I have grown old today

It isn’t my birthday. It isn’t even a momentous day. It is a slow day in fact. I have had much time to walk around, lie down, watch passable movies and even have thoroughly uninteresting meals. I have had a few conversations that felt as good as a second or third smoke does with far too many shots consumed already. I thought of some wonderful things I will never make – I just thought of them because I can loll around in its weak shadow imagining I’m safe, I have things to look forward to, I have hope. I’ve grown old though. Much older than I ever felt, I think I’ve taught myself to be older. I am getting used to things. The pain is dulled. The heartache continues, burning everything in its way, blinding me from what lies around me, but I don’t have to pause anymore. I like it there, the glow that burns burns burns. Here, It once singed holes in my clothes, my tendons, my head. I cried unabashed to let it out.
It never goes. In this realization, I grew old. Wiser by a million years. I have woken up these past mornings and reached out for the bile with my tongue, ever so hopeful it left. Yet, finding it there wasn’t disappointing. It was just familiar.
However, as science may or may not prove in the future, I have firmly established a fact, maybe. No one grows in a straight line, up ahead at a uniform speed, from 1 to 5 to 20 to one-day-you-wake-up-and-you-are-too-old. My growth pattern, traced over probably important phases in my life which were irreversibly spent in a world much unrelated to my then-Present have led me to wonderful charts. I trace them all over my books, over important papers, over files, over stationeries and desks left unguarded with smiting pens of all colours. Everyone asks me what they are. I, very frankly tell them it is in a process of discovery. They always grow into wondrous things – dragons, horses, dogs, umberallas, woman’s face within an alligator’s… opening Rorschachian avenues to those who care. In the end though, there is no pattern and there is no line. These are hours spent veering dangerously all over my life span – 5 goes to 50 goes down to 3, goes up to 10, comes further up to 25 and then back to 3…the pain fluctuates too, with no rhyme. I have grown, and in seconds I am tearing away at my childhood, grappling just as poorly with things that scared me then.
I am vertiginous. I am dizzy. I poke my head into strangers' rooms and squint for similar traces.

Freedom is a responsibility

My idols are poisoned with flaws. They may not be the worst but they definitely hide their cracks with humanity. Perfection – and I hear the perfect would rather pack their bags and leave than stay here with us – always was a bit too bright to look in the eye at.

Why is that as we move to wherever we are headed, humanity needs to be shown a human side to have faith in itself? We run out into the wild, strum a guitar and scream, scream our displeasure. Even as we buy it all and fill ourselves with everything we can find, till we rebel against the bad by being worse. And we consume and we cry.

I want someone to tell me that each one of us – and I can’t settle for less than everybody – has a well of compassion in us and that it is the pain of everyday that makes us cover it up all with anger. There must be a reason why we eat what’s not ours and wear a skin that we weren’t meant to. There must be a reason why we can go right ahead even when our hearts call out right unto the end when they are clogged with cholesterol. A lot of people tell me its part of the system that I’d like to know who switched on, back when all of us were good, our joys more simple.

And even as we grow, I can’t help feel that our weight is pulling us lower and lower into the ground. And maybe if we slowly do go down, we’ll find, somewhere towards the end everything that we should have kept back. And it might not be a mother, or a daughter, or a son. It might not even be who you thought you were deep inside. But it will be someone you wished you had met.

So there won’t be a need for love or hate, anger or joy. And we can just be, free finally.

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.

Victim of somebody elses fetishes Part II

Page after page of dates, histories and facts. There is a world out there that swirls in its own doings and undoings as I type and retype. A coffee stands by me, guiding my way in the dark. There is a world out there that turns back to see itself, finds recognition and goes back like a dog after its tail.
The daylight that no one saw has slowly begun to sink with the rays of hope. It had always been sinking for me, but then I moved out like the others. There was no looking back, there just wasn’t. We all walked forwards into the pasts that our flesh and blood was assigned much before we were born.
Unlike me, my body knows where to take me. My appointments here and based solely on its liking and it’s fetishes tie me down. I try and take the most crowded route because learning from the outside has always been a safer ploy for me. I like to spend, I like to smoke, I like to fuck, I like to drink, claimed some of them as I passed by, wrapped around innocent minds, too slow to register the perpetual winter that their childhood has entered. No changes planned there, not unless the flesh and blood found new souls, found new minds. For now, there was rotting, crows feet, despair followed by bouts of wisdom.
The blinding light of joy lifts its skirts to reveal the sorrow that always hides underneath and in sadness they always find their way back in. Little pleasures that always crush, that hold us back, hoping there will be more and they will always be so good.
Like scabs we will pick and pull, enjoying it as we go down.
And when the wound resurfaces we’ll break down, fall to pieces, waking up to find ourselves joined at the hip to yesterday’s picture story -
Each one rubbed a little at the edges, each one fading. Each one a memory we can’t nail down definitively but can always recognize somewhere deep inside.
Soon the scab grows back, we stand back in lines, to march forward, backward, wherever we can go from here.
Never be static, never be static, the Big Brother hiding inside me chants.
An age is walked through and this generation has begun to sink. A mother opens her arms and the children rush back, angry and hurt, still childlike underneath there somewhere.

-

RIP.



What Darwin didn’t tell you…

We are too many. Heaving and grunting, pushing past each other, we are all aiming to walk away and afar from the crowds. But there is no where to go, is there? We are always walking into each other, bumping, crossing paths, falling in love, hating each other…

Meeting new people, they say.

We are all strong now, in our diversity. Because of money, because of our sadness or our happiness because a mall around will sell you Anything you want.


When Darwin outdates, jihad steps in.
I never believed in a man ruling us all but I do believe that nature has a way of controlling.

This is where It switches on the auto-destruct mode. If we cant find heaven here, let’s blow ourselves into one.

Because the world is black, white and grey, I really don’t know where this is all going. Sometimes the rain takes me off my feet and sometimes, the news of a massive flood.

There have been so many deaths this month. I don't know why you had to die. Maybe you do.

This would only work on a blog more popular than my 1-audience ramble writing space. But I hope whoever sees it is moved to any action at all.

You could help those who would appreciate it, here:
http://www.helpageindia.org/bihar-floods.php

Adjusting

Living is constantly looking into a mirror. No, I don’t think life is vain – it could be, it couldn’t as well. I just think what you see is what you are. Some prefer to constantly travel away from life. Going away, away, away, till you are a little speck and the world is one as well. The lacuna grows. There is no collective universe because down here. Because where I am the world is too big and too difficult to connect to. It awes and amazes me and I can only hold my breath and marvel at the complexity. You are all gods’ beings and god made you all as big as him. God with a big g. Human with a big h. Not that I haven’t ever looked at this mirror. My years only make me more aware of it and I walk back a million times, always losing my way. Always a little too happy, always a little too eccentric, always a little too angry. Always a little too calm. There are days when I walk right back and I stare and stare till all those little dots, all those pimples, the vast forehead, the small nose, the dimpled thighs, the tiny ears vanish to become just one, pretty being. Human with a big H. a huge one, if I get really lucky. Full of meaning. Those are the days when I am happy and so is the world. People look at me, smile and wave, hug and kiss. I do my best at being; I keep looking into the mirror and forget how to walk away.

What scares me though is the feeling that soon enough, the doors away from the mirror will close.

Someone asked me why I am so restless in my sleep and that is solely because my being is in the ocean and water needs to seep and occupy as much space as it can. Thrashing and flailing is the core of me and staying still is difficult. The mirror will darken, the doors away will shut and I will suffocate in bourgeoisie hell. Life is so very hard with its decisions and lack of instructions or tips. Maybe my mindless wavering is turning me blind to life’s hints.

What are you going to do when you have grown up

As taking anything to your grave or into the afterlife isn’t a possibility, I have to ask you this:
What are you leaving behind you, you fucking piece of shit?
Will there be pictures of you in people’s wallets? A story that sells millions because you lived like a ticking bomb? A song that has you in it, on it, singing it, whatever?

Will they frame a more beautiful version of you, name you the prophet and buy your idea of life as a religion?

Will you add to the marketing industry? Will you be a Che who asked for upliftment of the poor and ended up being a style statement for the rich?

Will your illustrious life burn right after you, giving nothing away? Or, would you be a mystery with little holes in what was previously your skeleton closet and now, has translated to your new life?

Will you be in a room, piled and devoured with the last embarrassment your sphincter will ever cause you?

Or will they find you scribbled on your walls? Will you leave behind you a trail of faces that emote and learned to love you, like only kin can? Will you have someone to call your own?

Will you be a posthumous superstar? Will you burn till you live and leave marks – wanton, beautiful marks – when you leave? Will you have a presence that is too strong to erase?

You don’t understand, I have to do this. Outside of words my life is amount to exactly Rs 12,487 (a little less that American $360). I am an OK person with occasional bouts of rage and a day or two of depression in a month. Outside of words, I am a black suit, grey tie. Inside here, I am everything I want to be. This is what I have to leave behind.

And Now For Some Philosophy

I’m breaking into smaller vestibules -
Bodies of feeling,
Each one writing on a different page
Black and white stories –
Starkly contrasting one another;
Blending with the summer sun
And the cotton shirt,

With the frank, wide open eyes on the other side of the table
And the whiskey
Yet I am.
One with a tag. One with a name.

I’ll make you proud, Mother,
I’ll close my eyes and slit myself
So I never bleed again into the world
Or into its secrets.

Meeting life in it's myriad forms

Across the window is a wide range of beauties – dark skin, light skin, brown skin - that glimmers under their red wedding trousseaus, their white gowns vaguely bringing to mind 70s beauties and the blue dresses that wedge into thighs and buttcracks. There’s nothing that you wouldn’t know when you are this old, they tell me looking back at myself out of the window.

We wait for the lights to turn green, looking far and wide, into ourselves and outside the circle of life, counting our steps into the countdown.

I am slipping away even as I speed further into the web of life.

The neon lights leave marks on my bare legs. His big tummy caresses the steering wheel as he shifts, at discomfort with the creatures of the night rustling their wares outside. I notice thin white lines of a smile, a smirk, a leer.

The sky winks with a crescent moon that follows us where we go.

They know they aren’t getting lucky tonight. Not with us, they wont. Because parents aren’t interested in orgies. Not with their children at least.
This is how they get back at the life they can never have, as D would say.

I smile back because that is the most polite thing to do when you’ve stared at cleavage for more than 15 seconds.

They smile and I can hear the lewd male voice swear. A muscle ripples in his face as he laughs and pulls at his own tits.

Outcasts mar you and I can never tell you how that feels.

If nobody’s said it yet, somebody ought to:
What are these words but a pale imitation of reality?

Arranged and Labelled

Time and again, back and forth as I pendulum in a crazy routine, I wonder what really keeps me alive. I don’t know if I should, you know, bring about questions like these for fear that a lack of reason may kill me (forgive the sad little pun but I am in no literary mood today). But it has to be asked once for myself to know that I am still not a machine that unquestioningly moves and appeases itself with whatever it gets.

I was staring at the pipe wallpaper on the idling screen when I realised that everything would go back to being what it was, that it wasn’t always round or fair-square it was just a lot of random pipes in different colours and textures that would eventually fill up the screen and then empty itself for some other pattern.

I feel full sometimes, would it be insanity then to go back to being…blank?

It is an alphabetic order though

A- For the complete Ass I make of myself every time I know I am being loved. I am genuinely one of those who doesn’t deserve love because trust and satiety don’t come. Easy. I know I should try but it doesn’t come easy.

I cried the last time he told me he liked and whatabout much because a reply was a commitment and I cant commit to people or jobs or anything.

B- for Bludgeoning order that holds me tight, that encompasses everything that I have been. I couldn’t keep myself in it any longer, the constrictions are for a banker not a half-wit, confused loafer who would one day like to live in the backwaters and open air with a packet of masala cigarettes and chai.

C- For true love that is a Curse. I cant live without, you. You there, you know who I talk to, right?

D…E…F…G…H…I…J…K…L…M…N…O…P…Q…R…S…T…U…V…W…X…Y...Y

For all the secrets that dry up every morning in the pillows that have grown with me and stayed, I think forever.

And then yesterday when he went on about his ambitions and I watched her lingering interest being watched over by his possessive eyes, I realised it wasn’t love. It was boredom, I know there is an end to it somewhere and that is where the pipes will fold, the music will stop and everything will go back to basics.

Z.

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.

Jarring Ends.

Trickle by trickle it falls into grooves and it slides, inside and out, dribbling secrets. I am undone these days, watching things fall and laughter seize my insides. Change to a level, is permissible and acceptable. But sometimes it’s random, pendulums between blacks and reds.

The idea of gore puts him in frenzy, you can see the spit gathering at the corners of his dry, curled lips as he speaks of brains falling out and oozing with studio-crusted blood. His hands move in and out, rubbing his thighs, folding and unfolding. It is difficult to believe he is nineteen, or any age at all. You can see the glint in his eyes and you wonder if things really go wrong in people’s heads. The scenes play in your head with each word he says. He spins you in his tales of brutal rape, abusive deaths and brains oozing out. She laughs for him, loud and claustrophobicizing. It’s empty and loud, fake enough to cover her reality in shrouds and shrouds of tissue-for-the-lonely for her entire life. In bed she probably cries, whining he doesn’t understand her.

We sit together and watch the sun set. Comfortable silences when the tremors stop and the laughter pauses and the gore dies. The curtains fall but it kills me there never is an appropriate end. I am honestly tired of serrated ends to relationships and comprehension.

.

Brushes of Incoherence

Everything that goes up comes down-like Sundays blueing evenings after merry Saturdays (blah) unending night spend in tiny cubicle-rooms trying to get Fiona Applistic images to stop and only the music to play. I love you, love me, love you, love me, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.

Please.

Have you been in silence that slides and glides into evenings of nothingness? Blissful, repellent blankness? I love it there-the colour is always just a shade of glossy white. Empty and bright.

A truck flying at you through a dark night.

He talks to me-then press the clutch and slide into the third gear-forget fifth, that will take some time but you can keep shifting from fifth…

I don’t know, should he be staring at me like that, unsure of what exactly where I am?

My anger is purple in colour, tiny droplets drip in, forming purple webs on my white, glossy silence.

Don’t give a fuck about me, I don’t know if there even is a fine line between crawling bridges.

Now Playing:
Howling Bells -A Ballad For the Bleeding.

RUSH

It grew in the arms of lavender tinged bubbles and red glass bangles-a beauty that only stupid stupefaction could appreciate to full extents. And on its tiny fluctuations a hand fell, its curious little fingers tickling the innards till they broke their own fragile bodies breaking to uncontrolled, shrill laughter. And then the beautiful glass bangles broke into ugly red stories, unwanted progeny of mesmerizing magnificence…

His webbed fingers pointed at the sun-smeared sky with a threat to break it just the same way; a vile promise. And then he began with the daily business of whispering to the statue with restlessly moving eyes. His goggles covered over half his face and the other half he forced to unending activity, the old pink lips moving with a fish-like rapidity. The skin and bones statue would not speak, his mouth surrounded by a white stubble trying in vain to hide his secrets-sorrow of not being able to earn for his family, a parched lip pouting with the need for food and the stiff upper lip cut to half its size on being charmingly honest even deep under this pit. The pair of dark glasses stared at me; unfocused and almost there, my eyes stay still, threatening for a next move from under their half mast behind fogged frames when the siren announces the end of the war, even before it began.
Red lips move closer to my ears, wafting with them a putrid smell of decaying fishes before my eyes ward them away. Her cheap orange lipstick opens and closes ricocheting words, which my curled brown lips promise to pay no heed to. She smiles her whorish smile, her ample breast jumping up and down in amusement or need for attention. The apple enters her mouth and she sets about masticating with a primitive manner, the orange now smeared on the white innards of the innocent apple and beyond the confines of her huge lips, a poisoned purple now sickly growing under the coats of sunlight lips. And then I let my eyes close, a million voices to play from yesterdays notes, promising myself never to stay awake travelling second class.

TRANQUILIZER

On the bridge I stood long enough to make a pause in the shit, urine and hobo drenched landscape watching the cars pass by. They look beautiful in the night with the red lights contrasting the orange of the city. I think I will make a movie-a 3-minute one showing everyone how colourful these things are in my head. Like the films those guys you just love to want make. Or like Holden Caulfeild (Or Salinger) thinks-guys you wish were your friends and you could just call up and talk to. Or maybe not, because vision is limited and cant be twisted beyond the bounds of your eyes. Unlike words, beyond colours, beyond limits, each time a different beauty to each one.

Or maybe I need to make visual drugs, it couldn’t be too difficult since I hear Silicon Valley or wherever it is where they conduct useless robotic engineering will be making chips that can be etched in your spine. (Am I scared, or what?) Maybe I could marry one and together we could create visual oblivion. Curie style. I know it must be colourful. Colours are hypnotising. Or maybe someone from the CIA. After all I hear, oranges are really blue but seem orange because of some ocular default.

And the train passes, blurring, my mind a melange of Jefferson Airplane, Catcher in the Rye, which so far is a pretty irritating book and also a predecessor to Vernon God Little (You should try reading cable TV sometime) and the Sudoku puzzle before I melt into a-surprisingly deep-cat nap. Much of the colours have faded in me, I am dying for the home I need. Only I never seem to reach it past the dream.

BIRTHDAY FURY

So Im back, once again. Its not little that I whine about and loneliness under a flickering bulb rather than a well groomed dirt rich life awaits. I ought to fall down and die probably, but there are no nine lives and more desires than for nine hundered. Im tired and jumping again, hopping on the hoarse rythmn of a dry, dry cough.

Fury

Angel. Where are the tears?
The garden dries,
Give me a leaf, a night sky dried,
Leave. Love me, your mini death,
Not black, just beautiful orange,
Your death. A sunbaked, moonstruck, orangeness.

CARCASS

CARCASS


"You don't like me anymore?" She asked him, the one in the shadows where he always was; not because he was scared; he was fragile or just did not belong in sunlight. She was walking out of the doors of her half-light world when she asked; suddenly not sure it was good to do it. He stands back, in ease, in chaos that he draws and calls peace. Her yellow lace turn back to grey, her whites again walking back to colliding dust and covers, he was an illusion and always will be for her, but still "You don't like me anymore?" He draws for her, on her palm, words, more of them, tickling her, then he smiles-happy? Content? No, the drawings lie; he can't. She loves him even more, desperately. It matters now, wounds do no heal on her, and he cuts her, his nail now digging in her palm. He walks back, into the dark, she wounded as the dust comes back to cover. Mother would not let her child die.

He was a shadow and will never stop being one; she was already afraid of the paper walls building on him in purpose.


Am trying to develop photographs without much success. Need to find some articles (or books) on it. Any help is welcome.