The Butterfly Bandage

It’s a frantic struggle, this life. With no wars to fight and no causes to live for, all hell resides within. And when the defences are down, all poison inhaled-exhaled, chewed-spat, consumed-exhumed, they come back manifold. The hours of rest grow shorter, walls grow closer and rooms get smaller. There won’t be a point in crying because it’s taken over more than just your eyes.

But there will always be the butterflies.

Even in the dreams of hell. It is their strange hypermetropic state, I suppose. Being hidden under grandeur, revealed as scarred reptiles only close to death. In moments of distress, I conjure schools of them to decorate the face of my fears with spots of crimson and indigo, white and green, yellow and pink. And when them hounds sing their ghastly opera in the midst of those wanton hours, a butterfly somewhere will flutter yellow, fighting the usurper Black; against gravity, against lows and highs, against darkness and helplessness. And they’ll hide even then, holding their deformed bodies akimbo only to those they fight. Till everything quiets down inside, slowly seeping away, taking away bad memories, good ones, pointless ones, ones of lust, ones of anger. We’ll be left alone by butterflies and demons, by friends and foes, by everything but peace.

No song is as cherished as the silence after an evening of wars.

Sins from a Paintbox (Part I)

Do you know what it feels like…

To wonder if your hair really touched that tickly part of your shoulder blades and looks as good as it feels like when you lie on your stomach, naked hands spread across the width of the flower-streaked bed resembling Christ asleep-waiting-with a cross nailed somewhere into Her spinal cord?

The weight of which drives into you as you stand in a predominantly Muslim area eyeing pieces of beef being rolled into moist chunks of soft bread that cottons your mouth as the spicy meat burns in your stomach and leaves you salivating for more (and more; some more). The baba at the counter counts out change, chanting numbers slowly, trying to keep his hands steady and his red, watery eyes focussed while you watch out for the vague trace of someone familiar from the corner of your eye.

Shame tickles Her armpits as She lies with Her head sunk deep in the pillow surprised She can still breathe.

Two minutes.

That’s exactly the time it takes you to realise that this spunky, little dark hang-out you pick for a date with a poor, confused, lovely androgyny makes you happy because liquor feels nice after the first-burn and everything is light and breezy like his jokes on backstabbers and sinners. The chocolate glazes the roof of your mouth with its cheapness and the waiter tries really hard to ignore you but it doesn’t matter. He whistles his loud, cheap whistle as your raise your hand to beckon.

She tries to move without shifting much, the fictitious nails move in a little deeper. They punch her in like a million.

Fifteen minutes.

Is the time the guilt lasted for, as you watched your mother looking away sad and confused, unable to understand why you just did what you did. Everything is slow and jaundiced by remorse now, but what is to be done is to be done. You feel so bad, so-ho bad you cry all through the cab ride back home, retching into your tiny hands.

The Christ, she shifts her loincloth to scratch between her legs.

Dance

The window is wide open letting in a transmogrification of my bright orange and yellow landscape that still runs and reruns in my head. The music is loud, too loud like the bright white light that bathes my dark skin crumbling from lack of moisture and care. I can feel my wrists twisting and twirling (so are my hands, my legs and my hips each one in a circle of motion quite its own), hitting and banging unidentified objects. The bloody maroon furniture and the dark blue walls are transformed from the white hot light I emanate. (I know, I know, I know it’s me). I bounce off the not-so-bouncy bed and hurt my shoulders, my blades, my wings, my fingers, my spine, my neck, my talons, my halo, my horns, my, my, my….I cant stop. The water mixes with more water and all my pores contribute-no more tears, just love, pure, white, hot love that cures and blesses and burns holes into the evil that surrounded and compounded for so long.

There is music, words and so much poetry brimming in my mind; it’s all a haze of ugly conditioning.

I fall, get up and jump around again.

The walls and the floors underneath resonate, joining in the celebration (Hey bring in my drinks, champagne, vodka, rum, those colourful bottles of fermented, rotting veggies carefully stacked in the liquor cabin, whatdyagot!). We all thud against each other as Fergie’s voice muffled under mine, muffled by the voice of my skull banging against the wooden closet thuds against walls and unabashedly oozes into the homes of neighbours and parents. Of the children and the blind who are too young to understand and too old to change.

My ankles hurt so bad now. I scream and fall on to a misplaced pillow and sink into it. The music drips in the last few beats and stops. The ensuing silence is clear and empty. New and Anonymous.

The doors are wide open now and nothing is screaming and there isn’t any blood and there isn’t any pain. My anger is white, my limbo silver and my peace…colourless.

Playing At The Window Pane

The lights flash twinkle, twinkle as my drunk, far-sighted eyes move blink, blink, blink. This time it was something really burning everything inside. A lot of water but I’m still blinking at two in the night.

All my life I wanted someone to tell me I was missed.

Terribly missed.

And when it did happen I had other, stronger designs playing in my head. Of ‘tyag’. I rub my hands on my naked spine till the hem of the chequered sarong and back again. Sweet, music-less rhythm. The unrest creases my smiles these days, some sort of waning. Sometimes you have to strong, sometimes a liar, sometimes very, very smart.
What about the resigning, fragile ones?
They die in wars with the Taliban and economy.

I left them a week ago, on a cool terrace built amidst a sun dried forest, but the voices move around and so do the eyes. Cool black. And orange stained white fur. You may change but the sadness flows gently choking you, thudding in your ears before it pours out. In tears and ink stains. In secret scissor marks and delicate knife scars.

I find vacuums comforting, then. Silent ones that sit and stare back at you.

PANTIES AND PERCEPTIONS

The flower- eye catching in its hollow green cushion-lay still, its bright-red head drooping in indifference to its beauty and its reedy, yellow tongue sticking out, mocking itself along with the others watching it.

The walls close in and form a cage of sorts. A concrete 7 feet by 11 feet cocoon that went berserk. And along with the other tinier but more significant walls, cups in the smells of its captive- an ashen grey smell that sometimes unjustly sours to that of tobacco smoke. A smell of late night lights burning out without permission; of books torn apart that can be adeptly stuck back to perfection and of sacrilege - virgin white panties being chopped to imitate the Miscellaneous.

Don’t get me wrong; I despise whites and pinks; unyielding sensibilities are exasperating. ‘How can you be so adamant?’ I asked one and she (I assume it is a she) just lay there, rather cool in my discomfort. Off you go, chop, chop, chop and she was gone, rough cloth to my grey paint.

Sometimes its sweat-an acute fear of Prospects Black that rises from innocent scribbling on wasted English textbooks to melt into ‘inexplicable’ raucous tears. A sense of careening. A sense of purity and a sense of the fast approaching invalidity of soul.

Iris Murdoch sucks.

She watched it with intense curiosity, a pain of injustice filling her. She plucked it and threw it into the flowing sewage.

PHASES OF A DARK MOON

Well, what about tonight? Moon-ed, maroon-ed and pseudo-stoned.

A warm evening in Bjork's ‘Cocoon’, an oriental madness in the beats and a slithering voice licking with a rattlesnake's precautious pleasure. Not the urgency though, much more of a slow unwrapping, followed ungraciously by Bono. No comments.

I am being watched, again. Rattlesnake urgency there, unable to drown and dissolve in all of this, all of this can be yours; all of this can be yours… like before. You are growing fat on expectations, aren't you? I know what you want, something pretty. Pretty sad. Pretty lonely. Pretty lost. You can hear happiness standing on down street; footprints dressed in red as the wind whispers Mary… An old black pair of high heels and a tearing GO GOA! T-shirt hiding little bits of brown flesh swaying to and fro in rhythm searching dance as you watch. I know you want it badly, now. Just like all those times before with before people and all those before stories. No surprises underneath, you have been there, done it all, the indecision, the reluctance; a knowing smile with the soft thuds on the expectant floor and the scratching on the watching walls. Followed by the screaming and supplication.

You Draculian playboy, you.

Funny how fornication speaks for infinite thoughts of a virgin with an untamed word tambourine.

Though you might hear laughing spinning swinging madly across the sand, its not aimed at anyone, its just escaping on the run and before the sky there are no fences facing.

Always makes me smile. Always, always. Always.

SANE POSTS

Welcome to the world of the grammatically and dictionary-wise correct. De hopes you enjoy what you (dont) see (at least this time)

So I was on this break right? Something like forced leisure. Like a paralysis, only this time its the head. The brain. Complete refusal to function. So I'm coming home tired and want to write/draw something nice that I can remember through some days. Something like a first kiss or something, I guess. I wouldnt know. I hear Im not really all that kissable as I am kiss-ass-able. And lemme say, Im a pompous bit of shit. So I like what I hear.

And then the day before yesterday I was sitting with a pencil in my hand waiting for my mind pictures to flow out. Its a beautiful thing, these fragments. I think I learned to put them to abstract sense. Nothing. I mean, nothing. I'm thinking of a stupid joke I made up. Saying that if I found a guy he would replace my hand-as in I'd stop writing. Total pun or what?! To think I had no clue what pun really meant.

And then when I was almost sleepy, there out of the blue, a picture. I drew. So perfect. OOO so lovely. I drew it till 1 and spend the rest of the night staring at it. I think I made a baby, there. My own, very own, lovely child. You know whats wrong? Now I cant paint it cuz I think I'll screw up. I'm so scared. Watching out the corner for them to look at me and tell me what colours they would like. They are twins. Much like I wanted it. Beautiful twins. Wait till tonight. Im going to get into your uncoloured womb and caress your featureless faces. No abstractness, thats what they are. Unformed foetuses, so beautiful stuck in the process of birth.

FRANKENSTEIN

FRANKENSTEIN



Holes built, the trenches wait, not a glass coffin but a solid box of facts. I lower it, in the waters tinged with pristine hatred and create him-the scientist, of numbers and reason. He had a world in his head, of threads and black-purple shades, merging to form a picture in otherwise vacuum. I waited, squatted on his side as he woke, a cruel gift embedded in him-Mary Shelly's fantasy. I watch him walk and move into me, with an ease no other man can afford. I completed the story for her today; watch her turn in her grave, her grey, tattered white gown rustling in the wind brushing against my dead ears attached to a mind full of open doors. He swims around in my stomach, killing me, I let out a hollow scream. I drown him-paracetemol poison for his naughty self. He swims and then dissolves, his gift now mine and armed I walk into words that no words could ever be, into a realm tried so hard to be embedded in words of undue importance. And the doors open, I let them fly in, processing-me the machine, with a carrions gift. They were theirs, now mine-I let them in and they haunt me, eyes closed I see them murder me. They wake, give birth and walk in, again and again, chaos-unknown and surprising. I sing myself-us-to sleep.

Close our eyes, to the octopus unbound. Close our eyes to the octopus unbound.

Rummy silences

Rummy silences-stolen kisses

Tonight, there won't be need for thought he moves in with promise,
And through the caramel glasses I see a dull sparkle,
Don't look for my love he said,
And then the thought of tonight fell from his lips,
Onto my dry, tensed tongue,
That received with want, with urgency,
Tonight, I would be his love, his God, his muse.
And down my virgin path he went,
Limbless beast on a sliding descend,
The burn grew and a hole gaped,
My dull eyes now blissfully hollow on his caramel mirror,
The vaporising sweetness in its pure form,
Travelling on without traces,
I wouldn't miss till the next drop fell.
Sleep, sleep, it is time to rest he whispers in my throat.
Sleep. Sleep, I whisper in my feathery pillow.

NIGHT

NIGHT

Lips part, a finger pressed on her throat maddening her. There was need yes, but more so the guilt along with the fear of being caught that was arousing. The voice, the lips and the hands weren't anyone's; they were separate entities on her studio bed. She squirmed against her white sheet covers as sweat spread on her forehead and under her. The ache was maddening but she knew she shouldn't stop. Pending screams threatened to pour out along with those secrets that she had only read of. The fingers ran everywhere like frenzied monsters-fingering her lips, clutching her neck, grasping her heaving breast. Some moved below with maddening rapidity. The smell of an anonymous body, a thousand million of his words climbed into her head in different voices; she wanted to call out his name but she didn't know it. The fingers rushed along in their work as a hand flew to her mouth closing it with desperation. Her eyes flew open and searched in the darkness for something to remember-traces of light still weakly secreted from the burnt out bulb. She watched its afterglow till her eyes rolled halfway underneath her lids and surrealism took over. Her feet wide spread ached and there was an electric feel in her stomach. She muttered something she couldn't understand as the frenzy grew to painful heights. Waves of an old song fairly forgotten rolled in and she stopped; the irked fingers stopped as abruptly as they had begun. They withdrew to her side wiping away -partly disappointed- the wetness on her white sheets with the grotesque flowers before lying on her heaving stomach. And then she sung the neglected song feeling the wall still left unbroken, her body still on fire. There is no need now, she assured as she sung. The anonymous components relaxed in pouted acknowledgement. It was neither ego nor was it pride. It was unwillingness she comprehended. There had to be someday to regret this but not tonight. The still wet fingers, the faceless voice promised that this hadn't been a one-night stand.

They weren't her but soon would be.