Vertigo

The night flows,

pounding at obstinate windows,

prowling the edges,

peeling away

the world's masquerade,

caressing the insatiable passion

of gravity

But tonight, we float.

Up

and away.

Beyond the prosaic

tedium of gravity,

into the soaring

wings of darkness.

Up

and away.

Like music.

Like flaring tungsten

suspended in frosted glass.

Like dandelions

diving over mossy hills.

Like dreams

on the threshold of a lingering sleep.

Like resonating shadows

drifting away into the great unknown,

into the endless spirals

of a seductive nothingness.

Bulletin

2:37 Graphs in black and blue.
3:02 Ordeals with a sun.
3:14 Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground.
4:16 Circuitous snacks.
5:19 Disappearing letters. Sticky nap.
6:27 Lifehouse. Sunset with Monet.
6:58 The Economist on Afghanistan. The labours of Sisyphus.
7:34 Pepsi with Ross Geller.
8:02 Unfinished poems. Count+3.
8:25 Rice with green peas.
9:11 Slippery heads on a first floor. Hardwork.
10:54 Lemon Mint juice. Boiled corn.
11:13 Vocals with Thom Yorke.
11:52 Conversations with a whiteboard.
12:24 "Good prose is like a window pane".
12:59 Midnight walks by red-bricked corridors and whispering trees.
1:30 Unannounced dials on a keypad. Hello. Carefree chuckles.
1:56 Early morning with the New Yorker.
2:35 Advertising in the air. Tony the Tiger. The bloody innovation of The Vampire Diaries.
3:04 Eyes spinning in brownish white circles, slicing the ceiling into tiny arcs of scattered light.
3:07 The screen dims. White fades into black.

Who are you

Raging dreams
trembling through the icy fabric of reality,
leaving flaming trails in your wake,
who are you?

Fervent tears
slipping into the night's unbound spaces,
stirring up an ocean's gentle lament,
who are you?

Colourless eyes
floating into my mirrored thoughts,
unravelling the tangles of my bloody heart,
who are you?

A wavy song
murmuring into the amorphous darkness
of my wandering memory,
who are you?

A stony silence
digging your fingernails into my sweaty skin
beneath a pearly saturday night sky,
who are you?

On reading poetry

I've read hundreds of marvellously great poems over the past few days and I mean poems that are universally great, not personal favourites. [The current scope of this entry can not include (it probably never can) questioning the poetic merits of a coterie that consists of names the least of which include but are not limited to Neruda, Plath, Bolano, Whitman, Eliot and Larkin so let us please refrain from it.]

But the lines that captured my heart and squeezed it till it bled to ecstasy are by none of those. I don't always think of Borges as the greatest poet I've ever read, but I am yet to read a mind that so consistently produces words beautiful enough to put the inadequacy of language itself to shame, as effortlessly as the Argentinian can.

I read all of the others for days while I read Borges only for a few minutes (that too to refer to an old poem he wrote about Browning, coming upon these lines by accident) and I was so excited to write an entry to express my infinite debt to Larkin and Neruda but maybe that's for another day. The compass isn't working any more, there's too much interference. My mind's been brought to the ground, and I know it shows in these simple, flat words. I shall not read any more poetry tonight, let alone try to write any of my own, for I've had my fill.

But the days are a web of small troubles,
and is there a greater blessing
than to be the ash of which oblivion is made?

That, is poetry.

Jottings

*.
Is the chimney angry
when it spits flames at the patient sky?
Is the violin wailing
when it rouses the air around its feet?
Is the land patient
when it lets you stampede it in perpetuity?
Is the sunflower smiling
when it offers itself to the sun’s radiance?
Is the moon shy
when it hides beneath the milky cloud?

Who is to say,
who is to listen?

*. Our life is characterised by the search of exceptions. Maybe that is the elusive truth we seek in love, that unique exception that defines us, reaffirming our own uniqueness in return. An exception to undo all that's been done, one that challenges us, and unmakes all that's been made of us. The exception to a life that has so far been lived without one.

Some find theirs, some make theirs.
The rest just become somebody else's exceptions.

*. Intolerance is a vice, they say. But then, I ask myself, isn't a condemnation of intolerance against the very basis of the argument, that we have to practise tolerance? If we aren't tolerant of intolerance, doesn't that mean we are intolerant ourselves?

*. Living a moment, and letting a moment live you, are two divergently different ways of making memory. The first is an extension of the second, the second is a contraction of the first.

*. A poem is a celebration of impermanence, a solitary vestige that narrates a world as it existed one lost moment in time, exalted by emotion, embellished by detail, a miniscule packet of memory impervious to the oppressive present that threatens its immortality, like a placid piece of land in the middle of an endless ocean, enduring the raging storm of time, marked indelibly by a creaky old woodboard left behind on the landscape by the poet that silently proclaims "I was here."