Lemon Trees, Tears and Sorrows

However chaotic and distorted one’s perception is, the artist has to reassemble by his contemplation over the wounds. For a momentary salvation. For recuperation. For Consolation. It takes so much time in one’s life to lift the fog and discern the falsity of appearances. But it never ceases. The distorted vision never ceases as long as we are incapable of an unknown sainthood.

 As it’s always said an author is an isolated being. Detached. To comprehend the reality with vividness. The isolation is a choice. And the choice is for others and for oneself.

Lemon Tree. The movie is the story of struggle and defeat. The lemon tree grove- thick and fragrant- with the yellow fruit flourished- big yellow spots all over the field. The woman nourished and looked after the tree for five decades- the land and art she inherited from her father. Her emotional attachment and her courage to not let them go- to not let them be uprooted for the defense. The story is poignant. The woman is courageous- admirable- melancholic. Have I been in her place would I have struggled that long- to protect one’s own grove? Do I have the capacity to love and feel for the lemon trees with the intensity with which she feels? Sheer empathy will not give us a glimpse of her exact feelings. One has to experience in real in one’s own life with the given circumstances.

Circumstances. It would be such a curious an act to imagine people displaced in alien circumstances and how would they react, contribute, refute or accept. It would be curious to know how would they hold one human being despised and abandoned by the other. “What are you thinking? What have we done to each other?” Words somewhere from a thriller movie echo my thinking. Why should we destroy each other in possession with each other if possession is all that about it. If love only means one thing and should mean one for all.

Who can see you beyond your skin? To define you not by the loss or the preserve of your virginity, not to measure inch by inch the corporeal taints, not to see you as filth of another man. But to see beyond your smiles a silent suffering, shivering murmur and shocking nightmares. Who can judge the sanctity of your soul against the sanctity of your flesh and bones? There are nails sprouting to bleed my clenching fists when all the roaring definitions come back to my memories. Dallying along my solitary path. You could hug a tree and rub your tears on its rough bark and bruise your face. You could climb over it with your staggering wavering limbs all the way to the top, and hide somewhere among the branches, with such a quietness of an angelic grace or a demonic stealth (for both are undifferentiated in today’s world)  with only the wind among the leaves hissing on your ears, curbing the heart wrenching human sounds. H U M A N   S O U N D S. As heavy as an unadmitted guilt, all glittery and showy, with poison tucked in on each man’s sleeve and the polishing façade of truth so untrue.

My survival is my own effort. The more I am humiliated the more I find my worth. The more I am condemned in the name of some man made institution of relationships, the more I see its dishonesty, its futility, its fear of human weaknesses and how it struggles to ward off the ever threatening daring souls by malice and cowardice. For there is strength in sorrow. There is acceptance in sorrow. There is clarity and discernment of truth in sorrow. There is compassion in sorrow.     

Refuge

The muse has been persistently in my consciousness. Taunting to seek more more more truth. The larger truth. To seek it from the bird eye view. The outer sea consumed by the inner ocean of bitter blues – of melancholic sepia- of distant darkness. What I have been was ready to be a forlorn creature – to contract itself into an old shivering star at the high sky- as if to stare from a timeless past so cold and quaint- to this frame born anew- or at least believe to be so. This year is in confrontation with a blessed brain in readiness to devour more words- books- movies- knowledge- music.  I have become a creature of sharper conscience and ever sharper perceptions. 

All the blemishes of the world have been revealed and yet in the process of revelation. It disappoints and dissipates my search of beauty- love- innocence. Yet there are momentary consolations in the form of an orange sun at the threshold of a droopy twilight. It’s as if all the ugliness of the world is converged and absorbed into this big burning scar- to take along with it all the tears and tragedies for us to slumber peacefully- courageously- guiltlessly. 

As I move from one lonely day to another- eating biscuits and turning pages – hearing Bach and Beethoven and Satie and others- gazing at the visible borders of the horizon and dreaming beyond- many a times I have plunged myself into a fantasy of swimming so artistically in cold blue water with a robust glazing body- cycling on a straight infinite plane with legs free from pedals and wind across my hair…and other numberless reveries feathering my fancies.

I have learned to be more private- to keep myself away from the insanity of the world. To check the narcissism and yield to the calling of authenticity. To be distant and observant. To laugh privately at the witlessness of the fellow beings- to their blind confinements and meaningless adherence to meaningless conventions- to their thoughtlessness- to their shallowness- to their art of living an existence in death.

And their comes the wish to paint- blue paint smeared on the white canvas- shaping slowly into Buddha under the Bodhi Tree – Buddha who sought enlightenment- Buddha who saw the present- the inner light- Buddha in the  very act of living. As I drift between the darker alleys of life and the brighter broad squares with a cooling blissful fountain at its center, the fountain within me freezes as soon as I taste the wide gap. The gulf between me and the impalpable others- failing to touch my soul they bewilder at my unreachability.

I don't know from where to begin the benignity of truly connecting with another being. Is it when others begin to suffer my invisibility when they themselves are tired of their pursuit of surface pleasures? Or is it when I myself am jaded of my seclusion, cloyed by the broodings and threatened by the steely authenticities, bleak truths, and the repeated wounds. One who is after truth will be injured persistently. He will be a seeker at first. Then the recluse. Then the sufferer.       

        

City of Djinns in my hand. The book is not so heavy – ready to be tamed by the constant handling and turning- tolerant to be waiting when I soar in my fancy with images of that city which will tell the stories of its riots and ruins, losses and refugees. I take my refuge in it.       

Forgone

Thy name I least repent

Thy love I most cried for

I quiver under the memories

-of our ever enmeshing passion.

Railing through me

Through you

Is a covert world.

Place your candles before me

For I am the flame

Place it where the wind heads.

Let my ember be kissed away

Quiet like a pressed snow.

I unfurl like a spiraling fume

Enough to clog your pulsating pain

I quit for you to embark,

For you to breach the chains

And embark anew on wings.

The Chased Butterflies

I spread out my hands-

With the weight of the wind in between.

My leaves were already stale,

 Yellow and faint.

And there was no sand in-

 -Between those pebbles under my feet.

And I couldn’t hide from the orange sky

-Leering on my chest.

And the evening kept me only some chased butterflies

To hang on my nerves as to tickle and flutter

And to count my leaves

And to season themselves-

 Before their fast approaching grave.

I am an Artist! Who are you? You are Artist too?

Its blue beads have rolling lights and dashing reflections. And at the circling end of 33 such beads there are white threads hanging together. And I show them below the lights to see them crystal shine like his face in blues and in bliss. From the day it was presented by him it never lived a day without passing light. 

  

I haven’t ever noted this before. My words having a callous existence, leaving it like little islands with trees full of meanings, flurrying its red, pink, white, black, yellow, ripened and un-ripened cherries on heads leaning on its craggy trunk. I have never thought myself as an artist, who can spun words so indifferently that people’s brain can get shattered on my cob web.  I have never thought my mouth was ever lashing out a barrage of reactions, questions, misinterpretations, that it’s difficult for others for they are getting away from their coziness castled out of slanted truths. 

They say you cannot understand two people’s private emotions and sentiments. Because you don’t truly belong to their space.  And I never thought myself as an artist who can understand and empathize with other’s emotions and react to them in the most objective way possible. Even the most close ones, fallen prey of my impolite silences.

A junkyard full of deluded images of oneself. Always myself in the “right box “and others in the wrong box. Actually I am the true artist, contented with enough justifications, detachments, critical perspectives, twisting myself and other’s thoughts into pathways of redundant analysis so that others can finally despise me with most plausible reason lightened on their heads.

 That’s exactly why I am more into the beauty of the blue beads which is presented to me than the religious purpose of it. That’s why when someone discloses their most personal, moving sentiments, emotions and tears, I think upon the generality of it and react with the most ridiculous way possible. Because I am true artist who can later ponder upon it and dare to photograph its soreness here without an inch of disgrace.

Romeo with poison and Juliet with apparent death can have only the impact of critical onlooking of plot structure at the stage of complication and denouement for me. If you want to see the sentimental impact on me, leap onto my heart and rip off the skin, in beneath am I still the artist? I should think on it artistically. I am an artist. Are you?   

     

     

Afternoon Doodles!

Desiderans

The downpour seems to have an intimation

Of romance implicit and artless

That has been consistently thriving in her since yesterday

Though it’s only a revival of an existing bondage

Its face felt anew-

And invigorated

May be out of the sensation of being lost-

 And inanimate

By his absence- distance and missing

It may be the lack of ceremony of making him tea

Or simply he is either not there, or not palpable.

It reminds her of a painted figure-in low key

Dissolving into the background

Slipping into abstract

And there is only rain outside

And only rain. 

The Pending

The lost patterns of rumination found itself

Right at the edge of his joyous flood.

It’s been only like bliss interim

Later points razor sharp towards the hollowness.

It’s been like the pressed eraser-

-Waiting to be accelerated

To dwindle the defining lines

Bordering the sane – insane-

That the delicacy of his unresolved pains

Proved by a turbulence least imagined.

And yet

The strangeness of the mind less contemplated

Amidst all accusations and antipathies. 

Reversions

However hard we weep, scream and yell

The ones who determined to slip the grasp will slip

Break away, fly and trick.

-Betrayal-

Have two distinct faces

The one that smashes the bones

And the other that simply scoffs at its fragility.

May be it’s the victim

Whose vision clouded and clowned

Because for some

The ways of the new men is uncomprehending

They simply don’t fit in the new men context

Of digital texts, life, morality and love!

They are the yellowing papers

Waiting waiting

With single lines, margins and book marks

Sniffing flesh, blood, poetry in skin

Thickly sorted like in a red pomegranate.

Only to be later torn

Or eaten by moth

Or thrown to flame

Or to be ashes along with a sewage disposal

Still

They are seldom toxic

Unlike a digital explosion!   

Collisions

Why do we meet such people?

Like two similar fishes

Colliding in an upsurging wave

Being sported by an unknown hand

Out in the air      

Amused

Wriggled!

Vicious smiles-

Laughter - wonder-

Words slipping - stretching themselves

Slithering out of our mouths

Words rolled and sparkled

Ablazing the air around us.

All too much for us

To take in together.

And in the end

Only to dive backwards

To swim their own ways!

                  

I use to draw blood dripping bird wings

Broken glass pieces

And barren trees when I was small.

What did you draw when you were small?

Did you have myriad hues?

Vibrant and variegated?

Do you have silence?

Do you have sorrow?

Don’t play hide and seek

The moments you are in hiding

Would be the longest one to me

Don’t make me seek

Because

I am oblivion to

Faces hidden by intentions.

I know

You are out somewhere!

Wistful and waiting

Clenching fists-

Spitting thirst

For an abiding collision

For know not why!