Tourniquet

Let the moon sink its stolen beams of silver

like spears into my heart

and bleed me till I’m forgotten

Let the wind ravage me with its rage

like a whorl of blades

and tear me to shreds

Let the long night seep into my veins

like black poison

and split me open with its dark density

Let the infinite sky descend on me

like a straitjacket

and crush me till my bones break

for

I cannot cannot cannot

stand to burn up

in your cruel silence

anymore.

[10:24 pm | 18th August, 2009]

Class-break epiphany

Love

is just something

that holds things together

like the bones in your body.

It's just there.

On the pleasures of stealing Proust

"For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: 'I'm falling asleep.' And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me."

Finally.

If anybody knew me well enough, and also knew Marcel Proust well enough, there is admittedly a slim possibility of them being able to envisage the enormity of this moment in my life. Superlatives are cliched, especially at my slippery hands, so I'll refrain from them. (The woven patterns on the texture of the cushions of the chair next to me seem awfully psychedelic, a giant orderly army of immovable triangles getting restless by the moment.)

It unravels me, literature. From all that I am, from the inhuman realities of space and time. But most of those are simpler pleasures, really, compared to the connection I feel to Proust. My fascination with memory, its webby associations, its precise construction and the pleasures of its starry eyed remembrance have evolved independently of his influence, and that's what makes the connection what it is. If anybody knew us both well enough, they might even be tempted to call him my literary soulmate. (Though I probably wouldn't, the objections being semantic, not to mention an avowed love for a certain Argentine and a certain Russian. The whole multiplicity of soulmates debate, let's save that for another day.)

I have never read Proust, at least not the bits of him that matter to me. (Years ago, I did read his first ever published work Pleasures & Regrets, but that's not what Proust is to me, though the promise of his later self did shine through that young work.) And I wasn't supposed to either. For I knew what he was, what he would come to mean to me once we met. He was my greatest artist, one so great I deemed him too good to be wasted by acquaintance with my youth, somebody so important to me that I couldn't take any chances at not making the most out of. (Ever loved something so beautiful that you felt compelled to distance yourself from it, afraid you would tarnish it with your bare simplicity?) In Search of Lost Time was my retirement bonus, a pleasure ostensibly stashed away for my future, that dangling carrot on the ceiling luring me and guiding me through the vagaries of life and age.

So when I bought the first volume about a month and a half ago, or to be precise, felt like buying it, I was pleasantly surprised. But I went ahead with it. (After all, your instincts are way smarter than you if only you let them be). And there it was everyday, on my desk, staring back at me every moment, yet keeping its distance, never luring me in. I still didn't feel like reading it. (even though I did rifle through the introduction to enquire about the translation. I'm very picky about those.)

And this morning, I woke up seeking it. I guess I should've seen it coming, this moment, but then I've never really cared much for foresight (it takes the sheen off the instincts, you see). I got out of bed, took it off my desk, and went straight to the first page of the text. And as I so well knew I would, I felt it, what it was like to feel those words being written into my mind. Like a little boy feeling for the first time the pristine texture of an ice cream on the tip of his tongue. The secrets of all of life unraveled to the senses, in an instant.

And a stolen ice cream, it was. Because I knew I was stealing this pleasure from my future self, spoiling the plan I so carefully, not to mention patiently, drew up. I read only the first paragraph and was so overwhelmed I couldn't go on anymore without expressing my own emotion. As I write this, I do not know if I'll go back and continue reading it or if I'll just stash it away for my future with a twinge of guilt and an apology note to my future self, but who cares about tomorrow anyway. What this moment is about, is what this moment is about.

Memories are independent of time, without a past or a future, without reason or consequence, they are mere bubbles floating aimlessly in space, carefully preserving the tender waves of a bubbling emotion. And that is what this shall remain, this early august morning I, battling the trivial annoyances of disheveled hair and a painful left wrist, woke up to a stench of dusty corners and a patter of raindrops on my balcony, and stole a tiny piece of my own future.

Miss.

The boy who could talk only in reverse.

The girl who could write only upside down.

Skirts fluttering by the seaside.

Ties buried in sand.

Papers secretly folded up in notebooks. Coloured shapes.

Ice cream dripping down fingers.

Pencils in bubbles. Tall trees.

Words once written, thrice swallowed.

Discreet mumbles. Whispered chuckles.

Shapes hidden beneath blankets.

The pinafore by the curtain.

The muddy shoes behind the door.

Hands inside hearts.

Nothing ever goes.

The smiles always come back.

Always.

Enfin.

Diderot. Barthes. Rhone. Descartes. Corsica. Camus. Morisot. Cocteau. Bordeaux. Balzac. Duchamp. Hermes. Citroen. Proust. Asterix. Curie. Gauguin. Les. Chanel. Tzara. Voltaire. Pyrenees. De Gaulle. Musee d'orsay. Rousseau. Mandelbrot. Versailles. Poincare. Dior. Tiersen. Louvre. Satie. Mersenne. Derrida. Niepce. Mousse. Lamarck. Bardot. Bonjour. Lyon. Gericault. Napoleon. Vuitton. Cezanne. Eiffel. Champagne. Degas. Godard. Jeanne d'Arc. Daft punk. Sartre. Casta. Manet. Normandy. Dumas. Cousteau. Hennessy. Renoir. Pasteur. Oui. Jeunet. Cannes. Seurat. Besson. Becquerel. Matisse. Cartier-Bresson. Hugo. Crepe. Merci. Le Corbusier. Rabelais. Flaubert. Seine. Rimbaud. Debussy. Louboutin. Foucault. Amour. Croissant. Daguerre. Arles.

At last. At long last.

Your eyes.

Parchment.

The soul of all things unsaid.

Silences.

Voyages into serenity.

Dreams.

Shapes in a starry twilight.

Echoes.

Glimpses into an alternate reality.

Promises.

Words for a heartbeat.

Infinities.

Symmetries of an eternal embrace.

Remembrances.

Songs of a memory's music.

Absolution.

My beginning. My end.

For a man called David.

He is a footballer, first. Everything else flowed from that.

On that one, I could agree with Paul Hayward for once. For a man who was probably the most eponymous David of his generation, one who remained eternally grateful to a hard-earned gift that had gifted him all else he acquired in his life, battling constantly to be recognised for what he was first and foremost, a footballer, in a country that chose to devour him for all that he chose to pursue off the green pitch, that is indeed exorbitantly heartful praise.

His Achilles tendon may not be as critical to his country's sporting fates as a particular metatarsal once was, but then sport has an essence that transcends the triviality of victory and the tempestuousness of glory. It thrives on desire and the certitude of skill, the exaltation of the passing moment and the promise of eternity, piqued by the very lure of its impossibility. Sport is an art, if only for the unflinching passion it demands of its ardent practitioners and the diabolical heartbreaks it ever so enduringly alleviates, feeding on the fiery dreams it bestows its delicate wings upon, even for the hearts it so heartlessly tramples with the rigorous exactitude of the spiked imprints of its boots.

The world can, after all, be quite cruel to its conquerors merely for being what they are, its conquerors. Sport is not any different. To break a man so, life could be forgiven for giving in to its wily pettiness, its schadenfreude. The dream may not get another life but then maybe that's acceptable, for there's always memory to be turned to. For that's the glorious undeniability of sport, the immortality it confers on its everyday past, the spangled webs and the illuminated evening skies that constitute its history.

So long, David. You are, and always will be, a footballer in my heart.

On a dream of waking up by a view of the sea

Bleary eyes taken in by the distant din of wakefulness,

molten words, earlybird thoughts for a nascent day,

treading on the soft acquiescence of an ivory bedspread.

Dreams scribbled in formless feather,

fluid languages of a tranquil netherland

finding their feet in a morning's blue patience.

Rolling waves parleying with an open sky,

exchanging silent notes on a hard day's night.

Airy shapes drawn up by a bright blue breeze,

sliding through the slenderness of a balustrade.

A pair of half-open eyes

lost to the minty breath of morning's memory,

framed in the foamy evanescence of a wide blue sea.

[9:14 am | 10th Mar, 2010]

Labyrinth

A muddy road absent-mindedly snakes away into the distance. Beside it, a tree desolately crouches over its own weight, dripping the rain's excrement. The sun is nowhere to be seen, swallowed up by a ravenous sky. There are patches of abrupt greenery all around, like swathes dressing up a brown earth's moist wounds. My heartbeat sounds feeble and distant, almost as if from another body.

You're there, a trembling shape in lavender forcefully thrust into the brown callousness of the evening. On your knees, elbows bruised, stained with mud all over, wordlessly staring into the morphing shapes on the wet ground, delicate pain streaming down your eyes.

Time turns painfully slow, as if it already knew what it was coming to even before coming to it. I try to move towards you, call out to you, but somehow I know without knowing that none of it will work. I know my limbs will be nothing more than mere casts in hardened concrete, I know my words will turn heavier than my tongue, and I know the impenetrable vacuum that separates our shivering shapes. Your pearly pain pecks away at me like a searing scar inescapably burnt into the insides of my eyelids, as I helplessly watch the rain pour down, washing away your tears into the barren mud beneath.

Something tells me it is not true, that it is not happening, that it is just a bad dream, that these thoughts are mere phantoms of my imagination, curled up in the wet night's chilly existence but I refuse to believe it. Maybe it is, maybe it is indeed just a bad dream, maybe you are not there, maybe the pain is not there, maybe it will all disappear the moment I open my eyes, but what if, what if it was your dream and not mine? What if it was the reality my dream was supposed to wash away? What if it was your nightmare and I was an intruder, just an outsider, forever looking in?

And so it is then that I confess to my faint heart it is a picture I cannot escape, for it is my inextricable labyrinth, my kryptonite, the scorched eternity I have known all along and shall forever know until the moment the icy vacuum cracks open and the bleary tenderness of that lavender shape rests in the humble inadequacy of my arms. Until then, I know I shall be the unbreakable dream orphaned in the frantic nebulousness of oblivion, watching unblinkingly as my love eats into my heart like a slow sunset burning up an evening sky.

[3:07 am | 11th Feb, 2010]

Hello.

How elegantly life lives on,

Escaping lines, listening outside harmonies,

Lingering like oblivion, humbling everythings,

Learning on habit, enduring luck,

Orbiting heartfelt edges, loving love.

A tale of three balloons

Tiny hands grasping a thin, wrapped up memory

Unwritten words whispering to a turquoise childhood.

Squared stairways, lonely tables

Breaking habits, rolling tongues

Grins bridging hill stations and valleys

A glowing filament entombed in shapely glass

Green billboards in a directionless maze

Clicks for a canvas, alphabet on gravel

Colours on glass, half-baked words in neon

Diaries for dreams, footsteps slithering up walls

Fishy somethings, kids playing truant at work

Headlights snaking through a canopied darkness

Starry shapes by a fog-kissed lake

Russian farewells, Spanish boxes

A bubbly red heart peeping out from behind a dark wall

Blind ends and brown bags, envelopes with names

Passengers in a collective dream.

Silence painted into a rocky hillock,

floating silhouettes scribbling shapes on a perfect moon,

blue hearts escaping into the endlessness of memory.

[2:13 am | 31st January, 2010]

Désarroi

I have been you, just as you have been me,

I have been we, just as you too have been,

things have been themselves, just as we wanted them to be,

but here we are now, silently drifting into a word.

Nouns no more,

mere verbs now,

we're just shadows drawn up in boxes,

despondent waves mumbling to the stars.

Like lifetimes wasted just learning to breathe,

everything has to end, or begin, sometime

and before the world starts to squirm,

uncomfortable in its dark vacuum groove,

I shall be done. Soon enough, perhaps.