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."

For [-------]

I don't read book reviews, never before reading the books, and very rarely even after that. But there have to be exceptions, of course. You know, exceptions, exceptions, of course, those exceptions. Reason thrives on those, and so does irrationality. And we all do, don't we?... Well, anyway... exceptions.

I'm sifting through The New Yorker after a couple of lean days, literature wise, and well, what do you know, there's that name sticking out, noir dripping dagger-style, right in the centre of the slender film of the tender screen, that seven lettered [-------] that conjures up images of paranoid punks, sleazy streets with disappearing roofs, neon signs in forgotten colours and trippy psychedelia crammed into two dimensional black and white. And what happens next? Of course, the exception impulse kicks in, bypassing those hapless neurons waiting for the sinuous mundanity of reason and before you know it, your finger's done all the necessarily involuntary shaking and moving dance moves and in a flash that even time is at a loss to explain, the words stare into you through cunningly deceptive eyes and it's that. It's that.

But no, it's not that. It's not. There is another exception embedded in this exception. You read only the master's quotes, not the words of that simpleton reviewer who is, for now, to be bloodily, and exceptionally hated for being able to get his hands onto those floating, kaleidoscopic heads (=pages) before you could. Yes, I know I do admire Louis Menand, but I'm sure, in this context, or in any other damn context (pardon the language) involving this seven lettered [-------], we'd both agree that we wouldn't give a damn (pardon, again).

There are perfunctory snippets, names splattered on windshields that you don't give a damn (I don't give a damn about the language anymore, please) about, just little chunks of odoured flesh thrown here and there for the carnivore to just smell and move on, meaningless bodies of words strewn about but then, then, then,

"Was it possible, that at every gathering—concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?"

And then, then, then, only then does the embittered soul, dragged headfirst through the delirious boulevards of forgotten paranoia, painted in that unforgettable scent of burnt paper, submerged in shapeless shrouds of wicked casuistry, rest at last, at the feet of its faceless, nameless, seven lettered master of luscious, candy-coated apocalypto.

Welcome back, [-------].

Stolen

I spoke to her today.

The familiar giggles. Complaints about the laptop password. New best friends. Evenings lost to music classes. New contact numbers. Lots of homework to be done. A boring Harry Potter movie. The new second ranker in class. Awesome Bone books. Lavender. A very bad cough. New favourite songs. But no one to share them with. Just an open brown door, an empty room.

I wish time would stop stealing my moments.

Running away

Every time you slip away from my grasp
I look ahead of myself
and realise you were, in fact, never there
to begin with.
You had begun running
long before even slowing down.

You’re like the tip of the arrow,
forever hurtling towards the distance,
and I’m its tail,
forever chasing.

I sometimes wonder
if it’s me
who’s too slow,
or you
who’s too fast.

But beware
of the deceptive pleasures of running away,
for when the time comes
when I can’t keep up anymore
and fall behind
to gradually disappear in the distance,
dear,
you may have nothing left to run away from.

On Turner

He
who bent light
and moulded fire,

He
who brought down the skies
and chased angry clouds,

He
who saw rage in the sea
and life in its waves,

He
who gave shadows colour
and the land its waiting heart,

He
who taught me fury
and gave me art,

This stranger
who died in London
gazing into the Thames
on a December morning
one hundred and fifty eight years ago,
I think I knew him.

Memory

The sky is a bright blue, unwrinkled, untainted. I sit by my desk, overlooking the window, paper ahead of me, pen straddling my fingers. A flame appears in the distance, as if it has just burnt a hole in the sky and crawled out of it. It seems to relish its sudden freedom, zealously roving around the infinite space at its disposal, unwilling to settle down. And then, as if it had turned towards me from the heavens, I feel its gaze upon me. As if it had two tiny eyes, as if they were united in looking at me. It takes off from its high perch, as if it knew that I knew it was looking back at me, and descends into the mundanity of the land beneath its sky.

As it slowly approaches me, the flame drips colour onto a psychedelic canvas and takes a life of its own, a flaming piece of vibrant life, a butterfly. My eyes dissolve in its colour as it whizzes about the greenery in the distance, away from the window, shy of approaching me. But then our eyes meet and it hesitantly makes its way towards me. Unsure of myself yet acting as if I know exactly what I am doing, I lean closer to it, and whisper gently, as if afraid of hurting its tender papillae with too harsh or grating a sound, "Is it you, is it really you, my love?"

A pause. Like a giant swaggering backwards to go forward, reality surges backwards, in a huge heave, dragging everything with it. A shuffle, and as if time ripples in the moment, memory's slate is erased, the window dissolves into its past as if the precise converse of the breeze blows now, right down to the tiniest detail, the butterfly’s prismatic wings flutter backwards, beat after beat, as it makes its way back into the heavens it descended from, my words fly back between my lips, my neck cranes back of its own accord, the ink slowly drips back into the pen as it retraces its own words, the paper blanks itself word by word, letter by letter, the instants devour themselves, and the words start all over again.

This is it.
Burn, memory, burn.

Nothings

We.
Shadows scripted by a streetlamp.
Bagpipes on a deserted boulevard.

It's one twenty three.
But time doesn't know us.
Neither do numbers.

It was blue today.
God's mask for monday.

Paper bags in the air.
Appearances disappear.

I wish I'd known Caravaggio.
Do submarines have windows?

My words are too vague.
But you have the keys.

Rolling wheels.
When does a straight line become a circle?

Silly boy.

Dip your fingers in the inky sky.

The air sprouts wings.
The night's silent lullaby.

Can you taste the stars?
Almost.

IMG_2590

I wonder, what makes the sun's light
Dance to the tunes of the sea’s foamy white?

I wonder, how could anyone climb so high
And so artfully colour the sky?

I wonder, who taught the waves in the sea
The art of beauty in formless anonymity?

I wonder, why does life steal
These endless pleasures of time we so feel?

I wonder if I wonder too much.

[Author's Note: Thank you, A, for giving my eyes the beauty that is IMG_2590, and thank you, another A, for making it.]