An Epiphany Before the Death II

Time backward:

“I always have this strange feeling that I am this very old woman laying down about to die…that my life is just her memories.”

Time forward:

There is locked shyness in her very old eyes and an occasional flickering of the lashes. The curtains ruffle themselves like wavy hair in wind.  She spread her legs over the carpet for an idle warmth and furtive silence. There is the sloshing of water being sprayed on the grass outside. She imagined a rainbow from the inside.  

  

Inside inside there are colours raw and bitter

And I kept my palm over the eyes and slept.

Erik Satie. It’s like her soul covers a circle once in an hour. The music takes its own time with a looseness that can hold her shrunken feet fixed at a place. Fixed. Like you lay far from yourself in a forlorn shore and your hands try to reach so long to grab your heart rolling beyond your catch. Oh there is grave melancholy itching her very essence. And the ambiance shifts from a somber solitude to a seclusion with memories of long subdued laughter. 

Many a times she fantasized to have an incomplete slumber getting split by his smashing of the door and his figure emerging surprisingly from the darkness to the light with that dashing look and bending smile. And then she would call back the thought of reality working in different ways with its own schemes and shrewdness. Now she knocked on her head to have depended so much on his memories for her joys after his demise. “Know thyself!” Unseen paths. Unlooked spaces. And she sighed on all the unthought thoughts and unread books. Footsteps are heard on the stairs. Someone is calling her name.  Suddenly she searched for her. She heard a yell from within before the final call- “Cogito ergo sum!” And she couldn't yell back “ergo scribo!”

                        

An Epiphany Before the Death I

While he talked of Sartre, stains, and weather

He lowered his face in-between

To the cubic vase with a drooping flower

Near the antique ashtray- partly used

                                            Imbued

                                               Suffused with smells of ephemerons

                                                                          In rolls of smokes

                                                                          Coiling from his mouth

                                                                                              His breath thawing

                                                                                                  Resolving into the air.

                                                                                                                                          

It’s then that his grave ruminations turned flaxen

Like the hackneyed clad of a senile soul.

He abruptly sniggered at the whiled away seasons

With frail reasons to hold

                              Enfold

                              Refold the pages of Camus, Heidegger and others

                                                                   In labyrinths of thoughts  

                                                                      Besmirching his being

                                                                          Now discerning the implacable death

                                                                                      Roaming over his fretted eyes.

                                                                                                                        

To churn my dreams within the vortex of your eyes!

Sometime there is this piercing loudness of the subconscious voice. It grows louder with a violence so destructive and inexorable. And then all the past musings that the mind had undergone lie somewhere like a cold corpse mocking at the absurd existence it had all these time. Mocking at the smiles it had smiled, the giggles and the goose bumps, the laughter and the momentous joys, stormy sorrows and turbulent love. Loneliness brings a murkiness, an emptiness that the mind never wants to confront with a hanging head and weary eyes. It imagines weird moments and possible disasters that you have read or heard occurred to someone somewhere before. Sometimes I feel there are thousand bits of shriek brewing deep down in the chambers that I myself fail to render even by a sigh. Or my voice cannot reach me as if I watch me drowning on a pond from a window far above on a rainy day, with a mind wet and feverish, frozen and lifeless.

There comes a burning stir in the gut when an impulse of alienation circles me amidst a crowd. The thought of never being understood by anyone, I cannot fully utter my feelings and ideas with a zest I had sometime before. I look at people’s eyes and find a kind of absorption that tells me to speak only what they want to hear. Eyes that show within one glance all their fatigue, preoccupations and conditions that they have assimilated in this life. It’s as if they have been here for centuries and tired of getting aged anymore. I can hold hands and still never felt to be touched at all. I can talk and cannot hear myself. 

 Sometimes I enjoy fancying myself falling for an unrequited love. Loving someone who fails to comprehend your art of love so unique and intense would be fascinating. To churn your dreams within the vortex of your eyes. The pain gnawing your days, the longings, the frustration and jealousy scrubbing my existence into a sparkling crystal. Emotions embarking a new travel that wipe off the haziness on the path that hampered by a sober ordinariness. I yearn to love than to be loved. I may lack passion but not the appreciation of it. I may lack emotion but not the recognition of it. And I wish to be less indifferent to the ones who don’t seem so appealing to me. There are legendary souls yet to be discovered. Fallacious impressions should not be allowed to dissipate the chances of knowing them. There is an old dilapidating castle within me that has to be demolished just to grow a garden full of intoxicating grapes that was forbidden to be tasted for ages. And there will be a time to pluck some by the hands that watered it. And then the sky will be grey and the storm will begin.   

Ripened thoughts and seasoned wisdom blazing in my eyes!

Inaccessibility. The inaccessibility of me to myself was an interesting feeling that I have dug out from among the rudiments of lost thoughts. It’s like you are like a text subjected to varying interpretations. Each time the deconstruction would bring different meanings. One you overlap with another you and many layers of you will be hidden within a single you, like one text is a combination of different layers of meanings slippery and fluid. People change. And the fluidity in you may sometimes won’t take a shape. Inaccessible for an interpretation. Thoughts and feelings fail to amalgamate into one whole. “Unification of sensibility” giving way to its dissociation. There is only a fog and shadow. Quaint and oblivious.  

Immanuel Kant. Sublimity dismantles itself for a clearer view. A state beyond reason. The experience drowns you into an overwhelming terror.  Elevation. Wonder. Incomprehension. And I wonder what it would be like. Can sublimity be possible within the original thoughts itself? Can there be sublimity in discovering the fragility of your existence in a moment when elemental forces rips off your arrogance? Or is it simply epiphany? There are trees with demon shape and angelic vastness which often gives me a sense of elevation rather than a feeling of beauty. The mystery of creation.  Does the artist who creates totally be conscious of the sublimity that he is drawing in? The artist should melt in the creation, be the creation. And finally he gets alienated from the created. To stand away, breathless and wide eyed, admiration and awe winking at his heart, unable to comprehend his own creation. What a moment it would be! Isn't it itself sublime?

Coming of age. Some say they are never the same after immense suffering that they have encountered. They stops being silly. Stops being emotional. Their blaring emotions exploded too much within that there is calmness that comes out of it, Reason is their anchor, to fasten them to be firm in the dread and oceanic sorrow. I can only imagine what it would be like. May be not even imagining in its fullest sense. Nothing so tragic has happened in my life yet to be mature enough to stop being silly. My emotions float within me, venomous and evil to blind me from the serenity and compromise that comes out of the rational. I find beauty in it. May be something sublime that may occur in my life will transform that sense of beauty which according to Kant is an “indeterminate concept of understanding” to the Sublime which is “the indeterminate concept of reason”. And maybe I won’t be the same again. Ripened thoughts and seasoned wisdom blazing in my eyes :)

PS: Hangovers of Literary theory and criticism :p

Something in You I Dare Not Whisper

It was as difficult as the arrival of voice

And the second row of departure of silence

That you broke the glee on my crystal eyes.

As a castigation for all the procrastinations

I staggered through those long lost whims

There is no mutability for fragility you see.

So I returned with a fist full of emptiness.

And I shamelessly scratched on your walls:

As we clasped together

Our puzzles faded fast

We flowed

Like letters writ in water.

Long long goes the bridge we built

And now you walk on it

As I am drowning beneath.

A wave was mistaken as you

So I didn't defy its embrace!

"When your soul is gone out of your style!"

There is sunlight sneaking through the ajar windows, and the rays seems like they have bathed in pensiveness and  drank themselves a palm full of dreams. The afternoon silence has frowned at my negligence to its provoking heat and gross wilderness. The grass outside has started to grow as they like. Untamed. Unpruned. Wild. They have an air of being ‘gently ferocious’. I don’t know whether they would smile at my oxymoron if they hear it. They look so much themselves that there is happiness running through their blades by mild wind. And I tossed my head with them.

I looked up and saw the roaming birds

My heart leaped with my galloping thoughts

The flutters, the beats and the shivers

I hold my breath and closed my eyes

But there was still mutter in between my lips.

Sometimes I get freeze beside you in a bewilderment that emerges out of my inability to loosen up all the enmeshing voice inside me, that there is so much of pending musings that has to catch up and unleash to you. You told me that you liked me best when I read aloud poetry to you. And you always preferred Keats and his odes. You became his Nightingale, the Autumn, the Grecian urn and the Melancholy. But did you know that you were my prime melancholy? The sweetest and the inexorable melancholy I ever tasted. And you were like a wilted flower when there is "no poetry between us and when your soul is gone out of style". And then I would bring up some fanciful analogy for your flaccid face and cold eyes. You hated when I try to paraphrase my feelings to you. Paraphrasing for you was like besmirching the beauty and challenging the passion out of it. Passion. I envied you for it all the time. So much of passion whirling in your eyes. In your actions. In your aspirations. I feared it. Loved it. Awed it. And yes I thought of it even as your hamartia. Be proud of it since a fatal flaw out of passion is worth suffering. There is bravery and grandeur in it.

I have always imagined the switching of moments and people to mere memories. And there are some people whose shifting to existence as a memory is inconceivable. The reminiscences of certain people that can wrench my heart and rip my soul. The moments my love for them becomes so distinct as red on white. A kind of excruciating abstractness that these memories bring will circle themselves an existence of emotions that I cannot plainly touch or feel. May be that’s why I fail to sustain myself in any kind of virtual world. May be that’s why I always tilt sideways to a reality out there that can pull back my soaring reveries so that I taste life’s contradictions and contrasts altogether in a unfamiliarly familiar sphere.         

     

“Anything that can blow your candles out!”

“The nuns taught us there are two ways through life- the way of nature, and the way of grace- we have to choose which one you will follow- grace doesn’t try to please itself, it accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked- accepts insults and injuries- nature only wants to please itself- get others to please it too…”.

The light was consistently flickering on the walls. Like my thoughts making huge heaves and convulsions, but as quietly as “drops on disc of snow”. The sun shines through almost all the frames of The Tree Of Life. I watch it and watch it and the rays of beauty absorbed in those scenes, the whispers, the divinity, the sublimity and the quest- all have made me so insatiable- the more I watch the more I want to watch. Again and again. The ripples on my soul turn into whirls of rapture- everything in it is graceful and blissful, enlivening like the sun beams showering its trance all over us. Nature- “It finds reasons to be unhappy- when all the world is shining around it-when love is smiling through all things- it taught us that no one who loves the way of grace comes to a bad end.”  Am I in favour of grace or nature? What resides in me? Grace or nature? What do I want to reside? Grace or nature?  Don’t I constantly want to please myself and get others to please me too? Don’t I find reasons to be unhappy when the world is shining and love is smiling through all things? Precariously in an edge my melancholy soils everything that is fair.  Aren’t I nature?  And why did I often search for “grace” in “nature”?

  “When you become old, with grey hair and shrunken skin, when you become dreadfully alone, will you come to me?....If not now!” I called it a vicious wish to make my friend.  Pernicious was your desire to see me alone all the time. Unless you deceive me I cannot come to you. But there lies the true horror. Deception is unknown to you. Learn it. Try it. Be it. There is only place for “images” in this world. “Whatever comes I will be true to you!” What a dreadful plan! I lie down in the dark and lie about my own lies. Where is the tree I have been looking forward to be blossomed in the spring? I lied to you that it was fallen in the last rain. You have never asked me for the truth. Ever crossed me for the lies. What is left to be rusted long ago cannot regain its grace if the abandonment was for comfort and survival. 

The thoughts get departed as withered flowers. Words like tiny souls inside me spread their wings like cute cherubs with mischievous eyes hiding behind their palms. Words, words, words, rhyming, praising, loving, paining, blooming my withering flowers. My gentle antique heart, yellowed and distant, gazes at the rarity of your sustained fairness and silence. I searched for “anything that can blow your candles out”.  

Unknot me from you

You gracious with your silence in between

Is too distinct from mine.

Yours is grace

Mine nature.

Unknot me from your eyes. Its contentment has made my barrenness “raven black”. You have eclipsed my silver sense. I am tired of convincing myself of my seeming zest and substance, which in actuality decayed and cankered when I am alone. It’s as if I am ingeniously crafted to be frozen and numb when I am bereft of you. My liberty is no longer my liberty. My pain no longer mine. It’s merged with you, words slippery and tentative. My frowns have more curves and twists when there is the slightest fatigue from your part. It’s as if I live only in words. Your heaviness lightens my heart. Purges my soul.  Saturates my weary days. What am I without you? I want to get disappeared in you. “Thaw and resolve” in you. What if I be a word? Or a string of it, poetry from a most “comprehensive organic soul”, or a slice of sublime prose from a monologue, a soliloquy. Or a shocking metaphor.  Or a rhyming couplet. Or a sonnet. My ambiguity then to be dissected, reread, misinterpreted and reinterpreted, for centuries. For me your end is “Truth and beauty’s doom and date”. For me you are the grace that heats my nature enough to melt it.

PS: It took such a long time to resume my scribbles. Words flickered and frosted within me. Some bouncing on the surface with a buoyancy I never felt before. All I could see was the purples blurring my sight. Purple wings, purple petals, purple walls, purple lights. I rubbed my eyes. The purple memories smeared on my lashes, mixed with tears, purple beads trickled down my cheeks. And there was purple birds fluttering on my throat. There is no breath. Only the whoosh of flights and the surmounting letters dismembering my scruples. And what it left is a fist of sting with a feeble gasp, to be rasped at my next resumption:)           

         

  

“The story can resume, our story can resume, I will simply resume!”

Very few people touch your heart. And the fewest can dwell deep into your soul that some essence of them will be there in your conscience. A part of their perceptions and images more frequently visiting you back. Some people may change you, but very few sow the seeds of transformation, a transformation that you have feared to approach, hold hands, walk along, argue, and encounter every justification for the need of transformation that you have neglected so long. Answering so many whys and hows. There are far more differences between an ‘improvement’ and ‘transformation’. Some want you to improve so that you may meet somewhere at their ideal of their expectations, so that they can look at you, run their fingers through your hair and kiss you to squeeze out the elements that they never want you to hold, so that they can be secure and content. Some want you to transform, to stop your story, and to begin from the very beginning rather than a resumption. Forgiving yourself is the hardest part to do. If you don’t then the smile of the forgiver does not hit you, unnerve you, and won’t quench your regret. It will not make any difference. An ocean of forgiveness waiting you miles apart in the shape of people, moments and kindness. For all the mistakes you are going to do, you have an ocean of forgiveness in store for you. The only thing is you just refuse to plunge yourself into the water and get embraced by the waves and tears.

 The head slightly tilted every now and then. The fingers run faster than the thoughts. Thoughts striving to reach and slow down the far running words. What is it we call for forgiveness when the one who seeks for forgiveness cannot really seek for it anymore because those who have to forgive have slipped out of reality and distilled in to a memory? Atonement. Brione Tallis. Could they have forgiven her? Have they forgiven her before they get melted into the tears that they have shed over the years, over their unfulfilled love and passion? The fire of the two souls burns her, burning her, have always burnt her within, without, all over her existence! Guilt, cowardice, denial. False perception and false accusation by the sheer ignorance of a horrified, foolish girl.  She wrote when she was dejected and disturbed. She wrote with embellishments and adjectives, her imagination flaming like fire from the ignited phoenix surfaced from its ashes! Oh the ashes! The ashes of her supposed truth! The sense of truth has betrayed her. You didn’t know that truth can be lies! You didn’t know that your assumptions can’t be truths, that the world is different, that there are strange feelings yet to be tasted of. You didn’t know it because you were thirteen then! “How old do you have to be to know the difference between right and wrong?”  You “prevented” them from their very “ life”. Prevented them from their love that they deserved each other. Can your words ever serve for the atonement? Is it a reparation at all? If your mind has twisted your perception in a little other way round, if you were a little more grown to perceive it the right way,  then he would not have to be yearned for that resumption. Hoping their story to resume, he walked towards death, exhausted, pale, grey, still Cecilia in his vision, dream and voice.  “I will return, find you. Love you. Marry you. And live without shame.” 

Dorian Gray. His picture and his soul. Soul entrapped in his portrait. Soul rotting and soul decaying. Undying youth, unwithering charm. He sought for pleasure, “I am the flame!” The hardest flame he never allowed to flicker, the devilish pursuits unwavering his beauty, the lines of sin and its dread tracing and carving its ways in his picture. Worms wallowing and figuring in the face, the face of bartered soul, soul rasping and roaring by the most heinous crimes. The Picture of Dorian Gray. He lived in sensuality, he ruled his emotions, he revelled in his pleasures, sins, unpardonable deeds, bathing in fire of passion and ever gleaming youth. Dorian Gray. The man who forbid nothing, but his conscience. Conscience. Don’t you hear it? How often its grinding moans been reaching you! Don’t you hear it?  Beauty and youth had brought you everything. The picture has brought you everything. And the soul that you wished to abandon and merged into the picture has brought you everything and taken away one thing. Your conscience. Fatal wish! Fatal picture! Fatal hands that had painted it.  How often Wilde wrote of morality. Morality was never dissected like him with the most inverted and perverted way possible. The fashion statement of the time, the narcissicist who made use of his narcissism to flower his exquisite art, exquisite thought, exquisite wit. I wish you had resumed the story and led it to a good end. The story of Dorian Gray. Like the man in the Atonement who most yearningly, hungrily, intensely wished for the resumption of his story. Was Dorian not worth for a resumption? I guess he is not. Not worth of it. My conscience says so. I hadn’t pinned it to any picture. Not yet. Though I have pinned it so many other things.  

 Let me sweat in my wishes 

And be rinsed in my conscience.

Conscience. You know what it is? 

Is it the voice of the soul?

Or some bleak echo of some ingrained morality? 

I get wet in the rain,

Rain no longer perceived with romance,

But with the rocky dryness of a savage soul

That presses and dances and fidgets on digital gadgets.

Isn't that am doing now? Fidgeting on the gadgets instead of simply watching the rain? Let me simply resume. Let me simply resume from where my thoughts had started sailing from the drizzling water of the infinite roof. Our story can resume. Because some others could not resume;)

"In Me Nothing is Extinguished or Forgotten!"

Good things buried should be resurrected.  Good things forgotten should be remembered. Good things however painfully gnawing should be stoically endured. The days were retrospective, melancholic, restless, hazed and foggy, insipid and plane.

I saw the stolen glassy rays from the tree tops playing on your cheeks

And I felt the bubbles of poetry clustering on my head
They refused to take shape

They dissolved the moment they were bulged

Like unrained clouds dissolving into nothing

Unblessed Water unblessed Rain

Unblessed Poetry.

Can you see me in the dark when your eyes sail far into the empty space at nights? Once I described you as a perpetual agony of my soul. Are you the same? Differences can hardly be seen for eyes whose vision is oblivion to the dalliance of colours. Colours once so subtle and effervescent. So tender and watery, they spilled and smeared on my fancy that I could almost see the stains on my fingers. There was a time I could imagine you in hues of sepia, your every detail, every angle wafting the embalmed memories of antique love. Like you and I have evolved from incarnated idols. I tried to embody you in strange metaphors for there was nothing as gratifying as poetry for praise. Some people are so beautiful that no truth will impart glory to them. Words should weep if thoughts never born for them in diluted truth and diluted lies. I searched for words that would make you want to disappear, to make you want to live only in words. Good things will resurrect never to give redemption for the liar in me. Never to give redemption for the frailty in me. For the sinner in me. Lie, frailty and sin. Sometimes they are too good to be bad.  You make me an old woman waiting for a redeemer who does not exist. You make me a little girl leaning onto the stairs for a visitor who does not exist. For I have made you invisible inch by inch from the moment we met. I thought I can’t but I could. I rubbed my eyes and saw your eclipsed beauty lamenting in the light. I made you invisible. It was hilarious to see you unseen in the light, your truth lost among the lights. I laughed.

Infatuations must die. But wait. It should go a long way. Let me leap into the fire for no water to extinguish it so soon. There is completeness to be half burnt. Infatuations not pernicious should not be loathed later.  As long as the tempter and the temptation are not known of it, it’s as sweet as untold melancholy lisping itself in the ever consuming time. Be not grieves of the evanescence of your charm. It will feed itself even in the drought of passion and dream. “In me nothing will be extinguished or forgotten”. Good things buried deep should be resurrected to blow your redemption out. Good things are never to be redeemed for redemption is often for the bad than the good;)

"In Me All That Fire is Repeated!"

There is an atmosphere of confession that’s slowly building up inside me. It rushes in with horns and teeth and claws, desecrating my beautiful holy heart. Heart of colour. Heart of improved true lies, readjusting itself from time to time.

I think of you

And then I think of me.

I want you to be like Keatsian lines

Intoxicating

Forgetting

Escaping

Sensual

Dense and light

I wanted you to be like that Ode

In which I have luxuriated numberless times

Aching and aching

Dying and dying

Waking and waking.

Toni Morrison and her The Bluest Eye. Pecola Breedlove and her desire for the bluest eye. Blue Blue Bluer Bluest eyes through which she can view the world which may love and stroke her. Pecola- the tired bird, the drooping girl, the wronged girl, the the black black girl. I wish the blue eyed Pecola could sleep for some time. And then I would sit beside you. Wake up only when your dream is over. And then you would describe it to me. The blues, the moonlight, the silvery air. I would like to mix my memories with yours, to mix my dreams with yours, to mix my love with yours.

Have you ever felt what it’s like to be speaking and never conveying? Have you ever felt what it’s like to be belonged and never belonging? Have you ever been in someone’s eyes, look the same and look different? Have you ever been loved and not yet loved? “ What did love feel like?”  Why are you so certain of a hurt to be hurt and not certain of a love to be a love? Or is it implicit in the hurt itself? 

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, nuetralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.” Do you want to love like a free man with no gift for the beloved. Or would you rather be wicked to love wickedly? Be violent? Be stupid? Be weak? Would rather be anyone of these or would you like to frozen your lover with the glare of your inward eye?

Someone told me that my articulation of thoughts here make me look all the more foolish and that one should learn to cover one’s weaknesses rather than exhibiting it with an eloquence which will create an identity that I may not desire. Identities! You seek for it. One way or other you go for it. I wish to come back here to echo my immutable thoughts so that I could avoid some personal differences and fractures by throwing it right away at some of the close gazes. Here there is anonymity even in identities. Safe and excusable to an extend. Yet I demonize some of the bare truths and questions- as if their renderings may be as shameful as being naked. In Frued’s way though I wish to free play my Id here, I still have to bow down to my Ego…No! Don’t do it! Or if you do, do it with Innuendos and clever sophistication or use your innate appetite for metaphors, only to structure it as faint and vague.

“Do you fear to speak truthfully?”

Some times I feel like I am the Holden in Salinger’s imagination of Catcher in the Rye. Oh Please catch those little ones who are about to stumble from the cliff, who are about to fall apart and smash their heads on adult phoniness! Catch them! Save them! “So young and so true!”

I readjust myself and see my reflection on the window glass. What are you writing? Thoughts, I guess?

Do you still believe in the illusion that you feel better after you scartch these letters here? Scratch on your reflection dear, so that the changes won’t be marked. You fear change!

Where is Pecola? Let me not think about fear and change. Let me think about Pecola’s blue eyes. Let me think about the unfavouring earth and marigolds that never spring because Pecola was carrying. Let me think about you. Your blackness and your madness. Let me hide behind you little girl. “We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness”

“We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies to call it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

 Everything in italics are strictly quotes!

It isn't me/Is this you?

It was a long time back

I envisaged my dad’s hair growing white like some other wrinkled men

And worried how I could kiss his black mustache so audaciously any longer

And told him never to let his hair grow grey/white.

There was a smile-

Then I was told that I am too small for such a melancholy

Such a thought

And that I would laugh at it

When I would be no more SMALL- for melancholies.

You own something terrible-

An irksomely terrible tool

Of detecting my -f r a g m e n t e d- self-

It’s as if a part of me would buzz off

From the middle of something

And you would be there at the other side

Hearing me gasping, sweating, and gulping in my unhealed sighs.

I think neither you fear/contempt it- this fragmentation-

Nor you felt it as an enigma.

There was only a leisurely slowness and softness

Sans wonder, sans angst.

But you have always tried to catch my eye

Into the black lush sympathetic eye of yours

Tenderly signifying

That I am starting to be “divided”.

There is grace in it,

A glary wise grace of necessity, appropriateness and inevitability.

A grace just like when you smiled

At my small melancholy over the possibility of a white mustache.

I long to be too small for having melancholies

Too naïve for this conscious fragmentations

So that I can lean on to you

Or cling on to your neck

Nagging you to heed my shouts of premonitions

Anticipations

Frustrations

Shouts out of my subjectivity-which splits and wavers and shifts and pounds itself.

Shouts of my eerie vexations floating on my head.

So that there will be glassy emotions

Unmasked conspicuous brazen deformities

Unmodified words and unabashed guilt.

I long to cling on to you

So that I can pick up the left pieces of me here and there and drag them into

-ONE-

So that I won’t search for my self

And say that “this isn’t me!”

And so that you won’t ask me someday

“Is this you?”

Fated and Ineluctable!

Her shadow falls 

On the smooth surface

And she felt it came with a slither

A fluffy lightness

Of a beautiful white light

Ethereal and undimmed,

Defying the shadow logic!

“If it were a little dense

A little dark

A little less queer”

She wished and turned around.

Her cheeks blushed.

Crimson suffused shadow!

Red red shadow!

A flood of thoughts, urges, whims

Occasionally pulsating plumes

Pounding to be green!

“If it’s eternal!”

She wished, sighed

Shadow embraced!

Uninvited blues creep in

Fated and ineluctable

Shadow thinning out

Pitch-dark, grey, only some streaks!

Vanished!

Only a fluffy lightness of beautiful white light

Fated and ineluctable

And eternally ethereal!

But shadow no more!

"Mortified, Petrified, Stupefied!"

The wound is ripe

To be sliced and consumed

Before it consumes her.

Pardon me for the grotesque imagery

It slipped out

Of my grotesque contemplation

With a deliberate ease and arrogance

Of utmost feminine frailty.

(Can you please compare this

With a Sylvia Plath gloom

Dipped in “black shoe daddy” memories

And battered by a “red heart biting Ted Hughes”?)

My heroine in the poem

Demanded some drama-

Like ”plucked out Oedipus’s eye balls”

Staring at the wound on the empty sockets.

But that would be-

Too “rationally cartoonish”, lively and manly.

The wound is really really ripe,

Yellowish and yellower

And eternally yellow

When the cart wheeled and wheels

Quietly over centuries

With one Sylvia to another

“Mortified, petrified, stupefied”-

And mutely brewing inside!

Can it be consumed 
Before it consumes further?

Finite

I kept on counting him

Like number of birds

Perching perilously on a branch

Or like syllables

In a piece of poetry

…………………………….

But then

I regret

For all the wasted moments

As one day

He whispered of his “infinity”!

I felt betrayed

Disillusioned

Desperate

Something “finite” would be more comforting

For I can feel the infinite

Only through the finite

I am too “finite” to be the other way!

Strangers

Most of the time it didn’t matter at all!

When you blabber to me

I would smile at you

And would dream of beautiful thoughts unspoken

By strangers.

But this time

You uttered something  beautiful

And I felt frustrated,

By the thought of possibility of fantasizing

 Strangers no more!

And then I got pacified

When it occurred that

Things have that lingering enchantment

Only in the hands of strangers

Distant, unknown and less familiar!

They would start “blabber”

Just like “you”

When they are no more strangers!  

It's for Its Own Sake!

 The day is empty. A typical Saturday idleness. I play with the pillows and try to hold on to one after another- Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Whitman or Poe, Sylvia Plath or Frost- anything which can mask this emptiness. Anything which can give life to this very day. And I try to cover half of The Glass Menagerie.The house is acting as if I am an uninvited stranger sitting in some corner and reading a magazine. There is clatter from the kitchen, slushing of water from the shower, sounds so familiar and air so seen yet unseen. Laura Wingfield and her glass menagerie. Her crippleness and her shyness. Her fragility and her fantasies. Laura….and her glass menagerie! I wish it was I who could dance with Laura. I wish it was I who would call her Blue Rose. (Please give undue stress to the single diphthong in the one letter word “I”)  She would have had a wonderful time with me.  And I am tired of this victimization of characters. They crash and burn all alone in American dramas. Too much of expressionism for expressing negativity and its dimensions in life. Their incapacity to be in reality overwhelms my capacity to be realistic and practical. Tom, Amanda and Laura- their inability for connectivity is so transparent that I am forced to think over it disturbingly after every narration Tom make from his memory.  And the text is not moving steadily, I am in stagnation. It seems everything is flowing back too much to Amanda’s past or flowing out too much to Tom’s future or hanging loosely so high in Laura’s other world! And I didn’t want to touch the critical appreciation part since it’ll remind me that it is of the syllabus and I am not suppose to “read” the text,  but just to know the summary and have a superficial study to jot down some points!  Superficial study! How shameful for these characters! I wish they would come out of these printed papers and slap us!

Every day she calls and says of things missing and things lost. How she is not in ease with the recent dislocations and how she is paying for her lack of culinary skills! Everyday she talks about the need for change and her blurring ability for conversations and her “useless” withdrawals. And the last time she kept the phone it was with a bang, with a shaken voice from the other end- “I thought at least YOU would understand!” (Her “you” was drawled but sounded beautiful) And I was thinking about how useless is her drawl in the YOU there, same as that of her useless withdrawals! I wanted it to connect it with a Gautier quote (though I wouldn’t dare to do it in her presence!) “Nothing is truly beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some need, and those of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature.” Human beings of poor and infirm nature…are not aware that useful is ugly and beautiful is useless. Always there is this unconscious inner craving for beauty. Someone can’t tolerate a misplacement of things on the table, a stain on the carpet, a bend of the furniture- we scream at ugliness and throb and throb for beauty! Beautiful faces, beautiful places, beautiful words, beautiful world! Everything should be beautiful! And useful! How paradoxical! Can “beautifully useful” be an oxymoron?

Gautier wanted to defend the “art for art's sake” by the useful and beautiful dilemma! And so words here are for their own sake. There is no purpose. Non- utilitarian. How comfortable!  This gives a justification for my incoherent, dissipated, disconnected writing here. It gives a justification for my decision to post it here. (The secret behind the decision is actually to avoid the dormancy of this blog). And it’s much effortless if the head is an "unweeded garden" full of “things rank and gross in nature possessing it merely".  If someone asks me what am I writing I would say “words words words”. And if someone asks you, what are you reading? , just say “words, words, words”. (That’s what Hamlet said, but he was mad or pretended to be mad. But often there is very little difference between the two). I always misunderstand that there are certain things vital to my survival. And it will take me sometime to realize that they are not. Not at all vital, not even the last thing needed for my survival. The mind rejects the idea first and there will be vehement argumentation and trails to show that it’s not the case. And before the final surrender a sense of “nothing to lose” put out my exhaustion. This “nothing to lose” comes from “nothing to gain”- it was for its own sake :)