common nature of what we have known so far, which is assumed to be everything, only if it molds and slips easily into this frame that has been constructed over the years, it maybe allowed the privilege of recognition, and into existence.
And if in one of these seconds and minutes that tick by relentlessly, we manage to throw our hands out, wrap our fingers around and clasp an explanation tightly that refuses to fit into this shape, we reject it. An explanation now exists but does it make sense? It doesn't fit. The questions that ensnared our senses are now in the company of rejection and refusal. The noose tightens. Spend twenty more sleepless nights and silent days.The demand grows and sweeps in the first of its guests - desperation
 Some how, we feel that like all building blocks that we put together as indifferent children, our thoughts owe us the logic and pattern of those toys too. We do find answers, but when we fail to find all sense in them, we hold onto the questions like a stubborn, ignorant child.
While we involve into this unforgiving pattern, we also fail to realise that time really does wait for no one. There comes a time when this shapeless, homeless notion grows out into a monster and grows bigger than the man who sheltered it in the first place. For every question we cling on to, every explanation we try shake into sense, we lose the time to step ahead and the opportunity to look further, to attempt and stretch this frame wider. Hollow, dark crescents beneath the eyes, scaly hands, disheveled strands of hair. We begin to resemble the monster.
To stop life in its shoes, we tie ourselves down to the mercy of explanations.  All the while, the sand in every hourglass continues to pour down in submission of gravity, the world walks us by and nothing stops unless we stop looking into empty spaces.  In seeking answers, some of us, unconsciously mine deep into Anxiety. Unlike the outside, all halts within us until that one day, we hear the alarm trill beside our pillow; the shrill call that carries us back to a time of movement, a time with life. Until we consider stepping outside our own authority, our own cruel limits and consider for one moment to simply walk the shore, count every wave that kisses our feet and forget to demand. 

"Mirror, mirror ...for I have sinned again."

Many a sentence nowadays begins with Ifs. 

But beyond these conditions we place, and the words we choose to express them is the extempore present. The exact spot of light we're standing under; all that is, as it is now. It needs to be embraced for a certain sanity, for a future. Not rejoiced and celebrated. Simply accepted and learnt. But rarely do we ever learn. 

She steps in and steps out. Dabbles a foot in. Only a little. A stir. To err. It matures into sin.
Sin again. Err as a human. Sin as a woman and sooner or later he joins you as a man and begins to be, behind the curtains. Sorry, pretends to be. Before veils and walls, it is never more than meets the eye.

 For every sin, she steps back, reprimands herself, talks to herself, gazes into the mirror, explains & repeats one sentence ten times too many and stares back-- but there is an enjoyment in the enactment, the display of a role, the sheer entertainment. Oh, to entertain and to please! Pleasure! Pleasures beyond the juices that dribbled down her chin from the crisp apples she dug her teeth into, every season. Fresh! Ripe! Right off her mother's farm.
[Looking Glass!] She smears on a wine red, smacks her lips, pouts to be Monroe and feels like the woman who becomes one while playing all that is necessary to feel like one.

[Lights...] She struts in this time, and he bows down before her. [and camera!] He calls the Name, he claims he worships her, every part of her, every moment that they relish together. To cut them out like shapes out of coarse pages of his diary, preserve them and live in them forever to be trapped in them, is his sole, deep desire. 

[Mirror, mirror...] But god forbid it should come true! Only a performance... to be true. A thought sends waves down their spines.

[Exeunt] She rubs it all off memory. An undoing, with every stroke of the make-up remover she presses, wipes across her face, just as unsuited and sinless as he returns to the one he has planned to spend his entire life with. 

Definitions.

You want to define your life? Go ahead. Use one word. Use one sentence. Add another. Add several.
Go ahead, construct a definition. Write lines. Write paragraphs. But don't limit yourself.
Definitions help. They add coherence; they add essence. But if I believe in sticking to a little bit of direction, I believe equally in discretion. I believe in perspective. A prism was always so much interesting to inspect than measuring flat triangular surfaces.
So you've peopled this puzzle board with your solution. You've completed the picture? Shake it up. Put it together again.
Look around you. See one angle. Then tilt your head a little to the side and look at another. Then look at the many other. Nothing in life should come one except a kind of human being. Keep looking. Keep definitions but not one. Keep many.
Go with what you believe in. Stand for what you know but keep revising what you know.
There is always one perfect word but even this word has synonyms.
Who wants to spend their life in a house with one window?
The day you decide to lock yourself up in such a one, you have come full circle. From here, know that you need only travel this circular path to come back exactly to the spot you started from.
I read once somewhere, "Strive for progress; not perfection."
And then I wondered if perfection exists.

Once I Will

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple" -Jack Kerouac

Once, there was silence. The next time I tried using my voice. For the last time, I threw in a few words. But they weren't responsible because they couldn't carry the strength of all the emotions that queued up, brimming on my forehead. Eloquence stood precariously. When my words couldn't deliver every instinct that the questions sparked within my fingers, it scattered into echoes which bounced off our bedroom windows and walls. I'm blaming it on the nerves. They stood up in my throat and shook their head in disappointment, blocking the way for clarity. It would've made it a lot easier for you to comprehend otherwise.
Now I'm chalking up a plan. It's supposed to be grand. I've built a brand new shelf. I'm sifting my words with powdered sugar. When they fall through doubt and manage their way past these tunnels of approval I'll dust off the specks of immaturity and inarticulacy. They will be polished silver and brushed with simplicity. The shelf will hold all of them one on top of another, close and clean, in symmetrical piles. One day, when days and nights will suffice, my collection will stand tall, immaculate and complete. It will be enough and there for you. I will leave it for you to pick out the ones that suit you. When you put them together, you will finally know and everything will be as it was supposed to be, as we would have liked to be. They will tell you why I stayed back for you and eventually couldn't anymore. The fog will slowly lift itself off your apprehensions and you will see that it was never fear that held us from spending the rest of this life as one but it was our time together that left us fearless of the time to come.
Set up, ornamented, my words will tell you the tale plain. I will let you know all you couldn't hear when you left the room and shut the door behind you. They will finally make you understand what I failed to in all this time. They will help you understand that intention was not enough to give us what we wanted and that it's hardly ever about what we want. It will be perfectly clear to you that what we let go of was made to be left behind. It was meant to be left unfinished so that we could part ways and yet live. Some day all of this won't be limited to a glance or a social gesture. We won't just pass one another in the street. My words will hold all the loyalty and promise time always demanded too much of. They will take us past guilt or remorse, or nostalgia or need. One day it will be only my words and they will belong to you. They will explain to you that it was meant to be; be just as it was when we stepped away and gifted half of ourselves to memory.

Rant: Uncategorized

Enough of my vague attempts at prose. I've been trying to cook something up with what goes around me these days but today I'll just be and give an excerpt of what goes around in my head. Simplistic. Not very developed. So here you go, here's a rant for you:
Of late... Oh well no. That's a very drab way to start with this. Once more!

I don't like people who don't like people. I mean I've had quite enough of that. Fine! I understand, you don't enjoy the awkward silences, the self-doubt but that's us! Rarely any of us appreciate a dinner date seated beside an unfamiliar face. It takes a little stir up there and in here to really start a conversation and familiarize yourself with a stranger. I think that's a lot of fun. Honestly! And that's coming from a person who's very near to attaining the official status of a recluse nowadays. But yes, meeting strangers is healthy! If you want me to be cheaply analogical about this I'd say let's compare it to exercise. Those lazy bones and muscles kill you for the first two nights but a little consistency and practice and you don't want to give it up 2 weeks later! 

It doesn't take a genius to pass a snide remark. Moronic, hard-to-please behaviour is not witty and neither does brutal honesty make anyone smile. I am often 'accused' of being too "nice" or too "naive". That makes me think if I really am and then I wonder why. Not a long while ago, a friend lightheartedly hinted demanding a little bit of love. Mostly all of us would come up with something witty, mean-spirited, punny, something that would give her the exact opposite of what she obviously demands. I didn't feel like doing it. I gave her exactly what she wanted as a reply. I declared my immeasurable love to her, let her in on the fact that she's the best I know. Nothing that pompous Persian cat didn't already know. Am I really that nice? Do I let people walk all over me? Do I make myself sickly sweet? I thought about this. Maybe I am actually that nice. Maybe I am genuinely like that. I don't want to be too sure but maybe it's the fact that things have never come easy to me. At mostly all times of my life, I have had the exact opposite of what I wished for. And I feel that irony all too seriously. Maybe I take myself too seriously. Of course, everyone has to work for what they want. I really believe that things never come easily to anyone. Don't mistake me for a self-centered one but it's only that when I weigh out my life so far, I only keep myself, my deeds and misdeeds on the scale. And perhaps I enjoy filling the gaps. But I don't allow anyone to walk over me. Giving in to obvious demands, giving in to feelings, requests, jokes and making a hilarious spectacle of myself; I like that, you know. I knew it but in speaking terms, I've finally figured out the difference between being affectionate and trampling over yourself to do something you don't feel happy about. I don't offer people fake charms. 

Somewhere, I think I enjoy compensating for the hard, earnest work I have done (both willing and unwillingly) by sparing others of it. Something somewhere grinds in too solidly. I detest moaning over a mistake that cannot be undone. I'd like to believe I compensate for everything I did and didn't, did receive and did not by offering it to the people around me on a tray of gold. A beautifully decorated tray at that too. (Aesthetics matter!) I prefer displaying my unconditional love all too openly even when I think someone's life doesn't lack any. I want to try. I want to make a person laugh unreservedly with that embarrassing snort, eat with the chomp-chomp noise, slurp down Coke to the last sip from that ugly disposable bottle without feeling they're being judged over a lot of hooey we call etiquette, fall asleep with a smile and feel that they're never alone just because of something I said. Maybe I just feed my ego but, well, I love being selfish like that!

When my mind wanders to the dark corners, I often try to prod and question what is that one crime I'd commit and never be able to forgive myself for. My answer after nineteen years, now, is to intentionally make someone, anyone, go through any one of the unpleasant experiences I have ever had.
Yes, I'll never be able to purge myself of that guilt. Quite sure.
On another note, I'm perfectly smitten with this Barbra Streisand song! I wish men were like songs. But more about that later.

Set-me-down mirrors

You know yourself
and lose control
You call yourself old.
Tear out another sheet
from an imperfect diary,
and drive conversations
with mirrors and window reflections.
Suited and tied,
shake hands, nod, appreciate.
Your third furtive glance,
clutch empty glasses,
shift in your shoes and twist one arm around another
struggling
to be a man you never were.
If reflection were
not a trick of the eye
I would have believed you.
Some of us tremble while we speak
but you refuse to look at me;
and I'll never know
if it's another reflection you see in me.

Tomorrow.

It's been 5 years. Yes, we've stuck with each other for exactly that amount of time. My two girls have held my hand and put up with hale and storm, through summer and winter, just when I thought the day would never arrive again.
 Turn left or right, I had two shoulders to lay my head on.  And tomorrow, one of them is getting engaged. She's officially stamping the bond she has developed over one year with a man who makes her sift her words like gold from the dust. She's declaring her love to the world and the three of us feel we've never felt completer in each other's existence.
I've seen that look. That gleam which shoots across her eye within seconds, leaving everyone around her with a sprinkle of that out-of-this-universe dust; that trust. I've seen that look and I know she's sure which is what leaves me as happy as she is.
We always crack up over an absurd joke together. We've always had this thing. Synchronized. In Harmony. Now we smile together when she does. Tomorrow, we might shed a tear or two together too.
Sometimes I think we would traverse galaxies together if we were challenged to. At other times I think we're a little like whisky.

Half-a-measure.

How do you hate too much? Or even love too much? How does one feel anything too much, or even too little? Don't you simply hate, detest, loathe with all the negativity you can muster? And when you love, how can you love too little or too much?
Do you measure it in cups? Or do you use spoons? And if you do, how much do you take? Only half a cup? Two spoonfuls?
Maybe you tailor and stitch the seams until it just fits. 3 inches deep hate. 7.5 metres long love.
Do you not purely love? Untaintedly. Or do you weigh your feelings, like a chemist, with precise milligrams of O2 in your lungs as you breathe-in her scent? Or like the head-chef, checking your love for the right amount of salt and your hate with the exact seasoning of vinaigrette that stores like Poison-Blue in a dubious bottle that's labeled, 'Drink Me'.
Don't you love with all your heart? Every energy! Don't you run with the breeze? Stride across the streets?Don't you let your feet sink into the earth? Don't you want to swim along and leave every limb, every bone, every thought awash with one single current? Not too little or too much. Just one word. Pure hate or 100% love. Every capacity; fill every void, scotch-taping the gaps. Sans shades. Sans loopholes. Without the synonyms and complications, the entanglements and doubts. Without fear. All faith or none. Not one and a half. One whole. Only one. Make an exception right now and tell me the lone truth. Don't you want to?

Only the beginning

Trust. No, I am not talking about lovers breaking apart. 
Trust would be one of the many faces you show off everyday. It has been with you since the day you were born. It is the belief that you wake up with every morning. It is bred by your bedside every night. The belief that helps you rise up and the conviction that makes you step out. In fact, it is you. 
She laboured with this belief everyday for this belief in her. She laboured relentlessly to engrave it in this relationship just like her name was engraved in golden letters on the pen you gifted to her when she was 12.
She worked the hardest. She toughened herself up. But if this belief is born and bred at home, and you have failed to offer it to her in the warm spaces she always returns to, she has not failed along with you. 
There is a particular sort of liberation in the realization that the ones you have tried hardest to convince were never worth the hard work; the realization that the hard work was only you all along, the work that has made you strong enough to let go and set out to conquer the world on your own two feet.
The golden engraving has become hazier over the years. The rusty air is eating away the glossy letters. If she hasn't convinced you enough in 19 years, she might not be able to convince you in the next 19 at all.  Somewhere during all those years, I think she engraved those letters on her spirit. This time, it holds permanence, even with the leaden air. Above all this mist and beyond these man-made doubts, she learned to trust herself. Today and tonight, she feels, she need not wait 19 years longer. She need not wait at all. She is almost ready to let you go. Ready to leave. She is almost herself.

...

Dull eyes. Hunched backs. Swinging half-doors.
Stunted thoughts and a half-awake self.
The thin coat of cheap paint is peeling itself off of these half-funded walls. A lot buzzes and hovers around with the intent of cloudless clouds over our heads. Little goes around without us knowing as we wait for something unconsciously. Amidst whispers and knotted fingers, creating out of thin air, spinning unknowingly. Waiting till all comes around again. Waiting to rest. Waiting to wake up again.

Unscripted.

Words. Words and some more words. Meaningful, rarely. Always careless. We're thrifty with our sentences, our clauses. Some die and others pass away. They swoop past our ears and fly off our tongues without mostly meaning to mean. Steamy cups of coffee brim with the pungency of grounded, powdered beliefs while the heat carries our words across to one another. And names. We share the same names but never do I wonder if we share the same consequences of that pool of alphabets. Wouldn't it be so much better if we never had to use words to explain how and what we feel as our grays grow grayer and reds renege to maroons; without every thought trying to adjust its tone to the hues of these coffee-shop walls every second to second? If you just understood, with one contemplating glance and simply knew. Only knowledge... no words. But I guess the thoughts you read are a product of the words you choose to glue together.
Now we stare, blocking out the sounds of swinging doors, creaking floors and the hubbub that are words that we choose not to own, ones which never meant anything to us. We continue to look and search for explanations. But before you settle back into the armours I think I will open my mouth to speak, erasing fragments which will never fit into the human scale of words. I think I will use words again.

I think you are selfish. Very selfish. Enjoyment is banned. Of all sorts! Be happy. STAY happy. Take that frown off. It's so selfish of you to always put up that frown. Stubborn! I think I neglected you. You don't realise what happiness is! Stop binging. No wonder your new pair of jeans doesn't fit you anymore. You're still a child. I cannot leave you alone. It's too risky. I trust you. I don't trust you. I don't trust this world either. It's always a trial with you. You seem reserved that way. I don't mean to be rude but it's so surprising to hear your opinion on this. Oh, you didn't know? She's a feminist! I hate feminists. You smoke? WOW. I don't believe how much you've changed! But I think you just succumbed to peer pressure. You know what I mean? It's called the "labelling effect". We studied about it in Socio class. I don't mean it in a bad way but I don't think you really know what you're doing. They never let you decide for yourself. So controlling! They might never let you go. It's all so controlled. Do they sniff your clothes for drugs? Do they go through your school bag for cigarettes? I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to say it like that. But you know what I mean, don't you? I trust you (Laughter). Now that we're done with school, will your parents find a rich boy and have you married? How cute! You're all that I used to be five years ago. Oh, don't worry, you'll get there eventually. Get married. Get a boyfriend. Sex sounds like fun. Run away. I think you'll do well as an architect. Why don't you become an architect? Will they allow you to study law? Yeah, you should run away. I can't imagine how claustrophobic it must be for you! I understand. Really? You want to act? Will you be able to? Don't be angry yaar. Anger is a waste of time. But obviously you don't like rain! You haven't travelled in public buses in the heat. Who would with all the air-conditioned cars and classrooms? I didn't mean to be offen- ...really? You're taking this pretty well. I thought you'd just burst out with anger like you always do. But, oh well! You're growing up! You're Muslim? No, it just sounds a little ridiculous. I mean, I don't believe in God. Prayer is stupid. You believe in God? You don't look like the kind who would. You don't even say Bismillah before you eat. I just hope life doesn't turn out ugly for you because that is what happens to people who don't pray. You haven't been through half of the shit I have. You're so lucky! You seriously don't know what life is about. I just worry about how innocent you still are. Hopefully, life won't make you pay. I hope you don't mind. You know what I mean, don't you? 

This Man.

He has power. Such that is within him. Within his nervous clenched fists and curled feet that he presses against the ground. It leaps up. It flames! But he doesn't see. He feels. He presses his fingers to his forehead to feel the temperature rise and sweat trickle down his throbbing temples. The air-tight warmth of this home seems to wrap this man tight now. He is more than any person inside this realm could deign or dare to be and yet he does not realise; he is a King. He makes his own realm; he spins and unspins webs of unspoken sentences and he weaves his dreams into this delicate of mesh of imagination that no one else may perceive.
He stands alone. He feels the pressure on his lungs, on his toes but he does not see he stands strong. He stands and he endures. He has overcome this air-tightness, which consumed enough of his life to make it his occupation. He feels loss but he does not see it was never anything to occupy enough. And he must realise there need not be any struggle anymore. He sees every thread of this world entangled, sparred and sifted but does he not realise the craft, the skill with which imagination has embroidered courage on this blanket? Rock-steady. Not soft. If you hold his hand and feel the calloused skin on his palms, you will know the ripple of dream, those currents of strength swimming in these hard-earned, long-spent years of thirty.
Brother, I will undo your fist, grasp your hand and not let it be held and unheld once more. Don't you see defeat is not an idea in your creation? Never in these years have I seen anyone rise and rise again. Now that you have risen again, I can see gravity bow down and surrender beneath your feet. Epics will crumble within bookshelves in revision of faith when a man in your name is written. The carpet of man's dreams is not fit to carry the stamp of your tread. Blessed seas will welcome you and skies will clear beyond the Seventh Heaven, parting in your grace. Do you not see, you have only to summon?  Let the truth be known. Turn around and look in the mirror, dear brother. You will see humanity reborn.

An Alternate Beat.

The Sun is relentless. Merciless. And we're never short of energy shortage. It's a typically Monday, hot afternoon. The heat seeps in from these tall windows. I don't think the Sun cares.
It maybe a while before I decide to step into shade. The cool, the light, the ease. The fan blows, bursts across my face and for a moment I consider if it only throws off the heat from these baked ceilings overhead.
I think of water, of seas, of splashes and foams and I think journeys. I hear engines whistle and spot a ship sailing ahead, beginning it's smooth journey. Nonetheless, something tells me this ship does not sail. It steers. And there need be determination, energy to steer or this vessel may totter. Lifeless vessels totter and capsize if no navigator is aboard. Because vessels do not belong to the waves. They were made to traverse. Because sometimes the sea is only a matter of distance, a charted course, and not an energy in itself. It may bear life itself but may hearken death for another. Because sometimes, one life is not enough to move adrift with another just as sometimes, love is not enough to have us travel distances together.
 The heat this afternoon is too overpowering. The windows let in too much of the sun and there's something about this house that blocks the passage of its return.
I think of blue beaches and I can only picture crashing surfaces.
But I try to contemplate the depth, the median, where there is ocean and there's ocean.

Here.

I'm sitting here in my room with this mug of tea in my hand. It's my second. It's odd because I usually don't have more than one in a day. My day doesn't start without it either. I am literally incapable of all sorts of movement until I have had my doze of chai for the day. But it's odd because I've been sitting here in his same position for nearly two hours now. There is no movement. There actually hasn't been much in a while. I think I gulped down that second mug-full in hopes that there might be some today.
No stirs, no turns of a page. The twist of a pen, an ankle, sole of the foot seems lost. I see my reading lamp there, lying on my table in all its order and serenity. Only I cannot reach out and switch the light on.
But what have I done? Only nineteen and nothing yet.
We love, lose, give up, stand up, strive, win and sometimes lose again. There is So Much to be done. So Much to be Read, Heard, Spoken and Unspoken. So many leaps to be risked and a few friends left behind. Why then are these days like those nauseating merry-go-rounds I have always run away from? The inescapable kind. Cotton-candied-pink grins and sharp, sugar-coated, mechanical screeches of joy. Clownish smiles, mocking with electronic, dizzying tunes of the merry-go-round. Whereto from here? How? And I realize I am living my dread; I am living a sense of completion. The point of rest is the death of all thought. There is no rest, thankfully and unfortunately. Rounds. I come back to the same point I start off from every morning, without turning corners. I laugh too. You can die of fake happiness.
I read poetry in times like these, find briefly worded comforts but there seems to be no rhythm in the verses that I find. All of a sudden, I don't see, a rhyme in all that I have composed in these two years.
There are thoughts and there are questions. There were replies too. But there was no poetic justice in them. There was no poetry in the hearts. Only hearts broken and illusions restricted to delusional verses. Only in written. Never in Life.


There is only one window in this room. I think I'll attempt to open a book again.

Letters of Verse - Part II

You were mine, only till twenty-five

but the world swept you away.

In rolled the charcoal skies, to have you abandon that sparkling ray

I recognized, but cupped these ears

only to muffle the roar

The wind now whispers their plan:

the overcast has decided to draw away

to let the yearning sun have its way

I spot the shy streaks of golden too

curving a grin in the once graying realm.

I know and I always did.

I'm glad that Spring is imminent

though the knowledge wrings this obstinacy,

(Forever is nothing more than a word)

Forever this spring will never be.

Though this Universe never promised balance,

It's still an unbalanced trade.

This scheme was not hard to unravel;

I know and I always did

but acceptance, now, dodges this terrain.

Impulse to Scribbler

Spin spin, entwine entangle

(sway selfishly away)

wheel, reel.

Then twist, turn and roll out the carpet

while all that was invested, divests.

Bore the tips into the knits and grits,

twirl and flex these bones 

through the coarse, prickly fibers

(cuts, cuts, cuts!)

till reams unravel and expose under

the streams, beams and gleams

A trap! Scratch...snap! Catch, catch, catch!

Then plunge, pitch, sink

into heaving oceans of sighs.

Letters of Verse - Part I

It's a void, this inactivity.

Spent.

The sap of satisfaction drains from your limbs.

Each finger falls numb and yet the cup is held

for illusion to be drunken, 

for a sip of merry when all mirth has sunken.

Velvets of the dark wrap away at this solace,

enfold their arms and embrace this form so limp.

Mourning is delight. Drown you, further in despair, in shades of grey 

unless, flicker in time, the pale shadows of day. 

Glimmer into your pupils, a beam of cream and white.

A quick warmth rushes to these naked arms, bare toes

to have you recover from your woven woes.

The cup to tumble will be gripped. 

It's a slow repair till loss is not all,

till the self will suffice to pour into this void. 

Posthumous.

Something twinkles. The blades of this grass are dancing green. They waltz with the wind. I think it is the eye of a hare. The fur looks immaculately white.  Did it just wink at me? It's soft, pink paws reach out to me and a slight grin is discernible on it's round, puckered mouth. The mouth does not threaten me with the razor-edged teeth that dug into a seven-year old me. It left me pricking and aching with disease. Funny it should've pricked considering I had lost every inch of hair that had ever grown out on my soft, young skin.
The smell of perfume, a sharp rusty, singed scent of Ittar. A scent of white, holy, sacred sheets and clean bathed women. The smell of pilgrimage and prayers that jumped into your head and wrapped around like the sacred, white dupatta my mother shrouded my sanctity in when I bled for the first time. It's purity claws me in. I feel thirteen again.
The shadow of the setting sun is upon me now and I feel this grass will be green no longer. I can hear life being trimmed and sheared at its edges. The sun wants to snake its last last rays around me but there is nothing to trap any longer. There is no flesh and nothing that can bleed tears. I want to touch myself. I am the air now. I can see myself, the dust buzzing in the last light of the sunset. I can see my life in particles and I know I have left it all behind like I've always wanted; Like I always envied the feather that simply parted from a fully functioning body and flailed to its destiny.
I spread my arms out. There is silence and loss. Something twinkles and I can see it grow, expand and welcome me but this luminescence does not hurt. Maybe because I don't have any eyes that will face the hurt. Perhaps hurt was never more than a word, a rolling of the tongue, a melody that broke and crashed into shards of numbness when I took flight. I don't remember any hurt anymore.
I can see the man who left me alone when I tried to learn to live like that flailing feather I have always wanted to be. A thirty year old me flashes onto the theater screen from the grinding projector that gurgles out my entire life on this black, smoky screen.
Marry me. Kneeling, smiling, feeling. The girl beams at him. She knew he would propose today. I always knew. Even when I screamed at him for twisting my heart and breaking it into two. Even when I banged the doors wide open and walked out of his territory, I knew I loved him.
This warmth, this smiling, feeling light blankets the inside and does not let this strange, dark, Sad Man near me. I would shed tears at a time like this but I don't want to. This light is too warm.
It's drawing me in.  Music caresses my ears and wraps its symphony around my head. I can hear giggles and  white laughter, snowy white laughter that sings youth to me. I don't remember exhaustion. I don't think I may have ever felt tired. It's like the cosy, green and white afternoon where all my friends chat and live over a cup of warm, brimming tea. I can smell the rich, foamy tea pouring into a cup and I can smell friendship.
This moth flaps, dances.. The sweet, honey-coated moonlight is her majesty. The river sparkles blue and splashes itself into the sea, head-first. There is nothing but breath, and exhaling, royal, blue skies.
One moment I am the jiving butterfly. In another I'm the liberated sea.

Return to Sender

A sordid rusted track, railed upon for miles

the smog folds at length 

every shovel of coal sends the fire roaring, burning in its own agony.

Trundling carriages wail
A puff of sad song into the Departure air.

Souls are thinly lit and veiled, 

the winter tugs at every desperate tobacco fume;

Charring, twisting, crumbling

I can hear the gravel crunch beneath your torn boots, Jimmy.

The wind bellows and falls back on itself

Voices war and buzz red

While at the Front, the rifles pay their respects

A flower turns restless in another sleepless moonlit night.

Every triumph is a battle on land,
Sirens of tears lost

Every war is a battle of Hearts shed.

Undone.

The grains of white, pure sand swam and slid between her fingers as his fingers moved closer and closer. Their skins met as one hand clasped another. No spaces left.
The deep blue water lightened. Moonlight saw right through the waves as the sea met the shore. It lapped, it heaved, it rose up in foam and fear; Fear of surrender, laying bare a part of it that, once given, cannot be reclaimed.
Beneath it, the sand rose. It dampened and settled in wet arms, swimming with the recklessness and the knowledge of losing every part of itself, every moment. Bluebottles and seashells clanked and sparkled feelings against the dark. Seas and sands. Blue and white. The two swelled and latched onto each other.
The shore gave way and left the two undone. The sands sunk, taking everything that was left awash and giving some of itself to the seabeds. Breaths pulled back with the salty, summer breeze. Clear waters receded home only to return, hoping to soak up an inch more of the drier sand.

Pants Down Low, you Chakkas!

This is perhaps the longest gap I have taken after a post. But oh well, my mind was only accumulating angst and more angst to spill onto this page. I will abandon my Austen-ish and Wharton-ish tones tonight and unleash.

 Some might say I'm just PMS-ing...'cause it's the 'IN-THING' to say nowadays, amongst us Neo-Imperialistic, Third World inhabitants who dare not step outside their cocoa shells of an English medium lifestyle. Or rather American, considering how Gay Rights strike more of the soft chords of the heart now than the fact that mothers are hurling their infants onto railway tracks as an alternative death to starvation. It's the best kind of excuse, really. The most poetic of it's sort. Haye. (sigh)
What if I tell you that the world around me appears to be involved in this wonky jamboree? YES! Look! They're all shaking their bums in each other's faces and gyrating their delicate waists into each other's hearts. What if I say I'm not the one PMS-ing but it is them? I am not mad North by North-west, I swear! I swear by all the holy books and not just one. I'm a passionate and true advocate of secularism, you know.
So what if my unholy eyes notice the exceptionally low, almost-drooping-down-their-behinds, tugging-at-their-pelvis-for-the-last-breath Pants?! Is it really that my eyes were not baptized when I was born?
Then I'd say, their mind's ought to be exorcised for labeling artists (or rather sculptors, *hint hint*) who possess a peculiar way of walking, talking, hand-gesturing, a "chakka". Now this is the point where I really lose all my sense of secularism, imperialism, literary-ness, modernity, humour, PMS-ing because this is when I realize that society will never change. It will always consist of PEOPLE. People will always talk and churn out labels with their English Medium cum butchered Urdu minds that will go onto to be polished by the liberal arts colleges of the American. Or Cambridge and Oxford. Really, that's as far as they go.
I mean it's one thing to disapprove and it's completely another to catwalk around school with your pants down low, flashing a rolex in one hand and vociferously condemning the YOU-ESS of AY in your World History classes and going around calling a poor old sculptor a "chakka".
My own PMS-ing and imperialistic indulgences go as far as 1.5 gram chunky bar of Snickers. My pants are breathing their last but they're sure not, falling to their (my? *chuckle*) knees and begging my pelvis to let the world take a hormonal peak at my hot-pink boxer shorts.

Hah! I don't wear any!

Just.

A twist of the lip, a knit of the brow. This air around me is inflated with a hot hubbub of pricking murmurs. A fit of scream on the left and someone bawls pointlessly on the right. Inflated. All their chests are inflated with words and sounds and noises that they have stifled the air with. There is talk but no discussion. There is laughter but no joy and there is only noise and no music. I part my lip to utter something of significance but My Voice is overwhelmed by the reflections of yesterday's mistake and my throat dampens with the stench of a hollow life. I twist my tongue; I utter only to lose my words to this layered atmosphere and I see them ricochet back, floating into non-recyclable cans of waste.
There are times when crowds end up strengthening my sense of singularity. I feel like the only one; one among many. Their backs, shins, shoulders and arms reflect my voice like  and the a deaf mirror. The indifference of their pretentious nostrils, indifferent eyes and vacant words obstructs the view of the breathing skies.
There is a time when we feel like no other. The moment envelopes us and we recede into ourselves, and the people that surround us only serve as unpleasant reminders that we are needed without and not within. There are days we cannot relate and we begin to question if we really belong. To take such moments as ones in ecstasy or solemn depression is in our power.
To lose control is frailty?
 We are never alone until we have our self to ourselves. When we let ourselves fly outside our bodies, we temporarily undo every delicate string that ever held us back. We learn to unbind. We move on from "we" to "I". Perhaps, at times, detachment saves us from losing our minds to the heat of Insignificance. Perhaps, some times it serves us well to just not belong.

Monotony is not a thing.

Listening to one song repeatedly, multiplies the enjoyment of each word, each melody. When I wear it out like a ragged, over-bleached piece of linen, I become a victim of a little thing we like to call monotony. But when I listen to the same after three long and quick years, the song does not remain the same. Every word, every riff, every fragment of that worn-torn linen comes back fine and recycled. I iron the cloth with a different meaning and continue to enjoy the task all over again.

 I can assure you the man I saw yesterday was a different man today and I can tell you that these eyes do not see as they did the day before. Even these walls and windows do not stand the same as yesterday. It cannot be, but there are times when we choose to neglect and overlook these differences.  

 My dear readers, monotony does not exist. Words may be engraved but to read, hear and feel is a matter of our very own choice. In the gap of three years, these eyes saw much of the incomprehensible, heard a little of the unutterable and touched a bit of what used to be intangible. I cannot tell how because neither you nor I are willing to devote so many minutes to this crippling machine. I can assure you that you change every day and when these days turn to years these changes slip into the garb of maturity. We may not be able to calculate these transformations unless they devise some calculator of the many incalculable stream of words that ripple through us every moment. But to receive these changes with pangs of pain or joy is within our grip. We may choose to master our response to every bit of our life and no one but ourselves exercise the power to become the sort of men we want to be.

Stars in Her Eyes.

Violins are playing in the background and a strong patch of light encircles the whole of her; only her in a large dark room. She feels singled out, in a special way. The modest slit in her long, sequinned mermaid-cut gown parts slightly for her demure foot as it peeps forward, strapped in a pair of sleek, red Blahniks. You can almost trace the veins that run beneath the white skin of her long foot. Her walnut brown curls wave down and settle softly a little above her right breast. She looks up, blinking into the light. A grimace cuts across her lips. She breathes in the mist of romance tonight. She feels like a movie star.

The violins grow louder and more dramatic as she circles her thumb over her iPod. It's 10pm. The station lights have shut but she managed to get a bench near a small snack shop while waiting for the last train home. Old Charlamagne, the store manager, and her boss must have been in an exceptionally jolly mood today to have let her borrow the pair of Blahniks from last season's collection. The lie about a date with Johnny helped too, nonetheless. Unfortunately the checkered long-skirt, bought in a sale last month, had ripped when she ran to get Charla's coffee in the afternoon. But nothing could make her unhappy tonight. Sunday had finally arrived. She smiled as she pictured herself lying down in her one-bedroom apartment, with a copy of Pride and Prejudice and dye in her hair. Thanks to the extra ten dollar bonus this month, she might be able to treat herself to a bottle of Svedka this weekend too.
She feels like a star. Only there is no red carpet to lead her on but the screeching, whistles of the 10.15 from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

View from the 9th floor

I will never forget my first blog post. I will never forget my first blog. Both came to life when I was miles away away from home.
There are marked shades of duality. It is nearly 6am and it is nearly 5am.
It is nearly 5am now. I look down on this city from the ninth floor of this building and I see a sea of lights as if the stars had decided to adorn the earth instead of the sky tonight where skyscrapers... I forget it is morning. These skyscrapers sparkle and stand so tall, almost like a legion of knights. I wonder whether these knights are armed. They certainly carry an air of nobility but I'd like to see the King who has chosen these knights. So many years have gone by. Years have flied past. Yet I have never seen the King here...or 'a' king for that matter. These highways have been laid out for a ceremony. But it looks like that here every where any way, as if they're all preparing for a ceremony to greet their King. I still have not seen the King. The people appear content nonetheless, perhaps why the King never appears. Or maybe there is no king and there never was one.
At this height I can hear the wind roar against these wide glass windows and I can see the ninth floor doesn't stand very tall among these skyscrapers.
A snore rings to my left. An eye screws right. I lie ahead. I must go back. These elevators do not cover miles. The suitcase must be zipped and I must go back. I am your average Robert Frost.
Not an hour has passed by. It's nearly 6am.