Monday, July 31, 2007

It isn’t often that I win an award so I’m thankful to WUBA *does the V sign* and Saby/Jim/Anonymous for voting me into competition.

While still reading about cold blood murderers and after watching Psycho for 3 weeks in a row, there aren’t many people you trust, especially the ones that you seem to take a liking for. While she lit up a cigarette the feeling dawned in me that if I moved my head fast it will fall off – just twist and twirl off my neck, gracelessly plopping into the red coaster garnished by peanut shells. I grab my arm and rub my wrist and the soft skin above my elbow to feel an electric hollow, soft and ethereal. To feel a million balloons under my skin, fuzzing and ready to break. I scream as an involuntary response to seeing a friend eat a burning roach while the other one burned my arm with flakes of burning paper. They all spoke, louder and faster by the minute and I thought if I sat there any longer I might faint. A man passes by, fixing me with a stare and I see a million rings on his lips, ears, mouth and nose and I want him to come closer so I can smell the putrid sweat.

-What did you say?
- What?
- Are you drunk on that much?!
- (chuckle) Jee-ya

Well then, life goes on. For the first time I let the Bombay sun burn my back to toast without cringing. It is boredom and restlessness that makes alcoholics and addicts of us. Sometimes criminals. Sometimes petty thieves. Sometimes suicidal. I consider my motive standing in the middle of the road as a truck whooshes past me. I could fall now, who cares, or attend my meeting. And I do the latter. Sitting in between people who don’t like me much I consider if I should scream out watching the girl beside me scream at me. I watch her eyes bulge out and hear her teeth grind, she talks of blood, gore, violence and I sit and grin considering the appropriate reaction.

I do nothing till I wear out. I spend the whole afternoon amongst computers and people who slowly stop eating bottles and hollering. I wasn’t scared but I did consider breaking my head into the computer screen till they played Radiohead.

Ode to Moshpit Yuppies

It’s on all the streets you crossed till now,
The eyes and the bits of integrity that stayed behind
Leaving you
Fraying at the edges
What will you be if you keep walking?
Will you disappear?
And will you walk yourself into a nice little coven
Inhibitors of grey walls and vertiginous elevators
Those barren 6 by 11 ones that heave and toss you around
Throws you into wars
With your bedspreads and newspapers
Fighting and spilling tears on the truth till it changes
Into apathy - pills and tranquil-shots
One, two, three, maybe fourteen

And you look so pretty there
Pouting your cigarette-tanned lips, your eyes rolled to your left
Thrashed and drained out of your brains
Full of green-vein maps
On a one-way street to misery, mumbling cheap subway poetry

Light me a fire, baby
Maybe we will put on a pretty-dark, pretty-grim scene
Nod our heads and bang our brains out
Knocking into each other
Trusting to break
Onto the other side

Seeking Eternity

The one thing about being human is being unsteady for so long that the only way to stay still sometimes is to immerse the self into the most feral case of cynicism. Not that speed is an issue; the pleasure that fills the pit of my stomach with every dose of anticipation is unprecedented. It is the end that kills me because I know the ride is over before it even begins.

Losing focus is another way. To wake up to a day that has no definition in words or vocabulary and no metaphors, nor a ready asylum in a handful of memories that seep out of grasp by the minute. Every ‘wall’ is a door to heaven and every set of colours that you come across remains as characterless as a face in the 9 ‘o’ clock local. This is the stuff that poetry is made of, going back to basics (picking souvenirs from disorder, only to set things straight even, as I would later on like to be quoted saying) and setting everything up like an infant. Defenceless and vulnerable, handicapped and dependent-someone whose naiveté demands to be fallen in love with.

It must hurt to know that paradise is a two-bit reel that plays on as long as you can afford to keep the show going. Cynicism however is a life-long companion, a permanent bed-companion to easy life and available to anyone who has the ability to hate unfailingly. Love comes and goes easy to members of 'Live Large' league who see joy in the tiniest ever glimpses till you come to understand that being an adult is a constant struggle with the Will to Live and Reason to Wake Up Tomorrow. There are so many questions that stand at the gate of tomorrow – you most certainly can cheat it out of an answer but there are too many underhand activities involved for you to live long enough like that.

I was searching for one such answer (dutifully at my cynical best) when I looked out of my reverie and saw the leaves whispering and wagging their green heads in an important way like I have seen most adults do to offer sympathy or show understanding. The silence that cocooned their conversation concerned me. It had the vague smell of hospital corridors that you can’t rightly decide to hate or to like so I asked someone what it could mean and nobody replied. Staying there a long time, I examined sideways the uncannily human dialogue all the time thinking of myself as the special girl who infallibly sensed when the end was near. I was counting the seconds already.