Tears

It's 646,

the ceiling's telling me things

of tales carved in invisible circles

when

my vision suddenly disperses into restless waves

as tears invade the moment,

announcing themselves to my eyes,

an abrupt mist interrupting a guileless landscape.

I know not why - I was laughing just a while ago

leaning into that brown door - and I find myself sitting up,

my cold feet suddenly pining for the floor's compassion,

and they trickle down to my dwindling lips,

singeing my skin's language like harsh tenses,

salinity, that unforgettable taste of childhood.

I know not why,

maybe it's just the dying decade's final december

maybe it's Larkin's eloquence with countrysides

maybe a loneliness caged in a velvety absence

maybe the evening's turquoise humanity, I know not

but before the unforgiving glare of my desk lamp

reduces them to obsolete trails on my cheek,

I catch a fleeting glimpse of my world - a roll of cellophane,

a wristwatch lying sideways, a yellow push pin,

a torn receipt, bronze keys on a steel ring -

and a smiling dawn breaks on my moist lips

as I fathom the imprecise whispers of eternity

through the magnanimous transparence of life.

[24th December, 2009 | 6:46 pm]

Musings from a shower

*. I'd rather be a wise fool than a foolish wise man.

*. Is it mere coincidence that the two cornerstones of my love for literature, Nabokov and Borges, were both born in 1899? I suspect not. Born into the last year of the nineteenth century, on the threshold of a temporal shift, unable to either reconcile with or break away from the conflicting worlds that raised them? (Though I suppose V.N. did a much better job of it towards the end of his life while J.L.B. seemed to choose to ignore it and ply his trade in timelessness instead)

[Further musings on this question are reserved for a better-researched literary essay later in life]

*. I hate my hair. Have never been able to figure out what to do with/to it. It has been, inarguably, the greatest unsolved problem of the last twenty five years of my life.

*. There are many ways of living.

I think dying is just another one of them.

*. There is so much directionless anger that resides within us, we never seem to know what to do with it or where to express it. We always get stuck in traffic when we need to be somewhere early, the delivery boy is always late when we're hungry, the internet connection's too slow when we need it, the friend's always busy when we need to talk, the bus is always crowded when we board it, everything we love is always way too damn expensive, the manager's always an idiot, the exams never end, the room's never clean no matter how hard we try...

I think this helplessness and futility that has seeped into the very heart of our existence, is what has, more than anything else in our joy-driven lives, come to characterise the generation that is ours.

*. Gravity is one of the most comforting and reassuring things in life.

Track 1, Radiohead: Kid A

Footsteps on the trembling membranes of sound, a hypnotic menagerie of tangled rhythms gently invading a soundscape.

Everything.

Everything.

The floor rises up, caving in to the elegant melody. The walls, as if taking a cue, curl outwards like a giant unfurling secret while the ceiling turns upside down into a cavernous sky. Through layers of melodies smeared into one another like swirling colours on an artist's palette, warped words rise up through the weight of their music, bursting like bubbles, crashing into each other, splintering into the air.

The room rearranges itself as instants rise and fall, like the aeolian vagaries of a feather wafting along a fickle breeze, things no longer defined by places, places no longer defined by things. The music evolves into a mutating monster, snarling at the floating walls melting in its charms. The candid transparency of the air descends into pearly fluidity, foamy shapes rippling like the unborn faces of a thousand melting seas. Disjointed dots blink on a shimmering screen, pictures awaken in sleeping frames, pages talk in forgotten languages and windows extend into spaces that didn't exist moments earlier.

Gravity's suspended in surprise as the tangle of voices and strings verbalises an ellipsoidal army of rhythms sketching abstractions in displacement. The shapes blur as the images weather down, an ellipse fading away into an ellipsis, concentricity disappearing into the simplicity of a dot. Described in tender parting tones, the aural deluge gradually recedes from the room's memory, and the silky stillness of daily reality hesitantly slithers into view, settling down into unmoving tranquility after a pearly odyssey into infinity, everything in its right place.

Scoop

Shadows crashing through dimensions.

Absent smiles drifting into metaphors.

A shapeless mist, a lenient emotion

slowly sinking into words.

Moments dragged out into devious tales.

Escapades tied in to conversant skies.

Sighs muted by their own voices

like eyes drowning in their own vision.

Lungs shrivelling into pea pods

like leaves in a withering gale.

Silences that dig into days

leaving heart shaped holes behind.

This is what you do.

And, how quaintly beautiful

and wonderfully sad it is,

that you don't seem to know it, yet.