Words are simple here

It was large and it was warm. There was ice-cream, there was hugging and there were words of promises. They may end soon and I may move. I never remember the happy bits but I always remember how they feel. Like warm chocolate ice cream that turned liquid when my tongue felt it. There was a smell of company and warm sun that blinded us. There was screaming, yodeling and we laughed like God's crazy inventions, which we are.

Not for the first time, I felt, these pieces fit together. We may not be best friends for life, but once you know belonging, you can't go back.

This is happy time. This is simple and untouched by the covers of dull bedrooms and corroding tears. This is the other side you wake up to when you get in touch with yourself.

She could be any of the faces I saw. Tiny eyes, yellow skin, high cheekbones. My xenophobic mind mistakes her and automatically labels her an offensive vernacular label even as she holds me back to give me a little something she made herself.

-For you.

I try hard to feel happy, to be nice for the sake of the little present but my palm hides it in the folds of my skin as I bow a reluctant bow.

Among the Rolex-taunting, SUV-careening monks of Dharamshala is a little girl-child with the softest of voice who despises foreigners, even as she and her’s continue to live and procreate in the latters’ land but tries to keep no hard feelings.

Thought exists only as an escape from reality. If you spared me my addiction to thoughts I’d never smoke a cigarette, inhale, snort or inject myself. I wouldn’t read a book; I wouldn’t look at a picture. I wouldn’t cry or go high or low. I would be me – open, wide and unflinchingly mathematic. You could calculate me into a system, break me down and find bubbles that intensify for the sake of clarity because I Will it to do so and you would be amazed at how little I cry for myself or any of you.

But the fact of the matter is, even as it hurt my legs and arms, I moaned and shed tears asking strength and the correct way (whatever that may be) for all those lost. I cried for the girl I couldn’t smile at and the man who wouldn’t let me touch prayer things because I have a high forehead, wide, bulging eyes and brown skin. I cried for the monks and I cried for my lost friends.

I cried so they find their way and hoped the blood they shed fighting back their country was worth it. I wished for once they would prove me wrong because I don’t see how a reluctant Communist Republic would change its mind when it has the power to never need to bow.

The ocean reads like a face today, the bright red crabs tap dance on the deco and I singe one with ash. I expect him to blow up, meat all over the place strings on my face and some on her curly hair (I love curly hair, did I tell?), some over her T’s vast hips that sway like tumbling waves.

‘What are you looking at, honey bunny?’ she squeaks, mass appeal a daily event for her.

‘SSSSSS’ I go. They look at each other. Turn left, eyes facing each other, right to left and left to right. They look back, left to temple and right to chest.

A mosaic of feelings, one under the other, under the other, under a Marlboro, a contemptuous nod and a face full of teeth.

‘T, do you like crabs?’ I ask

‘I love crabs, yeah.’

‘Well, then let’s cook you one,’ I say and let the remains of my second cigarette fall on a solo crab, back to me, as it tango-es to the sea.

Your time is up (I might die alone)

This is where I am.

After four years of traveling in a crowded local train hanging on for life I wondered for the first time what would happen if the pole gave away. It struck me then that I never thought of this before despite being strung like this for hours at one point of time. Maybe I was too busy trying to get to places to ever notice, or maybe fear is something that comes only to those with time on their hands.

I do have a lot of it now -

Fear of waking up invisible; fear of waking up without a reason to; fear of waking up too late; fear of waking up in the middle of the night trying to find a meaning to the whole damned thing; fear of not waking up at all.

The streets are full of eyes, watching and darting this way and that, never showing a sign of recognition. I remember walking these streets ever since memory stands and it surprises me that despite being a veteran street-walker I never seem to meet someone familiar. I look for a colour I remember, a mole that I touched before, a cigarette-lighter I borrowed, a shirt/book/vice I lend, a habit that I marked as odd/entertaining/amusing, a voice that I heard... but everything seems to be a part of a vast, giant river that changes into deeper oblivion.
This way, that way they all flow - brushing, groping, pinching and occasionally murmuring something incoherent - although conspicuously dirty- but never recognizing until a pair of eyes from a few feet away looks

Right

Into

Me

I know he’s seen me somewhere – somewhere he didn’t want to, somewhere he didn’t want to go to, some part of him that didn’t seem good to him even when it was him.
He brushes his greying left temple, lets out a deep breath and looks down, joining the forces of analogii. I button my shirt right back up and walk away to a page and pen padding the empty places with “those damned” adjectives like only an Indian can.

Aliens

I come off at ends now, broken as my skill and weak as my will grinding my teeth to avoid one more reversal of promise or falling back but I can’t help it when I am low as now, sinking into the chairs and the starry-black granite holding my fingers out, hoping someone will come and wrap a palm around it and pick

Up from the ashes and
Hold me tight.
Oh-oh-oh hold me tight,
Fill me with the light (ho, ho, heh, ha, ha, ho)
Of the flame
Far end, wide and burning itself
Into colourlessness

Into normalcy where I sit in the back seat of the bus, watching it crash into the wrong lane - Full Speed Ahead - the driver’s back twitching and careening the steering, his spine jerking up like a sax’ buttons, letting him breathe and then plunging him again deep into the journey towards the burnished sun, vexing and wavering as I bind it into poetry from the rear-view mirror. Everybody runs towards us as I watch them from the corner of my eyes – strange beings that seem to be growing out of the cracked earth. And back in the bus everybody’s shades of purple – light, dark, purple with blue, purple with white, purple with green, purple with black and purple with purple. This is where the clock strikes

Hijacking my dreams
Savouring everything I was once
Time
And letting me watch
As it sprays everything with cataracts
Like those in the sky
White and black
Clouds of a colour it likes
Time.

And as I pull off my glasses to rub my burning eyes, I see everybody turns to brown and black and they all stare back at me passing lewd whispers in my ear even though they are so far away.

9 Letter Magic Words

Countless cups of tea line her desk as she taps taps taps on her computer playing her important part in the all-too-significant 12 feet by 9 feet office . Not cubicle but the Office which accommodates three other not-so-significant and much unoccupied office boys and a secretary with a jaundiced liver. A word passes, a lewd song that will play in countless taxis and rickshaws moves in and out of her head as her fingers go tap-tap-tap against aging keys of a veryoldmodel computer. The whole world outside is a block of coloured vehicles and the little people, all on their way to somewhere important. A drunk weaves through them, swivelling on his haunches like Bizarre Bee before he trips and falls underneath the shade of a car. The sky with the she and the all-too-significant-too-small-to-be-true office wavers as he watches, his amber eyes lighting up with hope of…something. Something that no one else could see. A dribble of saliva runs down the corner of his sensuous, charred black lips, cleaning a tiny part of his face as he goes off to sleep with the sun forking the back of his neck and his defenceless, dimpled buttocks.

She passes him on her way home, eyes fixed on the large birth-mark imprinted on his dimpled buttock, as she walks right behind a mumbling hobo. He hunches and watches the world from behind angry red glasses perched on his nose like some picture of a Beatles dude, sheforgetswhich. He looks behind and curses the world with lewd words, loud and dubious. For a moment, his face clears and his eyes lose their angry glow. The lines crumpling his sun-kissed forehead are obliterated by the evening sun leaving a clear, round face with the corners of his lips upturned as if positioned in a smile. He giggles and repeats the word again and again before he falls into splits. She giggles with him and before she knows they are both screeching and howling. Everything is set straight and everything falls in its right place, slowly and evenly into the back of her head where everything is set at slow.

100th Post/Preparations for Finale/Confessions from a Paintbox (Part II)

She does know how it feels like as bits and pieces of memory crumble and bleep in Her like electric currents but on the surface she is still asleep, plunging headlong into vast seas of men and women generally shattered and specifically wankers, motherfuckers, spazes, whores, pimps, jhats, choots…angels all, as they float and push, screaming and hitting to break free. The Christ wonders how long she will be here.

And there, in empty spaces that sit on mantles, shelves and peer at her through yellowing pages in the words of Victorian women crying insanity for a read from her textbooks. I go mad sometimes, hitting the wall for a lack of places to. And in between the fingers of exotic dark women and beautiful, gleaming men who laugh and make merry on alcohol and love.

She holds their hands and croons Johnny Guitar, Madonna, Madonna, Johnny Guitar and such other hymns till all the heads are spinning from intoxication and exhaustion. For the lack of poetry and artlessness of foul words that drop like rain on a July morning they all smoke and drink till there is nothing else that matters and repulse creates larger room under the blue-green ceiling over the badly-lit boulangerie. The Underdogs watch and snort, smoke announcing the presence of something divine-A Last Supper or a thing on those lines.

Quoting and Unquoting.

He wouldn’t ask me what I thought of it but I wanted to say it to him like a novice, like a crazed-up misplaced, messed up hippie chick that the photographs of the leaves and the green that enveloped the frame reminded me of headaches-turbulent on the inside but so tranquil and unperturbed, outside. That the piano music was all wrong-the right wall should have Jon Brion’s theme song for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the left should have Profokiev’s Romeo and Juliet. But he wouldn’t look up or even see me move around all alone, waltzing with his psychedelic flowers pictures.

Artists disappoint me, especially the ones who do amazing work. They make my head spin.

So I lay down on the cool of the glass top when they played Happy Birthday for a well-passed middle aged woman in a restaurant full of Saturday night out-ties and closing my eyes I felt everything melt and loose levity.

‘The days are bright and filled with pain; enclose me in your gentle rain…’

I look at her in her pink shirt and dark pants, a blood red shade of lipstick encircling her plump lips and think of September and Art Tatum

“Then one day you look into the mirror and realize something’s missing...

your future.”

How he makes me laugh.

METAMORPHOSIS (BOOK II)

The drying after days of turmoil is a finger pointing at the veal coloured lips-no azure of blue and no willingness to be a proper purple.
Line after line, erased and deleted till all that remains of a dark cloudy sky is a naked, sunless afternoon-an aftermath of a hoarse rain. The very inappropriate yellow skirt sits in ennui on thighs and ‘secret triangles’. The fancy underwear is chopped to a tiny piece of elastic that is now naked except for the innocence only the ugly can conjure.

A lovely crescent is being spanked till it falls asleep, bottom skywards.

On the pages of another evening is a curly haired little girl crying at the demise of her light-blue crayon. A word spreads throughout the painting. Stick men and women with tiny plant-like children; large bulbous flowers; the mountains and the brown stream with incandescent green are all awaiting the sky, angry with the little girl who is scratching her pee-pee due to frustration and unhygienic habits. Soon the stick lawyers will be on their way, with suitcases and mandamus’. The poor black and green birds are all suspended in confusion, rather dead, suspiciously blissful. I ask her if they are angels.
No, angels are white.

Lawyers are black.

You and me, we are brown.

You decide, I tell her. The angry roars hurt her 7-year old self. She draws them miniature Prada clothes, high-heeled shoes for the ladies, patent boots for men and Nike sneakers for the children. In deep curiosity she looks, queen squatting on the outsides of her kingdom. The lawyers are still accusing. She wails now- tired and retiring abiding defeat-into her mothers lap and then in exile on the polka dotted bed, embracing her mother’s ample waist.

The queen gone, they subside. I draw them a fire. I draw them guns and I draw them a sky in the grey of blind pupils.

The child is gone.

Breaking To Pieces.

Beautiful. One, two, here we go...

H-I-A-T-U-S

I thought these would enteratain you for a while.

Code : Thank you for the template. Where do I send the vada pav?

Rex Venom : He can stimulate every bit of what you can call yours. Be warned, you will be back with tight nipples and a craving for more exoticness

Transience : Her legs are wide open but you could never touch her. Just a-w-e.

Ashes : A head-trip in a 24 year old body.

La Surrealiste : Every bit surreal, every damned bit.

Zofo : You ought to check the words once you finish admiring the pictures underneath. And thats where all the words come from, right-down-there

Dlak : He could tell you what could be a potential name for a band.

The Saturnyne : Wicked coffee-drinking funny guy.

Vikas Kaul : The current-affairs man. Makes up for all the newspaper politics you didnt read.

Esoteric Wombat : All you would want to about Yankees and he's got an amazing comic linkage on the right.

Tim : Makes Hegel seem right with his simplicity.

Anil : The icing always cometh the last here.

ABSTRACT SKILLS, KILLS.

Heir soir il n'ya pas des etoiles dans le ciel noir.

Endlessly time and again, a vacuum at my navel pulling in everything happy and arises nothing but a painfully dark feeling and answers that reek of guilty pleasure. And suddenly the only thing happy is a Led Zepplin song light and sunny like the Ocean.

This week in sentences: Give me thy hand! I think I am going blind!

Black to brown to nothing at all. Give me colours, give me.

Individuals with abstract skills and no social skills are absolute failures.

And a room with beige walls with brown spots and long dark legs rested carefully against them.

And suddenly you know how inflated noises sound like; so close you know 20% liquor-ed drinks can get you philosophical. The water seems to bite into your hands. And before you know the sofa throws you up and down. Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy, bouncy baby Wee! How fun to be 17 again. Gallons of chocolate sauce was used instead of blood in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho.

And then you see the sun set before your eyes leaving behind effervescing purple. Alls well.

Hier soir, il ya des etoiles dans le ciel noir.

-Are you still unhappy, she asks.
He suppresses a giggle pressing his teeth on his wanton black lips.
-We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, Yellow submarine, she croons.
They laugh, happy children on a winter scratched afternoon.

TU DIT

TU DIT

The day falls to be happy. The grey clouds burst with the uncertainty of his smiles and that of the funny feeling in my stomach when I see his crinkled eyes and his frail body heavily lifting up. Like a drug addict I said. The figurine in her hand looks pretty. She wonders if the other one is her boyfriend. You bitchy prick I mutter. The rain falls and I wade through the puddles, watching the eyes on my clingy t-shirt. Nice he mutters. There are sudden bursts of smiles; a premonition of good things to come is around the corner and they watch me with incredulity. You are much easier to talk to now they say. Yesterday the picture they saw and giggling they ask how the hair stands on top of your head so still. I push back my head and laugh a Carrey Bradshaw laugh. Like a drug addict they say. Life wasn't normal anyway, now there are these wonderful masks that lack of coffee brings. I am suddenly all of bright blue pullovers and heels. I am suddenly glass bangles and white t-shirts.

Life can't be loved and I am not trying any more.