You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2006.
The moon is a pan of flimsy tin
The sun a mere braggart
The evening skies are shameless
Flaunting their russet skins
You love burying yourself
Irretrievably
In abysses of the past.
Loud trumpet calls, parades
And red banners you detest
Secrets are your retreat
In midnight sleep
You whisper words of comfort
Grasping my fingers tight.
Thief
Sometimes I could
Slit your emptiness with a knife
Wanderer Conman
Dreamless sleeper
A violence in me quivers
To conquer your silence.
Pretender Liar
Plunderer of loneliness
Drag those heavy caskets of kisses
Hidden in your cave of solitude
And plod homeward soon..
Else
Let my remnants
Haunt your green box..
Well..I used to play neopets long back and I had a neohome for my pets.. When I saw this program called “Gliffy” I was reminded of that little room I wanted for myself.. a little home actually! So I decided to fix it up! 
Web 2.0 rocks!
Here is the image of my own lil home!
Go build yours..
I am listening to “Swallowed in the Sea” by Coldplay.
Earlier such songs dragged me into them and suffocated me. Or they produced in me spasms of love, longing, pleasure and pain. Now the song sounds like a meaningless whisper halfway between sleep and waking. It brings with it some nostalgia of an earlier me. Yet, the sleep overwhelms me.
It is either that something in me is dead or alive. Something is deader than it was or more alive than it was. I think the “me” in me is more alive and what is dead is the “other” I craved and longed for.
I think I have “turned into something beautiful”…. I have dropped all my baggage behind.. I feel like I have died or am very close to death. I feel pure and free.
I am cold yet not numb. I am warm yet not alive. I am asleep yet not dreaming. I am awake yet not breathing.
I feel like something in me has transmogrified or died. Something in me is a new-born smelling of darkness.
Perhaps I should not write about it and chain it to words and to an experience. Perhaps I should let myself be…
Whenever I threw tantrums as a kid, my grandma used three methods to appease me. I always fell for them.
When I cried or got difficult she used to say “Inga vaa..unakku oru pandam tharen” – “Come here I’ll give you a “thing”. Actually the word “pandam” is not used often in common speech.. it is a word like “thingumajig” It was some kind of a “spell” actually.. 
and I always fell for it..
After this lure, she took me to the kitchen and gave me something to eat or play with.. something very ingenious.. like a icing sugar doll in a tiny velvet bag.. or an old wooden carved box.. or a hairless doll head. These things were treasures in her trove.. I dont know if she was like Cinderella’s godmother conjuring things up in her kitchen when nobody was looking…
The other thing she said was “Naa unaku appuchi tharen” ..now “appuchi” is more interesting than “pandam”.. appuchi was some very interesting eatable.. like “thenkozhal” or a limp biscuit 
or appalaam or a piece of jaggery.. or some powdered sweet.. perhaps some powdered ladoo that is at the bottom of the empty dabba..
But these things were yummier than fresh sweets or biscuits.. and I immediately forgot all about crying..
The third thing was a “samaacharam”.. she’d say “Inga vaayen..unakku oru samaacharam solren” Now this was a good lure too.. a distraction.. this “samaacharam” was a piece of information or news. She’d to place me on her lap and say something nice… like “After appa comes back from office I’ll ask him to buy baby (kozhandai) a chocolate” or she’d say what the cat did on the wall or what the mouse did in the kitchen. This method was not foolproof though. I often remembered why I was crying while she was in the process of telling me the “samaacharam” or this “samaacharam” itself was not so interesting.. so I used to go back to whining and crying. Then it was the “pandam” or the “appuchhi” again..
These memories returned to me today when I saw her saying these things to my three-year-old niece. 
Now my grandma and me share a special relationship..some special childhood memories include the story of goldilocks she told me every day. Every day! I asked her for the same story over and over again.. The story went like this..
There was a little girl called goldilocks who had golden hair. She was a very naughty girl. One day she went into the woods without telling her mom about it, which was wrong. Then she found a little cottage in the middle of the woods. This was no ordinary cottage. It belonged to three bears. The appa karadi, the amma karadi and the kutti karadi.(papa bear, mama bear and little bear) Goldilocks did not know of this of course. That day the three bears had gone on a picnic to find honey. So there was nobody in the cottage.
Before they left for picnic amma karadi had made some porridge and kept it on the table for them to eat when they came back. Now, goldilocks saw three chairs in the house. The first chair was appa karadi’s, the second one was amma’s and the third was kutti’s. She sat on appa’s biggggg chair it was tooooooooo big and hard for her. She sat on kutti’s little chair and it broke into pieces under her weight. Then she sat on amma’s chair it was just the right size and soft and cushiony. Then she saw three bowls of porridge on the table. She tasted the some from the biggest bowl and it was toooo hot and burnt her tongue. She tasted some from the medium (the word grandma used was “nadu tharam”) bowl and it was too cold and bland. She tasted some from the little bowl and it was warm and just the right taste. So she ate all the porridge that belonged to the little bear. After eating she went into the bedroom and found three beds. She climbed into appa karadi’s huge bed and it was tooooo big and hard for her. She got off and climbed on to nadu thara karadi’s bed (from this point my grandma started calling amma karadi as naduthara karadi(medium bear)) This bed was toooo soft and full of laces and frills. She got down and went to the kutti bear’s bed. She found it to be just the right size and softness. So she started sleeping in it.
After some time the three bears came back home. (Now I was horrified..and every time she said that I was..
)Appa bear started sniffing the air and concluded that there was someone in their house. Just then kutti bear started crying. They noticed that his chair is broken to pieces. So amma bear pacified him and appa bear promised to build him a new chair. Then they decided to have porridge. Then the kutti bear cried louder than ever. His porridge bowl was empty. So amma bear took a little bit of appa’s porridge and a bit from hers and mixed the two and fed little bear. (I lovvvvvved this idea of amma karadi)
Then they went into the bed room and what do they find? (I was wide-eyed and gaping at this point) Goldilocks sleeping on kutti karadi’s bed…. achacho… what is she going to do now? The three karadis were surprised to find this girl here and they started talking among themselves. Suddenly, goldilocks woke up to find three bears surrounding her bed. (Imagine!!) So she jumped out of the bed and jumped out of the window and raaaaannnnnn into the woods. Then she nevvvvver came back.
I made her tell this story every day atleast 3 times. Then there was this other thing I used to love about her.. every night before I slept she made me tell a shloka – “Ramaskandam” which was supposed to keep nightmares away. After this she sang a song for me.. it was a devotional song.. “karpaga valli nin porpadhangal pidithhen nargathi arulvaai amma” – but I have never heard it fully coz I usually slept off before she finished. 
My grandma bear is the sweetest of all..
give shape to story
please stab gently
castle lake red swirly
disturbed hard wild deadly
hot hypnotic cuts long
soft voluptuous squares crawl
like serene horrors
ostracized exteriors chorus
like smells in traffic
a confetti of dreams
descend like lodestones
lost to eternity
Dy Iz
You left me to drift
In loneliness
Yet I laugh
You know
There is no silence.
Nor loneliness
For we who is buried
So deep down in the convolutions
Of our wild soul.
Who hears the death knell
Sound like thunder
Like a horrifying night
Being inside our towers
Of winters
And scrawls of trickling snow
Down our calves.
iz
Wordlessness or absence
Silence or space
Distances
Isolation and troubles
All these have lost
In their struggle
To obliviate me from you.
Tiny owls
In blindness
A stake driven into their hearts
My prophet of love
Drifting I am
But not away.
In a spaceless timeless consciousness
I stay like a clamouring resonance
In you.
iz
Night after night
You dream of forgetting me
And wake up with sweat
Streaming down your insides.
Night after night
You delude
Of memoryless dawns.
iz
You fail
We are bound
In the fragments of Timeless.
Centuries away
A glimpse in your eye
Dreams of me.
Loser
Where do you think you can go?
Away from me
And my miasmic warmth.
We cannot escape the sky,..
A poem is born my dear iz
Clutch its tender feet
Showing up
Through the womb of insipid Time…
A distant bell
Somehow seems enormous
Noises from another world
Far away from ours.
iz
Pull the tiny feet of baby poems
Out of me
With you painlessness is pain
Pain, painless.
Objects stay in their places
Like monotonous insignificances
A cluster of zeroes
From a shark of the past
Lays itself around me
Like tiny innocuous eggs.
iz
I stammer
You swim into my everything
Like baby fishes
You swim out of me
Like a forgotten tune.
Was it a few minutes before
When a bare nakedness
Dazzled in me?
When I flailed my fins
To capture it
In little phials called words.
iz
Love me
Like trouble
Like pain and suffering
That haunt me in this ruthless dance.
Drag me down the alleys
Of thunderstruck cities
Love me
Like nothingness.
Dust and decayed filaments
Of broken bangles
Clay
Sunlit straw
Smelling of truth
iz
Snatch away
All the lies in me
All fragments of me
That believe in order
In rearrangements and unity.
Be my chaos
Disintegrate me
Into shards of bones
And an empty nothing
Where love will dream up
A web of kisses
Trickling silver streams
Of blood and mayhem
Where love will discover
The smell of infested wood
Of burnt manuscripts
Of death and birth.
iz
Scatter my feathers
Shatter my mirrors
Let love alone be.
Why do we long
For completeness?
And for a poem
Full of pretentious meaning
That displays its wares
Like a whore?
iz
I want meaninglessness
Incompleteness
Disorder
And you.
Yesterday
When the moon kissed the high sky
He said “I am still here”
A smothered spark
Longed to leap back
Into light and flames
Yet
Ashes from another night
Suffocated its desires.
Yesterday
A wave crashed
Across the timid rocks
Of a battered heart.
There was not much to do
Than succumb
To the merciless pounding
Of bittersweet love.
Yesterday
In silent stillness
Of a familiar room
Eyes wide open I saw
A me that was here
And a me that wanted to be
Elsewhere.
On the stones of time
His deeply etched image
Is a reassurance.
Yesterday
I seemed like myself
Crawling into the arms
Of imaginary warmth.
If only poetry could flow
With as much truth
As it used to..
P.S:
In my silent room
In the dark stillness
Of an unfamiliar night
I wept and wept
Till my heart exploded with love
I love him terribly
Helplessly Joyously
Whole-heartedly
Unsympathetically
Meaninglessly
Uncontainably
Someone save him from me…
One more of them hurt me iz
One more pain
In my collection of insects
Pinned to velvet boards..
One more hurt
Once again crawling
Towards the mirage of a healing, iz..
One more of them iz
One more revenge of reality
One more piece fell off
My atrophied heart
iz
Dont disappoint me
You too should
Turn into an ugly shadow
Haunting my space in nowhere..
This is perhaps the last mail of this kind I will write to you or
anyone else. I am beginning to think if I should start moving away from
people and isolate myself somewhere where nobody can find me or have to
tolerate me.
Today S pinged me. I have not been talking to him properly in the
recent past because he has been trying to make me feel bad everytime I
talked to him. So I have been avoiding him. Today he came online and
pinged me on his own. I started talking generally and suddenly he
started hurling accusations at me. He said things like I am trying to
intrude in his space and that I talk too much about myself. He hurt me
by saying things like “Thinking of you gives me a bad taste in my
mouth”. I dont know what I have done this time. He says that this is
why B also left me.. and that I try to behave like I possess him.
None of these things are true. I am scared. What is with me? Is
something terribly wrong with me coz this is happening to me over and
over again? I cannot contain myself. I am crying at office. I am a mess.
I am really scared to ask you for help coz I dont want you to feel the
same way as he did. Maybe I should blog this mail than send it to you. Perhaps an angel will find it and help me..I dont want to be a burden. I am sorry.
