Flibbertigibbet

Once there was a pencil in crimson dark
that knew a paper as fair as air,
and a boy in the centre of an arc
who knew a girl at the corner of a square.

Spiral bound texts, lessons in valuations and stocks,
all the talk of the chalk got the pencil bored,
and away went hurtling through the boy’s magic box
a terse request to the girl for a random word.

Soon the inevitable blink inevitably blinked
and hidden beneath his desk, a screen silently awoke.
A discreet glance was all he took, as his fates winked
and the rest, as they say, went up as if in smoke.

The pencil went back to the paper’s white,
they were working on a rhyme, the last they were seen,
but they say the poor boy never recovered from the sight
condemned to an intolerable cruelty, an insuppressible grin.

[12:57 pm | 4th Feb, 2010]

Dear Grandfather

Acute myocardial infarction, they told me.
Oh, what little they knew of your heart. It had ceased the moment his had, an early June morning nineteen years ago. If only they knew. 

The phrase

I still remember how your school tie was always askew,
how we both had the same stickers on our maths notes,
uncle scrooge winking out of a mound of gold,
and how you gave me three toffees on your birthday
when it was only one for everyone else.

I hate you, I said one afternoon,
and you thrust the torn page into my hands,
took your schoolbag and left the classroom.

You didn't come to school the week after that
and the teacher told us the bank promoted your father
to a distant town, to a distant state.

Seventeen years since,
I've not repeated that phrase to anybody
dealing only occasionally in the tangles of its converse.

Time carved in me a regret for you that life slowly eroded,
for many loves came and went, but you lingered, on the other side.
They say hate is an ugly business for a nine year old,
but it's only until he grows up and finds love uglier.

And on cold evenings when love wheedles the life out of me,
leaving me nowhere to go, I return to that long lost afternoon,
to the flimsy emotion of my torn comic book page,
to the curious comfort of my boyhood resentment,
clinging to it the way a drunk does to a lamppost in a dark street,
not for the light it so readily proffers but
for its gentle generosity in letting him stay on his feet.

Perhaps life has since afforded you kinder friends,
boy whose tie was always askew,
I truly wish you the utterly greatest of life's gifts, its love,
and only hope you condone this flawed passion of mine,
the warmhearted wrath of a schoolboy's hate.

Footnotes

Patience is the unimpeachable

chivalry of a straight line; poems 

are just blood and bones, one 

unreasonably mad with the other; 

pride is the boisterous sadness 

of a defaced old coin; youth 

is a dead man's treasure, wistfully

squandered when he was young; 

love is a bloodless papercut, 

sudden, invisible and stinging; anger is 

a stirring serenade to the old neighbour's 

dead cat; maturity is the unflinching art 

of pretending to be somebody else; 

defiance is a rock in the window 

on the seventy ninth floor; idealism is a 

polka-dotted napkin one moment and

a burning tongue the next; happiness 

is the curious devotion of a 

ticking clock in a deserted house; childhood is 

a blue swallowtail, delicate cheekbones

stretched taut into an endless smile; simplicity is 

a rainbow captured in monochrome.

Epitaph

He lies here,

the boy who was always elsewhere.

Eiderdown

The television played on
in mute,
to empty furniture.

Someone sang the words,
over and over.

I thought of you,
I thought of you.

The Glass Room

"Man's answer to eternity!", the flashes proclaimed

amidst porcelain music and raptures of fearless colour

as nations stood still and stubborn bells danced in joy.

The gauntlet had been thrown

and impossibility hung its head in shame, vanquished.

Tomorrows went out of style, mirrors grew into windows,

apples were left unbitten, wishes summed up to wars,

dreams became common sense, distances went extinct,

carpenters turned emperors, love became a science,

and the air was taught a new kind of language.

"The departure of innocence!", the poets wailed, 

cowards with quills lurking behind bedecked windows,

as the sullen shadows of days marched past,

stretched out by the burdens of unceasing habit.

The forests wept, summers froze,

paperbacks forgot, shadows disappeared,

regrets smirked, corridors dissolved,

whispers faded, seas mourned,

and the air learnt a new kind of silence

For soon enough time's gentle currents turned into words, 

protesting indifference, spelling out remembrances,

trickling through long gardens and silver houses,

scything through the geometry of language, reclaiming history.

And when eternity arrived, eventually, 

the glass room stood, true to its promise,

a resolute mythology among the ruins of time,

glistening like a little boy's loneliness,

tender, teary and endlessly vast.

Outtake_3

It was the way she slept.

The way her tranquility shadowed the room like a wandering fragrance, swamping everything in the most unattainable of divine solitudes. The gentle form of her nape rested against the feathery pillow, almost as if wary of bruising it. The echoing rhythms of her breathing, like a flock of memories breaking free. The amniotic grace with which she nestled into her blanketed shape. The innocent arrogance of her skin as an unwelcome sunrise sneaked in through the window. The simplicity of every moment that passed her by, like the pulsating ignorance of a road that goes nowhere. 

The manner she always awoke, the fluid measure of her guileless reluctance, the rambling beauty of her heavy eyelids as they slowly unfurled, luring and dissolving the day's harsh reality into tender dreams of her own.

The perennial injustice of being Michael Owen

"But I'm 30, I have been around and I understand how it works. I am not going to kid myself because... I know I am not as good... Maybe 10 years ago you could argue I was – but not now."

It hurts me to read it, not because of the statement's undeniable obviousness but its scathing simplicity, the gentle resignation of the emotion behind it. The mundanity that has come to replace the greatness that once stood in its stead. He must have come to hate that word, that terribly cruel "once" that has shadowed him all of his lime-light filled adult life. But I suspect he no longer does, not because he's tired of it but because I think he truly understands what it means. What it means to be part of a once.

For that has been his destiny, to always be remembered for being young once, to endure the perennial injustice of being a genius that once was. Sport has an almost ruthless curiosity when it comes to its prodigies, filling its lore with tales of the ones who unequivocally fulfilled their potential and the ones who fell by the side along the way. And it's the accidental misfortune of the latter to endure the rest of their lives inches beneath the threshold, condemned to wonder and rue for all of eternity how it could've been different. History may inevitably end up placing Owen in that company, but that tells us more about ourselves than it does anything else. We mortals are easily bored, unsated by mere excellence, we want more, we seek immortality in our idols, we make promises on their behalf and then punish them for reneging on them without ever bothering to think who it was that made them in the first place. Almost as if it was an unforgivable crime for him to have been that teenage footballing prodigy that flood-lit night in St.Etienne twelve years ago. Maybe it's the scourge of genius that it is bestowed upon so few and understood by even fewer.

I admire Owen for many things, but more than his prodigious skills with the ball, I admire his endurance, for abiding with dignity and humility the long chain of injustices handed out to him - to haplessly watch his game deteriorate with every misfortunate injury, to be unwanted by the very people who once idolised him for his abilities and to be incessantly convinced on the sidelines that he was 'past his peak'. Maybe some might say it was inevitable, the resignation, that he had to eventually come to terms with his frailties but even so, the obviousness of a path doesn't make it any less harder, does it? After all, it's not so uncommon, sport's unkindness towards its aging prodigies. Some refuse to acknowledge it and pay the price, some part ways early knowing they can't stomach the reality, some even convince themselves of eternal youth and make fools of themselves and some, like Owen, silently press on every single day, enduring the sublime burdens of dissipated genius. 

The question of the muse

Okay, that was long.

Did the over-long hiatus end up giving you the impression that the previous post had a more clandestine connotation, in other words, that it was meant to be a simple sign-off from all further writing endeavours here? I hope not. Ah, a voice from the back, "Sorry to disappoint you man, but no one here has been waiting for your words with bated breath." Ouch, should I say? Okay, there you go. With an exclamation? Okay, ouch! Forgive me, my gracious heckler, for that's the perennial, and some would even say despicable, peril of a writer's art, that regardless of the cretinous vapidity of your artistic output, you believe, almost to the point of irrefutable certainty, that somewhere in one of the countless spaces of this world, there's at least someone who is smart (/naive) enough to be engaging (/wasting) their precious (/purposeless) moments reading what you're writing. (The parentheses are for the staunch optimists, the rest of you can kindly ignore them.)

It was a very early morning for me today, and when I woke up it was with the cacophony of absurd traffic in the usually peaceful introspective alley of my mind. (Yeah, I know, the unpardonable crime of beginning a sunday with an "introspection", it's almost vulgar, for lack of a better word. But then I asked myself if there's any productive way of beginning a sunday other than not beginning it at all. And since I had so grandiosely failed to accomplish that by already waking up, I had no other choice but to deal with the vulgarity.) So I decided to don the cloak of the responsible citizen and clean the mess up, what with all that flagrant honking and revving up that was going on. (Ever noticed those citizen traffic regulators on our dusty and rainy streets these days, frantically trying to make our driving lives more tolerable? It's quite admirable, and also seems to have become fashionable, I should say.)

Goethe had his rotten apple, Balzac had his caffeine, Poe had his siamese cat, Coleridge had his opium, Hugo had his nakedness, Nabokov had his placards, Eliot had his cold, what do you have, oh what do you have, young man? 

(Insightful as my question was, it was quite uncomfortable, really, hardpressed as I was to stop my over-active imagination from taking over. Overwhelming as the thought of all that humongous literary talent crammed into a single chamber was, I didn't think I'd be able to stomach the image of them collectively plying their trade in all their glorious oddities. Imagine Nabokov fretting over his misplaced placards amid Eliot's sniffs and sneezes, Goethe holding his rotten apple with a delirious contortion of his face, Balzac screaming for his evening jug of black coffee and Poe's cat purring menacingly as Hugo cavorted around the room naked, parchment and quill in hand... You know, sometimes those things can scar you for life.)

And so I recovered, composed myself and decided to seriously answer the question, reminiscing on my muses. Turns out my last great muse was a dusty, unswiveling orange chair in a dimly lit wooden corner and more importantly, a blue-white kenzo and a blinking box that made kind little noises from time to time. But the corner isn't wooden anymore and the blinking box seems a little mad at me now, though I do still retain the kenzo and the dimness (I don't like the light too much, it makes seeing too easy). And now, in addition, there's the speck-free milky white ceiling to be stared at, a white window that looks exactly like a letterpad with ruled paper, the elegant madame Rimsky-Korsakov to engage in conversation, the new black matte lamy fountain for the itching parchment and why, of course, the venerable Messrs. Bolano and Gombrich waiting idly by the nightstand. 

I've been asked this question before - So what do you do when your lovely muse spirits away all your free-flowing streams of verses and leaves you hanging on a block of frosted words? Set off into the hinterlands in search of her gliding shadow and steal back your palimpsest? I'm not the really adventurous kind so I usually check into my lounge mode with some magazines and just wait. For that sunday morning I'm jerked out of sleep by that block-shattering moment of sweaty, self-confessed inspiration, for that bursting sentence to write itself, for that most glorious of all pittances the literary muses offer us mortals, that moment when I shall be exceedingly pleased to announce to my dear ladies and gentlemen that my shadow-stretching, falsetto-singing, infinity-loving, memory-making, sleep-usurping, abstract-sketching, swift-walking, childhood-worshipping, metaphor-slinging, H2O-guzzling, randomness-doting, head-banging, time-hopping, stupidity-wooing, verse-sputtering blue-eyed muse is back.

Parting

The dark road travels ahead

into a distant, interminable vapour,

The sky's gentle tears descend on my shoulders

like a pianist's measured notes on an empty wall.

Under a crescent floating in a sea of coal

the streetlights roam free to their heart's content,

drawing heavenly shapes on the wet tarmac,

rorschach blots seeping into an acquiescent canvas.

Memory slithers along in stop motion

as the empty night lures me on

into its evanescent wings.

I wander on like a broken thread of thought 

in search of reason

as the fluid wind dances in the soaring rain,

wrapping the world around my screaming soul.

[30th August, 2010 | 5:11 am | Ahmedabad]

Little girl, little girl

Little girl, little girl
Please don't be sad

I'll turn the zephyr into cotton candy
and twirl it by a wand of glass for you to taste
I'll show you the secret place where they make dreams
so you can pick out the ones you love the most
I'll build castles for you under the rainy sky
with paper boxes made of your pulsating memories

Little girl, little girl
Please don't be sad

I'll drown the streets in paint, slice them into pages
and bind them into your bright new colouring book
I'll tell you bedtime tales of little men in green
cavorting in silver suits, burning batteries and flying discs
I'll steal moments from the tyranny of your clocks
and string them into anklets that rhyme with your dancing feet

Little girl, little girl
Please don't be sad

I'll fly you away from the relentless concrete
and tie up the blurry evening to your window
I'll carve a zigsaw puzzle out of the boring afternoon
so you can make shapes of it as you please
I'll take you to the distant shores of the breezy blue sea
and write poetry for you in the sand

Little girl, little girl
Please don't be sad

For, if it all fails,
I'll make a song of our story,
set it to life's endless music
and gather the world to sing it for you
until you smile.