Eye of the Storm

After a hiatus of over 4 months I have returned. As a different person. This blog reminds me of the Bohemian past that I had once inhabited. Insanity, impulsiveness, rebellion and restlessness. That was me.

Now I have calmed down a great deal. Silenced all my histrionic narcissism and the need for drama. The inferno has been quelled and my mind is now a gentle oven for incubation of thoughts and secrets.

I have found a special world in secrets. In quietness. In control.

On the 8th of May I got married to a very lovable and gentle human being. Now I have found more time for life and less time for rants and raves.

The poetry that frothed and foamed like a wave is now contained like a mirror. And in its reflection I see tranquility and purpose. I am not a driftwood any more. A wandering soul picked me up from the shores of forgetfulness and gave me a name and a concept to personify.

Knowledge does not pain me. Predictability does not bore me. I have discovered that I too am living the human destiny of innocence, rebellion and eventual acceptance. Life is a beautiful religion.

Peace.

Relapse

How many times will I fall and how many more times will I rise.

People have been watching all my one-act plays. They wonder what color this creature would assume next and what metamorphosis this mutant would undergo next.

I thought compromise was a challenge but now I know I don’t care for that kind of a challenge.

I am not going to settle for anything less than the best that I knew and loved.

I know why I stop myself just before the last step.. it’s the fear of losing him. The day he leaves me for another would probably be the day I die.

I remember you said I will always have a corner in your heart… it means the world to me and I will live in that world.

Despite my many moulds and many seasons, he is the only thing that has kept me going. I have tried to make my mind believe that I have gotten over him… maybe I have gotten over his absence..

Why do I wake up in the morning and feel like nobody else can take your place in my life? Why does physicality seem irrelevant when I think of you… even your absence does not hurt any more…and I feel like I can live the rest of my life with the images inside my head.

Why do I go back to you when oppressed by superficiality?

What is it between you and me? Why do you haunt me?

Why does it pain so much…. and why do I try so hard to replace you with obnoxious others? I know I’m fighting a losing battle… you will win eventually…

The Death of Another Piano

They moved in with their equipment and dismantled the piano with perfect dexterity. Each piece was wrapped in crisp brown paper and duct taped. They were exporting the music to another land. To another hand.

Eventually, the pieces of the piano landed in a museum of sorts and all the pieces were assembled with great care.  A small placard announced that it had belonged to the greatest composer of all times Friedrich Hampton. A spotlight shone upon its ornamental carvings announcing its material value. Elite folk wandered in and out of the room. Some of them took pictures of the flawless piano and its grandeur after obtaining permission from the museum curator.

A glass case was constructed around the piano. A persian rug was spread beneath its legs. The whole room was exterminated to prevent termites from creeping into the piano’s wood. Janitors were placed at the entrance to guard the piano all through the day. A close-circuit camera watched the piano at all hours to ensure its safety. The glass case was dusted three times a day. Once a week the glass case was carefully opened and the piano was wiped thoroughly to retain its sheen.

Nobody spoke loud when they entered this room out of solemn respect for the great piano. They gasped and gently murmured to each other about the composer who had died recently and left the piano to be preserved by the museum in his hometown.

The piano stood there for several decades. Students did school projects on the piano. Musicians and scholars walked around it to weigh the kind of music it could produce. Artists and writers were disturbed by the mere story that surrounded the piano’s past. The nouveau riche approached the museum to enquire about its price.

Early one morning, a slight seismic disturbance was observed in the area. Subsequently, an earthquake rocked the whole place and brought down all the buildings. The glass case shattered into a hundred pieces and large chunks of debris fell upon the piano.

Rescue workers toiled day and night to trace corpses and save people who were stuck under huge piles of rubble. Bulldozers were brought in order to help clear out the land. The museum area was inaccessible to people. The government tried to salvage bits and pieces of all that remained of the museum’s exhibits of the glorious past. The piano had been completely wrecked. It was a great loss. It had invited a great deal of tourism into the town.

The last moments of the piano:

The townsfolk had made a zombie out of its soul and a whore out of its body. Everybody thought that the piano stopped existing when it was physically shattered but they had killed it decades ago. It had generously allowed the earth to consume its frame and the rubble to devastate its components. Nobody could have had a happier burial.

This is how I was killed .

Requiem

I hide shocking pink under grays
Muting wails and strumming metal, I wear silence
Bustling shoals of fish under the still deep blue
Bursting hail sleeping in calm cold clouds
Eye of a storm
Unwritten story
Sky-bound I fail
Shackled by Promethean snakes
Undead I lie still
Quiet and unmoving
Under a bleached smile shroud
And coffins of unpronounced death.

Note: My sad poems have started again.

Resurrection

The charade is over. The mask is too heavy and cumbersome. I am throwing it away tonight. It has once again become important for me to write. I remember that I once threw God away and I have not gone back to it ever. I confess. I cannot threw my writing away. It is a survival exercise.

I used to inhabit a little beautiful world where a few of my friends flitted by. They brought in some parchment for me to write poems on. They brought me bottles of ink and lots of love. I had an imaginary love. It was firewood. The phoenix has gone through so many phases and has evolved into a bird of paradise. Life might be happy. Yet, life is empty. I think, nay, I feel that the earlier world was more beautiful even though I was less happier than I am now. I don’t like happiness. It is not my natural state of being. It is a form of imposition.

I want my sad, moonlit, bleeding world back. I want all my dreams back. I want my imaginary home and hearth. I want my phoenix raiser back. I want my hibernating dreams to resurrect and jostle around me like apparitions of a sweet-smelling past. I want love back. I want my desolation back. I want my writing to be my refuge. I want my escapism back. I want my innocence back. I want my vulnerability back. I want my intense, melancholic, solitary existence back. I want my fantasies back.

I want the moon children and meaninglessness. I want the absurdity. I want the broken souvenirs and the dry leaves. I want the wilting fragrance of a dying rose. I want breathing. I want rain. I want my conviction. I want the extravagance in imagery. I want the death and the resurrection. I want all my wants back.

I sing a requiem to reality and I resuscitate my dreams tonight. My exotic, impossible, flamboyant, exaggerated dreams are returning to me this moment. They are flitting in through the windows like little fire flies. I wish to never die again.

Inaudible

Tried to hide the fifteen hours of inaudible crying. Walking away from mad insensitive people.

Vulnerable. Ripped open. Fresh wounds glistening with unwept tears. Your mad insensitive eyes.

You’re an indifferent tortured soul in a victimization drama. Spit fire at me!

Leave me. Leave me. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me. Leave me. Leave me.

Who should be saying this?

A reconciliation falls apart. There. It crumbles. Twenty reassurances and dreams wilt with it, irrevocably. And you sit over the grave staring into space, as if oblivion is the most obvious thing.

And I gulp down my pain and hold my tears back without brimming out of my eyes.
Because the shoe of your indifference will walk over my little ant pain and not even know it.

You walk into the museum of my exagerrated, obsessive compulsive, paranoid, surreal, imaginative, creative, confused, repressed beliefs and thoughts. And you casually push something down and walk over it. And you find it to be amazing entertainment. Because this museum just watches with its quiet, ancient eyes and does not complain while it dies.

You are now one of “them”. Don’t apologize. They don’t. Do the hurting well. More people will evolve. Like I am.

Ironically, I am here to be “ignored”. If you desperately want to ignore someone, you can think of me and then ignore me. I will not complain. Sometimes everybody needs the luxury of ignoring someone else. Sometimes everyone needs the comfort of not being the “ignored”.

And I also give you the special pleasure of hearing my rants and raves. I don’t take it easy. I hurt. But you can hurt me. When you grow out of your childish ways, walk far away from me and think about what happened. And don’t come back.

….vivek

..ulalume
…lapsus lingue
….po-mo pastiche
…..paradise regained
…..prometheus unbound
…..posthumous treatise
……paradise lost
…. faraday’s find
…mutant poem
..andromeda
.arachnid

 

…..canvas
…….madness
………….anguish
…………….languid angst
……………………sulphuric anomaly
………………………..anonymous absinthe
……………………………nebulous unfathomable

………………………………agonizing rain candle flicker
……………………………….. love love love love love love

……. dreary dailyness

….dreamdom
…….liquid constellation

………………………………..

……………………………….

……………………………..

……………………………

……yada yada yada
…nada.

 

 

Risen

I fell in love with a dangerous reality-practitioner… now I hurt because he makes me feel bad for the way I am.

I am unreal. Unreliable. I trusted and my time was wasted by many many people. And so I chose to retaliate by doing the things I wanted to do, in the time that I had. They don’t like it. They can’t take it. They want me to become a frozen fossil.

“Wait,” they say, “we want to watch you turn into a fossil.” Follow our rules. Loyalty, fidelity, chastity, reality, integrity… they give me these beautiful titles on a golden platter but I’m their slave. I should pawn off my time and wait… wait and wait and wait…

Second-hand human beings who cannot make choices… cannot make things happen… cannot stand up for themselves and their desires… cannot fight for their dreams…

So, if I wait like Penelope… then perhaps I’d get what I want when it is too old and unfit for my liking…

I’m a rule-breaker, a freak, a law-defier, a dreamer and a shameless fighter who runs after my dreams… if you cannot match my speed, then you’d be left behind. I’ll miss you… I’ll cry for you… I’ll mourn your absence and I’ll hurt all over… but I cannot stop… I have to keep going… I cannot stop for your dead monuments built of falsities and empty promises.

The Little Monks

The little monks stood
On pearly white chunks of snow
Carpets of verdant grass language
Flowering irises

And they spoke to us
Of dream lotuses
A glassy tear rolling down Buddha’s countenance
Golden domes of crimson fire
Prayer wheel murmurs
Yellow silk and paper roses
And innocence.

In the heart of war they stood
Blazing like a thousand constellations
And spoke of lamb fleece
And peace.

Far away from hatred-spewing violent sermons
Glorious white they stood
Upon aster-strewn pulpits
And sang in baby talk
Like wind chimes tinkling
Tinkling passionately in the storm.

They told us of Bodhisattva
Who slept in the pollen of an unknown flower.
Bodhisattva the death slayer
Who whispered across births
In the antlers of a martyred antelope
In the howling nights of a Himalayan monastery
Bodhisattva who reincarnated
As aeons of windy plains
As tremulous bamboo music
As shivering waters in silver streams
Bodhisattva, the zephyrous trance breath
Levitating like an incandescent orb of peace.

They smiled like an annihilation of impurities
All indifference conquered
Under their tender barefeet
Running across rabbit lands.

The little monks with their round moon heads
Rained azure purity
Their dainty finger buds
Caressing eternity.

Jasmine-breath babies
Walk the earth untainted
Love sprouts in the valleys
We need garland makers not gunmen
Poets and not politicians
Dreamers and not death angels
Flower girls and not fraudulent saints

All ye mortals in the veil of sanity
Followers, disciples instinct-haters
Posterity-destroyers
Upholders of ancient lies
Yesterday-mirrors
Tomorrow-brewers
Today-killers
War mongers
Political godmen
Conditioned androids
Blind painters
Hypocrites
Hark! The delicate anklets of truth
While it dances dances dances

Strumming the ephemeral ether strings
For ripples of musical energy
The little monks stood in silence
As the Books of Lies burned
In a gentle inferno
Of what is – Truth.

Sisyphus Dreams

Outside the window a rain is falling… somebody else’s rain… I just
bury my face in my pillow and sleep. Within the walls of this room my
musical dreams dare to fall like tears. They are shy of strangers…
and they fall slowly like the raindrops that fall when we kiss in a
dream. And they sleep with me… burying their heads in my pillow. We
sleep.

And we don’t wait for it to dawn… we wait for the night to
linger on like the resonances of a mist. And we ignore the first rays
of the indecent sun that dares to trespass on our tryst with
melancholy..me and my dreams… the noises of daylight make their tiny
wings to wither like softness suffocated.. and reality pinches.

I watch your countenance waft across the room with the fallen
feathers… in its slowness and sad sweetness it looks like someone I
have never known. The shadows have begun their strolling around me..
they fall gently and unpardonably heavily on me. All music is you..

Futility has gathered me in its lovingly strangling arms…
and I surrender. The only arms I desire are distant, misty, and feel
like a single clumsy kiss. For something lost and irrevocable I am
punished with more irrevocable losses… I feel my body… my scar and
remember its presence lovingly.. I cannot afford to lose my
self-love…

I wait till immortality swathes me in its promises and thrusts
more dreams into my night… I see a distant day in your arms… with
your voice.. and your fragrance. A day when all cruelty in this motley
world disappears with a heavy downpour… after which everyone is
acceptable… incomplete as they may be. Incomplete as I am, I drag
myself with this burden I cannot hope to unload… like Sisyphus I
heave my way uphill and come back down… Yet some day on the way a
flower would grow to soften my struggle down… and then many flowers..
I would watch the clouds shift shapes and the changing hues of the sky
from twilight to twilight…And I would see the full moon wane and grow
back…and the waves that recede and come back… and the music that
subsides and resurrects..

I will sing wild songs that I alone can decipher… I will
watch you grow out of touch.. with me and my dreams… if you come back
like a moon night you will be surprised to see them intact… and you
will find someone complete and forget incomplete me… but I would grow
back when you are invisible… I will grow in dreams like a gargantuan
ocean and an overnight mountain…

And I will sit at the seashore watching the myth of a
blueness… seeing only gray.. the ships sinking into the horizon like
wingless birds… and I will take my absent guitar and strum…

Our
first kisslessness will haunt me in the candle’s stupor…and my nights
will have more wilting dream wings…yet like tiny stars they would
regrow and rearrange themselves into magnificent constellations…

You. The one sensibility that governs my being. So as I
spend the gloom of a warm climate and you of a cold one, across several
oceans let my remnants travel towards you… only you…