i stir my coffee slowly
clockwise and then anti-clockwise.
a newspaper sits on the table like stale crackers
moist from the humid air,

a drop of sweat
hanging precariously
from the tip of my nose
collapses;
suddenly giving up
………..its will

descending below -
to rest upon
an empty page of a diary
dated September 29.

I love this song…

Where has that old friend gone
Lost in a February song
Tell him it won’t be long
Til he opens his eyes, opens his eyes
Where is that simple day
Before colors broke into shades
And how did I ever fade
Into this life, into this life

And I never want to let you down
Forgive me if I slip away
When all that I’ve known is lost and found
I promise you I, I’ll come back to you one day

Morning is waking up
And sometimes it’s more than just enough
When all that you need to love
Is in front of your eyes
It’s in front of your eyes

And I never want to let you down
Forgive me if I slip away
Sometimes it’s hard to find the ground
Cause I keep on falling as I try to get away
From this crazy world

And I never want to let you down
Forgive me if I slip away
When all that I’ve known is lost and found
I promise you I, I’ll come back to you one day

Where has that old friend gone
Lost in a February song
Tell him it won’t be long
Til he opens his eyes
Opens his eyes..

they try to break the mold.

I read Charles Bukowski’s Factotum today. It’s a short little book (which works for me) since I am always running low on time or my attention span is limited to the level of interest which a particular prose style can sustain.

If you haven’t yet picked out your copy, here’s your chance. He’s easy to read.

Merriam-Webster

Pronunciation: \fak-ˈtō-təm\
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin, literally, do everything, from Latin fac (imperative of facere do) + totum everything
Date: 1566
1 : a person having many diverse activities or responsibilities
2 : a general servant

the monster collects his debt
he wears a different costume
and a mask to conceal his ugliness,

the monster visits unannounced
he has a limp when he walks,
and a vague stench of inconsiderate
resentment rises from the ground,

but his royal ugliness must accompany
every house,
dawn to daybreak
from the little penniless orphan
to the rich man’s quarters
he knows his way around.

the monster must have his pay
to settle the accounts.

–

mother thou art perfidious and unwise
and father doth a husband play
his role in a doll-house
this is my plastic life.

“mother” i ask her every time,
“have i done this right,”
she nods, and nods,
but never replies,
i must be like a wall
on the fly,
white smokescreen jammed
between a hornet’s nest.

i turn back to watch the clouds
form funny shapes, a dolphin,
a man with a big nose
or a long necked woman
with a turban on her head
fading or at times becoming intense
while the wind sketches it’s lies.

i do not know
but i often think
how people talk of big things,
but you can see they do not know
where they are going with it,

they have learned to love the music
of their own speech;
harsh, soft, familiar,
misty, remorseful,
different keys of the same
miserable piano,

the subtle indent in the pause,
or the long interminable stretch where
the audience loses patience
sweat clouds the brow
suddenly beaten together by the falsetto
and the dubious expression,

somewhere in the midst of this dramatic
presentation,
there is a slight faltering
of their inane programmed system

that joyfully validates my point;
the silly silly mistake
of earning a living,
pretending to imitate the second
man on the street,
the whorish depletion
of individuality –

the inferno
revived.

nay, the bird is not a prey
if your eyes can concentrate
along the raspy willowy
unformed branches
of an unbent tree
too tired with age,

or if her feet unbuckle
from the twitch of reason
underneath the curvature of
a sheer black skirt encircling
the motion of earth,

she would turn around and laugh
the sudden sway of her hip
disturbing the momentum
of an ever so still mid-afternoon sojourn,

nay, the bird is a falcon
as it perches on an elevation
and hunts for its prey
in the seven steps and sudden leaps
on seven stones for seven leaves.

ok. so i didn’t have to format my computer because there are actually nice people on the cyber world who have the generosity to put up tech support forums and help random strangers for free. i am going to write this blog in lower-case and pretend i am e.e. cummings voicing my musings (heh those -ings rhyme). anyway the moral is – shit can be fixed.

let me count on my fingers and toes, the good things that come for free (yeah we need to remember them in these moments of economic crisis).

how about smiling when nice thoughts cross your mind, loving (the one or two people who can actually manage to get through all that debris of what you are not), helping without any selfish intent, appreciating something because it just is, cleaning the loo (no one pays you for that), cooking? oui, making love (unless you’re a hooker or a manwhore), dancing to your favorite music when your family is out, singing in the shower because there’s that nice echo+privacy, playing with soap suds, a pleasant breeze (you don’t have to swipe a credit card then click on the nature-send-some-refreshing-air-this-way button), walking past two lesbians holding each other in a close embrace (that you think, oh God! there is so much love in the world that it transcends gender),

…ok and many more.

obviously i am not out to create an encyclopedia of such examples.

but you get the idea.

It’s 4 am, I’m a little buzzed and all I want to do is write some before I crash in bed. There’s no better foreplay to sleep than a downright honest rant (like a confession, except our lives are so absurd that a confession at 4 am would sound false and exaggerated by noon). No wonder they say the past is gone, the future unknown, and all you got is the present which simlutaneous to its being lived – disappears or embellishes itself. All that we are left with are interpretations. That makes us the translators of our lives. And if your vocabulary sucks or you’re not good at re-interpreting, which is a downer because the lack of expression will render you incapable of delivering to others what mattered and moved you, you will most likely end up an unknown, a loser, a bum, unable to do any good to the world that ’shat’ you out in its polluted maggoty sphere.

Ok so I am on bum status currently. Because I sleep at odd hours, prefer tasteless food, possess zero desire to go out and impress people, find myself a little incapable of taking orders for the sake of authority when it doesn’t make any sense, wonder where exactly superficiality ends because I see people lying constantly to each other and themselves about what they want and how they pursue the contrary, because I want to live as I feel (each moment as I go my way) and not be a LIE. ALso because I am a little slow (earthworm?) tending to process and think what people say to me, why they say it, and how I can respond best unlike an automated machine.

Alright. So life is random. strange. meaningless. a little fucked up. twisted. mean.  It does not have a beginging and obviously no end. However I have a begining, I know what fucks me up, makes me mean, strange, meaningless and random. Thus upon the palm of immortality, the human soul breathes, subsists on nothingness, yet shackled and imprisoned by the merciless demands of Time, often chokes, sputters, and cries. Dillusioned that the end is near.

The American electoral race climaxed today evening with Barack Obama becoming the 44th President of the United States, enthusing and overwhelming the almost teary crowd. The first thought that crossed my mind was, alright – so no more wars. And maybe no more Iran. Hopefully bye bye to the Iraq issue too. I mean since when did America become the international janitor to be cleaning other people’s messes? Saddam is dead, if you think he’s going to come back from his grave, and cause another spectacle, then you have cause not to pull out your troops, but now after he’s pretty much decomposed and dissolved into the bowels of the earth, and surprise surprise there were never any nukes (concealed or on display) why then must the government retain control of a foreign territory? Unless America has suddenly become an imperialist nation and taking after the Brits, has this irresistable urge to go on destorying and possessing lands, to ‘woohoo’ revel over the superiority of its power.

No reasonable cause justifies the American citizens to allow their people to be butchered in wars because that is a responsibility of the Governments of those nations to deal with their own shit. Their shit and American shit is different. Each country has a cultural identity that entails satisfying and living up to the standards and ideals of its citizens. To stand up and shout out suggestions or intervene with solutions that are likely to never work on another territory is pure stupidity, because ideas don’t always translate well beyond our national borders. If you think living in America and discussing politics and peace plans will actually bring those ideas to reality overseas, it will not. Period. You are in denial if you think otherwise. Ok, lets not discount the minor possibilites, believing ideas conceived ‘here’ will work ‘there’ then be prepared to face the obvious antagonism of the local civilans of those nations.

Try imagining the Germans, coming over with ideas to improve the American economy, or pretty much any random issue, would that not rile the public? Piss you off? No? Indeed it would. Would you not feel trespassed? Insecure? Invaded? As if you were losing your identity?

Well that is exactly how the so-called ‘Other’ Nations felt when the Bush administration began riding their assess. Terrorism is not an Islamic or eastern concept, yeah right, as if the Russians were angels, and the Italians and Germans never terrorised or blew up Americans. Oh maybe because eastern people are colorful, do not speak English, have strong values, so they are the suckers. Boo. Ok. Obviously we have suffered a mass psychological crisis since 9/11 attacks. But the fact that those attacks were successful was something that the American Defence forces should be held accountable for.

So now America has elected a black president. This moment in time has certainly set the history for the world. A country which has lived through race-issues, the black and white divide, Obama not only represents the manifestation of what people thought would have been an impossible feat to achieve today because people’s tongues are still slured with racial prejudices but also a nation of young men and women who made it a point to vote and change the malignant condition of the American govenment and its dysfunctional policies. I can picture the world leaders probably sighing with relief right this minute (at least the not-so-asshole-ones). However when it comes to politics and political leaders, I have my own cynical veiws, because its like you are dealing with a Dr. Jekyl and Mr Hyde. So it would do us all (Americans and World Citizens) good to sit back and watch where things lead and make it a point to always question reality before accepting it blindly on face-value.

A water bearer in India had two large pots, each hung on each end of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, and while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water at the end of the long walk from the stream to the master’s house, the cracked pot arrived only half full. For a full two years this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one and a half pots full of water in his master’s house.

Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect to the end for which it was made. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do. After two years of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it spoke to the water bearer one day by the stream.

“I am ashamed of myself, and I want to apologize to you.”

“Why?” asked the bearer. “What are you ashamed of?”

“I have been able, for these past two years, to deliver only half my load because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your master’s house. Because of my flaws, you have to do all of this work, and you don’t get full value from your efforts,” the pot said.

The water bearer felt sorry for the old cracked pot, and in his compassion he said, “As we return to the master’s house, I want you to notice the beautiful flowers along the path. Indeed, as they went up the hill, the old cracked pot took notice of the sun warming the beautiful wild flowers on the side of the path, and this cheered it some. But at the end of the trail, it still felt bad because had leaked out half its load, and so again it apologized to the bearer for its failure.

The bearer said to the pot, “Did you notice that there were flowers only on your side of your path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, and I took advantage of it. I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back from the stream, you’ve watered them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate my master’s table. Without you being just the way you are, he would not have this beauty to grace his house.”

Taken from http://www.angelfire.com/ne/cre8vityunltd/xepshunl.html

Death of Lovers

We shall have beds full of subtle perfumes,
Divans as deep as graves, and on the shelves
Will be strange flowers that blossomed for us
Under more beautiful heavens.

Using their dying flames emulously,
Our two hearts will be two immense torches
Which will reflect their double light
In our two souls, those twin mirrors.

Some evening made of rose and of mystical blue
A single flash will pass between us
Like a long sob, charged with farewells;

And later an Angel, setting the doors ajar,
Faithful and joyous, will come to revive
The tarnished mirrors, the extinguished flames.

By Charles Baudelaire

Ce soir, la lune rêve avec plus de paresse;
Ainsi qu’une beauté, sur de nombreux coussins,
Qui d’une main distraite et légère caresse
Avant de s’endormir le contour de ses seins,

Sur le dos satiné des molles avalanches,
Mourante, elle se livre aux longues pâmoisons,
Et promène ses yeux sur les visions blanches
Qui montent dans l’azur comme des floraisons.

Quand parfois sur ce globe, en sa langueur oisive,
Elle laisse filer une larme furtive,
Un poète pieux, ennemi du sommeil,

Dans le creux de sa main prend cette larme pâle,
Aux reflets irisés comme un fragment d’opale,
Et la met dans son coeur loin des yeux du soleil

****

The Moon more indolently dreams tonight
Than a fair women on her couch at rest,
Carressing, with a hand distraught and light,
Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast,

Upon her silken avalanche of down,
Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;
And watches the white visions past her flown,
Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.

And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,
Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,
Some pious poet, enemy of sleep,

Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow
Whence gleams of iris and of opal start,
And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.

Charles Baudelaire

It takes an empty sheet

for the fingers

to let go,

and the heart surrender,

A crazed attempt

before the storm,

to suddenly hide

and seek a shelter.

of things that do not matter

never mean what they seem,

from their deceiving prison

i seek escape

that my flesh be not devoured

by such damnation,

i do not seek a heaven

upon this inhuman earth

where the racing rage of evil

suppresses the gentle rose of love,

hence let us not veil our silences

or moments of pious reverie,

for those who sought God

beyond the holy scripture

the divine

spoke through their being.

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For more on Isaiah Chevrier visit http://www.rootsyrecords.com/HtmlFiles/LittleDjembefola.htm

The violin got all worked up, imploring
then suddenly burst into sobs,
so child-like
that the drum couldn’t stand it:
“All right, all right, all right!”
But then he got tired, couldn’t wait till the violin ended,
slipped out on the burning Kuznetsky
and took flight.
The orchestra looked on, chilly,
while the violin wept itself out
without reason
or rhyme,
and only somewhere,
a cymbal, silly,
kept clashing:
“What is it,
what’s all the racket about?”
And when the helicon,
brass-faced, sweaty,
hollared:
“Crazy!
Crybaby!
Be still!”
I staggered,
on to my feet getting,
and lumbered
over the horror-stuck music stands,
yelling,
“Good God”
why, I myself couldn’t tell;
then dashed, my arms round the wooden neck to fling:
“You know what, violin,
we’re awfully alike;
I too
always yell,
but can’t prove a thing!”
The musicains commented,
contemptuously smiling:
“Look at him-
come to his wooden-bride-
tee-hee!”
But I don’t care-
I’m a good guy-
“You know, what, violin,
let’s live together,
eh?”

“Universities are nurseries of orthodoxy. The university, while offering a nurturing environment, is not a creative one. It can’t be. That isn’t the function of higher education”  – Rita Mae Brown

****

There is a stupid irony illustrated in the above quote, and the way I see it is that despite such a deep aversion towards institutionalized education and the way it perverts and distorts the essence of creativity in creative individuals, men and women are willing to go about submissively worshipping them as hallmarks of academic and personal success. What are the real milestones that determine a man’s progress much less his happiness?

While the systematized academia may succeed in implanting a methodological formulae of executing projects, mastering the structural nuances of any concept or idea, it neverthless fails very badly in helping these individuals to focus and nurture the core of their artistic faculties. So after the required period of fatal polination they depart from the hypnotized echoes of authority as thirsty for comprehension and recognition as they had first entered it.

Artists do not need this structure, they have no want for imposed ideas, or the dilapidated presence of mediocrity, all they ask for is an acknoweldgement of their voices. The voices which speak in different colors and elements because their convergence is a beautiful symphony of expression, an orchestra that is divinely led by inspiration…perhaps it is just my personal perspective, call it a psychological dilemma, that I find it absolutely impossible to comprehend how such institutions can contribute or help unless they are willing to step aside and allow these instinctual beings to grow on their own.

As reflective mediums, we tend to oscillate between our enviornments, family lives and our feelings, while the work we produce mirrors the amalgamation and synthesis of these characteristics on our inner-beings. The danger lies in generalizing people, and if you expect a teacher to instruct several students using a  singular method or principle, which would hardly produce any positive results in the students, since they are going to be universally different and unique, it might as well be good for a student to seek a teacher on his own, independent of authoritarian representations of educational disciplines. Or better yet, be in charge of his own learning.

The human being so often like a plant dies out of neglect.

There are two kinds of salvation in this world:

 

The first one is where individuals

tormented by certain truths

seek the silent refuge 

of a religious haven,

 

The second one is a little different,

here too the man bares his soul

not in the name of religion or truth

but rather to find a reason

for his indefinable existence.

 

In my map both these ways

lead to no particular destination

and the road besides being crooked

is based on false hopes,

 

The former immortalizes us in tombs

while the latter serves to cherish us in books,

Neverthless we are in both ways duped.

some talk about their children

some about their boyfriend or husband,

 

they discuss the weather

politics and fashion,

 

even the five-year-old knows the difference

between a democrat and a republican,

 

not three years ago i remember

i tore all the newspapers

swearing to never

bother with this shit again.

 

people and places will probably

never mean a thing,

 

i was born with nothing but my

skin,

 

and yet the impassive excesses of

men, women, children and dreams,

 

the tongues wag for more
and more

saliva drips.

That day when my mother lost herself

to the impassioned embrace of a man

who by virtue of the vows of marriage

possessed her body

in exchange of his resolute presence,

 

she relinquished herself

for the child who slowly grew

inside her womb

 

and prayed

to the God

who did not let her down.

Brrrrrrrr I am hungry

But why am I writing that here …..!!?

Yah. No poems for today. I am learning all the words under the A alphabet from the thesaurus. And some French grammar.

and downloading music

scratching my head

biting my lip.

I received my first rejection letter in the mail today (and anyone who’s been-there-and-done-that is reading this, will probably know what I am talking about).  If not – - go smoke a ciggerrate and don’t come back until I write a new post (I don’t have my spellchecker on right now and I spelled ciggerrate wrong, damn linguists, they had to make vocabulary so complicated). Anyway to get on with the rant, I also received a rejection ‘email’ this morning, and they were considerate enough to reply promptly. Well this one was a two-liner, polite and concise, and the interpretation in my terminology: dear poet, we have enough bastardios sending us their work samples, however your work does not contribute in anyway to our schizophrenic mélange, so thank you for the attempt, and while we wish you luck in your future ravages, we secretly hope that you will choke on your next roast beef sandwich. There is nothing like a choking poet’s last words.

LiteraryMary, journal of the beautiful, unusual and eclectic, is now available for pre-order through this link.

I once knew someone who for some strange reason had a profound impact on me at a very young age. Caught betwixt the burden of having discovered I could write and not wanting to write was like denying as well deceiving myself from being who I was. Of course as long as I can remember, I have not only been a pain in my own ass but in others as well. Family can bear your faults tenderly and call you different and special, whereas society will reject you as the byproduct, and stamp your ass with incompetent, socially inept or mentally screwed. Or maybe you simply were unfortunate to have been conceived under a bad moon. Oh, how I both hate and love the moon! God knows what a useless empty piece of land that is, and yet, for some utterly incomprehensible reason humanity has worshipped it, poets have idolized it in innumerable ways alluding to it the symbolism of their beloved’s beauty etc, or some other far-fetched analogy.  We cannot help but worship that which is beyond our reach, and the means to experience it becomes the axis of our life’s journey. The nuclei being ‘the’ desire.

 

This particular individual had a strange philosophy towards life, he said, since life was so vulgar, meaningless and pathetic, one could either cry incessantly or laugh hilariously on the very stupidity of the divine creator’s intelligent design, which at the end of our frustratingly-maddening lives did not seem so intelligent after all. And I wholeheartedly agreed to his wisdom; a dimwit myself, but my not-so-dimwitted alter-ego securely invisible under the cloak of young age, the caustic-opinion-rejecter, refused to hog down her cognitive-sewers such a blatant conclusion of existence.

 

So despite my outward meek, tepid and rational persona, I set up a new front, prepared an army of my own, and lodged them in every nook and cranny of the mental stratosphere whence I could travel to thereby forfeiting any external claims on my thought-factory. My so-called friend had chosen to laugh on the world and laugh he did. Everyday, in every conversation, he could elicit and discern the mirth from the utterly un-laughable, which riled my pensive temperament. I did not believe that it was possible or even an easy alternative, to see the funny, to be safe, always from the bullets and torpedoes fate so amorously targeted at us. He often told me the necessity of positive thinking, (I said yes, and agreed) but I could not make myself practice it. The preacher preached and practiced his doctrine exceptionally well, but did he never stumble upon any holes, loose ends, or even shallow ditches? Did he never think twice, before making up his mind about a certain thing, was he so cocksure? One day we had an argument about food. His field being medicine made him a nutrition obsessed freak. He could talk for two hours about what vegetable or fruit could cure eyesight, or strengthen the bones. And I thought to myself back then, how could a man, so goddamned educated, intelligent, and well-versed with the nuts-and-bolts of life, seem so stupidly self-centered and obliquely dumb to not realize the ‘separation’ of his being from my being. That I was the cause of my own life, and that <thoughts> were a result of my individual experience, and lastly I may just as well choose to disbelieve him until his method is proven compatible on my system.

 

I raise my objection to a positive approach. Simply because it leaves one with blind spots, insecurely exposed and put out there without going through a test-drive. No I do not adhere to the school of stoics, however if I am to believe in something or proceed in a certain direction hitherto un-trodden, I cannot merely do it from one happy-lotus leaf, like a carefree toad, and hop onto another one. I begin my alphabet from A – the problem. The issue, the chaos: the confronted self doubting the questioner, to the actual genesis of the very intent. Step one, from shit-tunnel of wretchedness and doom to step two, acquiesce of a possible solution. He preached the positive, I was gloom. He said light, I refused its brightness. I’d rather acquaint myself with darkness. It is impossible to build a skyscraper or a minaret (of the mosque) unless the constructer has dug deep into the earth, his measurements equaling the heights he proposes to which the building will stand erect at. My philosophy is I do not have a philosophy and refuse to have one. Philosophies are formed in one spurious moment of concrete thought, hence imprisoning the dynamic shift of both impulse and life.

I enjoy food as long as it fills my belly and gives me strength to move from one day to another. I do not like to sit dwelling on seasonal tastes, the coarse or subtle, cooked or over-cooked palate. There are more serious issues that concern man besides his food. No longer content with my friend’s assertions over life or his ideology, I was restless to move on and find my non-space which would prove a thousand times more creative, productive and enchanting to my senses.

 

I admit to having fancied the moon myself though not out of idealization but a curiosity of its very bare and empty elemental existence, the randomness, the no-purpose, the void which proceeded from God, his scattered meteorology. God was no Van Gough, but he certainly was the gamer, the programmer, the player and the virus.

i would love to crack open your skull

with a sharp gleaming kitchen knife,

for I deem your rotting brain to be

in dire need of a thorough examination

perchance the annals of history observe

the sickening branch, the crooked stuff,

 

as pathetic, the pathetic engorged spleen

unfixed in its nature or purpose purports

the gateway of hell, shallow, how utterly

lackluster! i will cut off these fingers

halfway through their joints, the dripping

red stain raspberry thick, sticky

oozing, observe the depletion as I choke

on anger, my impenetrable voice,

 

darling i cannot call you my blood,

adulterated, diluted, over-polluted breathing

heart, lub-dub, lub-dub, the smashed bullet

protruding the left-ventricle refusing incursion,

the sun, its fiery burn, my soul cries out caught

between the barbed wires with which you guard

your damnable fortress, inside a prison called curse,

i cannot call you my blood, my blood nor can I call you

but force this anger to separate you from my earth.

So it’s between you and me, the writer and the reader, because we have a special relationship. When I was a little girl and my mama bought me my first picture-book; The Little Mermaid, from a big book store, on a random summer-holiday in India, I knew we were destined to go a long way. That I was to grow like vine leaning on the alphabet of my sustenance. I knew that humid afternoon, back in my grandfather’s house, dimly aware of the clothes sticky with sweat on my mosquito bitten, six year old, sun-browned body, what homecoming meant. Freedom is a universal currency, and a master-key to all the horrid locks that exist in this world. Knowing I could possess this key was more than enough to bolster my courage and prepare me for any possible setbacks that might impede this precarious breakage from my tightly woven cocoon.

My grandfather often woke up in the early mornings to tend to his plants with a very long green colored hose, which was attached to a tap by the water-pump in the front yard of his house, with which he watered the roses and jasmines. I once fell into those rose bushes, while playing tag-your-it with my cousins, and ended up getting pricked on the skin, that my little frilly-frock had left exposed. I can almost recall my dislike for girlish attire, or anything with ribbons and lace. I was a tomboy at heart, raised amidst three brothers, in the constant company of boys as playmates, and anything from braided-hair to behaving politely, was never on top of my list.

My father did not get along with my grandfather so very well. They seemed to be two very strong opinionated individuals, who were, better off living as far apart as mother nature would kindly consent to. And after all the years, these words ring true for my father and his offspring.  If you think the ancestors were impossible to understand, too complicated a cup-of-tea for this lifetime, give the offspring a try. My first lesson in life was to learn how to differentiate between the gravitational forces of the earth from the force of one’s blood. The former taught us to keep our ground, to stand before we learned to leap, the latter, served to poke and prod, hurt and cut, before one learned to severe the self from the afflictive source in order to maintain the paix d’esprit.

To be cont….(time to get some zzz’s) 

I was skeptical about reading this book, firstly because of its over-used theme of Asian immigrants trying to discover or re-invent their identities in western countries, secondly, literature balanced solely on cultural precepts does not sit well with me. It’s like cheating the reader. However to get on with it, The Namesake begins with a young man in his early twenties, who is of a Bengali (Indian) descent. He is very fond of books and one day while traveling on a train to visit his grandfather, he meets with a tragic accident. He is miraculously saved, when someone discovers him moving among the debris and rubble of the aftermath, and his hand clutching a copy of The Raincoat by Nikolai Gogol. The presence of this author’s book at that particular junction of Ashoke’s rescue leaves a deep impact on his psyche that eventually ends up shaping the rest of the novel.

 

After the accident he decides to leave the country and settle as far away as possible from all things that might be reminiscent of the incident which left him mentally and emotionally scarred. His parents and the many siblings, devastated by his decision, reluctantly bid him farewell, as he leaves with his newly wed bride (a union made possible through a formal arrangement by his family) and we find Ashoke, a doctoral student at MIT settling down in a tiny apartment with his wife, Ashima in America. This brings about a shift in Ashima’s experiences as well as the birth of their first son, whom they end up naming as Gogol. This young man grows up, ok, to make a long story short, he has a sister, and both of them struggle to fit in the society, schools and friends, as second generation American-Indians, rebelling against their heritage. The book follows through Gogol’s initial dislike of his name and so forth. But, I’d rather not spoil it for you, so go read the book!

 

i cannot count how many days i spent
in unruly discontent that somehow
the art i longed to perfect mistook my
intent. the gracious muse who came and went
as his highness pleased, goddamn such freedom,
did he like to play hide and seek? or some
other silly game to startle and tease
nervous poets who struggled to graft their
thoughts on a frightening old man’s hull also
known as history. crumbling yellow skin,
the perennial stubble, accusative of
our insipid philanthropy, the muse
loved to dance upon the throne of time thus
challenging my creative feats. a cow with
no teats, or a violin minus the string,
synonymous to my frustration a
window overlooking desperation.
what am i? but valueless currency 
wherewith the trader falls bartering his
dreams. the poet; ever shallow, wooden
-legged corpse, patch-eyed, a caribbean
pirate in search of fresh meat. woe to these
elegies. but afore i scatter the soil
and close the book shall i not utter those
farewell words? readers to whom we write with-
-out a cause possessed by invisible
demons and wars, this thankless employment
that doesn’t feed the belly nor pay bills of 
habitation, whatever in this world,
did induce us fools to such detraction?     

 

In the middle of the night

I push away the blanket covering my body

Run a hand through my tangled hair

And get out of bed.

 

It is late enough for me to be myself

Prowl around the dark house,

 

I turn on the light in the kitchen

And heat myself a glass of milk,

 

I am hungry,

But not enough to want to eat

Just one of those days…

/or nights.

 

I can see a constellation of stars outside

In the dim darkness,

The snow is frozen everywhere

Some days it rains and that makes it dirtier

And messier to go out,

 

One hand under the chin

I stare at my reflection a little sleepily

The window already fogged with the warm

breath.

 

I turn to God

As I have many days

To talk about things

I wouldn’t with anyone.

 

The ice expands the wood

Congesting the door to its frame

And I have to pull harder

To get it to open.

 

A treacherous draft hits my face

And I gasp with the impact,

 

There are chores to be done,

But my mind is already elsewhere,

 

I dig my heels into the snow tentatively

Re-checking my pocket for the grocery list

Things I write down because I occasionally

Forget where I am and what I am supposed

To be doing.

 

There is an unhappiness that surrounds

People with things;

Material, immobile to their consciousness,

The noose around the neck

Tightening its grip,

 

I have stopped counting days

By man-made calendars

Or watches that tick out of semblance,

For I refuse the dominion of a life

That will end with death,

 

My brother drives

Lost in thoughts somewhere,

 

I look at him

And think of the escape

We all attempt at least once or twice

No matter how shoddy the plan.

snow
breaking apart
descending upon us
crystal powder, floating butterfly
flurries

 

dancing
midnight dreamer
behold halting elegance
breathing desire convulse under
motion

 

A deep flood enters there.
Unfolding petal stirs,
This dream into the light.

A loud bell resounds.
Laughter is heard in the streets,
It is half-past nine.

With my singular vision, I should like to overtake the world. Except my energy levels are occasionally low and need to be recharged like an expired battery, which is prone to dying on the user before its estimated time that I think perhaps NOT.

Yet, human batteries cannot be replaced, unless you have auto-part shops where God’s messengers sit and wait upon us tired servants, wary of retardom and excessive verbose, preferring the martyrdom of dumbness to the much exploited and misused lingual facility.

Some days everything fails but the quiet darkness of my room.

It is funny when I see teenagers act like they know the shit. Times have changed. Or must I say we have. Since my antipathy towards this entity that requires clocks and hands, or the crutch of the sun’s shadow to measure its effluence upon our progress or decline, has been an arbitrary ass-wipe concept in which I have refused to believe in. I simply do not understand why we function the way we do. Where must we go to that we aren’t in that place already? Adults ride their children’s assess as soon as the poor innocent creatures begin to develop their comprehension abilities, to be someone, go somewhere, whereas I who lack the necessary spatial skills for figuring out my way through these geographical nuisances see no point in the stupid discussion. I am going to sit here, (maybe under a tree in my backyard) and stay there until the next tsunami arrives. Will that satisfy our stupid mortal dilemma of existence?

 

Our world has been crippled by some menacing disease that has spread its malignant influence from the mere physicality of life into the deepest recesses of our essence flushing out any hopes of reiterating what has been dispossessed. Our lost paradise. We struck the first match and now cry, fire, fire.

 

Maybe it is intellectual laziness that causes me to think so, but what can cure a snake bite if not its own poison? Gandhi was wrong when he said, an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind. He was a chicken, a hermaphrodite, who chose stupid tactics and slithered his way out of imperialism. Now the entire country is living off his name, what a rip-off, but saves them the hard work of establishing their own identities huh? What happened to the world was, a couple of dope-heads made their way to the top of the human assembly of intelligence and power and began to advocate/dispose off their mental diarrhea on the lower-half of the populace, rendering us incapable of fresh air as well as the existential mobility to which we were entitled to as our birthright. So we stink, reek of polluted remnants not of our own doing, and yet they burden the shoulders of men, women and children, who think they are of sin. Whereas the original sin was the conception of ideas, the duplicity of our illusory sight, when man thought he was the almighty God, and began making offerings on the altar of his deranged brain.

For some impenetrable reason, when I awakened today morning, and was in the process of making myself some hot cocoa, the begining verses of Robert Frost’s Mending Walls, began playing through my head. It’s been ages since I read that poet, neverthless to honor his work in this cold winter that chills the marrow of my bones, it would do him justice to share that poem here as well. So dear readers bear with me as I navigate once more through ‘Mending Walls; metaphorical and literal.

@#!& enjoy this music from my favorite movie ^-^

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen ground swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair,
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
Stay where you are until our backs have turned!”
We wear our fingers rough handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before  I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down. I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But its not elves exactly and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Binging a stone firmly grasped by the top
In each hand, like an old stone-savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only the shade of trees,
He will not go behind his father’s saying
And he likes having thought of it so well,
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

The first couple of pages of Swann’s Way can be very aggravating to a reader. Proust begins by recounting the early impressions of the boy-narrator at Combray, where his family usually spent their summer holidays away from the city life. The reader comprehends an unusual amount of affection and clinginess of the narrator towards his mother, whose love he vies but is afraid to be found out by his father and his grandmother, all of whom are over-protective of him, choosing to confine him indoors with some book for most days rather than letting him venture out and mingle with others.

 

As I continued reading, I observed how the recapitulation of the senses, metaphorically and literally, continues to be a recurring theme of Proust’s work, which in a quiet semblance fogs over the reader as well, and one begins to feel like they are re-living someone’s life by observing them from their own sitting room or lawn. You do not feel like an outsider yet there exists a camouflage of unreality dividing the past and the present.

 

Proust has a way of being excessive in his narration, that is from the magnanimity of his descriptive sentences to their very length, which induces the reader to consider how serious could such an author have been about his craft. What do I think? I think he was very serious. Perhaps up to a degree to have disregarded a normal lifestyle.

 

Another observation the reader might glean would be about Proust’s badly structured storyline. It is not so much a book about characters and their lives, as much as about portraying the narrator’s experiences, memories and their dynamics. As a fiction writer he most likely fails, but as a linguist, recorder of history and lives, he succeeds. It might be an absolute waste of time to ever attempt reading the entire seven volumes of The Remembrance of Things Past, and you are most likely to curse the author midway through the process, yet ironically after completing Swann’s Way, I came to the conclusion that the experience had been worthwhile. It had been a feast of the senses no doubt.  

One must not be decieved by the size of this book, despite its two hundred something pages, there are several themes that are interwoven throughout. The story unfolds as straight forwardly as someone would go on to describe the weather. Fifteen year old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna Schmitz, a woman in her mid-thirties, who finds him sick on the street and whom she takes to her apartment to clean and tend to. This marks the begining of an unconventional year-long affair between the teenager and the young woman, who is particularly interested in hearing Michael read to her. However here is the catch, Hanna is illiterate, she cannot read or write and this is a very important aspect of the story because it determines almost all of her life’s decisions and their implications that she eventually comes to bear. The story takes place during and after the Holocaust period.

The book is simply not one which would revolve around a love affair that ensued between these two, it is much more than that. The issues raised here concern the legitimacy of morality, it’s accountability on human actions and whether a person should be considered responsible for things done or acted upon in ignorance of their actual consequences. Do we live inside the box and ignore all that exists outside or let go of conventions? It was not a book that I would read on random and enjoy because the language is translated, secondly prose loses it’s orignal intended effect when clothed in another tongue, thirdly the narration is at times clinical; lacking richness. Like the white-washed walls of an empty house the words are often stark and devoid of warmth. The Reader reads like a holocaust report, by a living corpse, that was burned by the consequences of an unconventional love affair and swallowed by the vaccume of moral guilt.

I cannot believe the impunity with which I treat myself in spite of all the incredibly silly failings that I suffer from almost on a daily basis. Counting from the innumerable absent-minded gestures like forgetting what I was saying in the middle of a conversation, walking away from the cashier before paying and/or taking back my change of money, and/or panicking in the face of simple tasks such as operating the laundry machine in my basement, which I did for the first time today.  That bulky contraption seized me with more fear than a sudden ensuing war or major global catastrophe could. The more my thoughts strive on micro-analysis of things and people the lesser the degree of normal social behavior. Methinks the conjecture of normalcy obsolete.

 

this song brings me back…

Oooh, love…
I get so lost, sometimes
Days pass, and this emptiness fills my heart
When I want to run away
I drive off in my car
But whichever way I go
I come back to the place you are

And all my instincts, they return
And this grand facade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, and without my pride
I reach out from the inside, ooh oooh whoah

In your eyes, the light, the heat
I am complete
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
the resolution through all my the fruitless searches
Oh I see the light I see the heat
Oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light, the heat, I see in your eyes

Love,
I don’t like to see so much pain
So much wasted, and these moments keep slipping away
I get so tired of working so hard for my survival
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive

And all my instincts, they return
And this grand facade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, and without my pride
I reach out from the inside, ooh oooh whoah

In your eyes, the light, the heat
I am complete
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
the resolution of all my fruitless searches
Oh, I see the light I see the heat
Oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light, the heat I see in your eyes

something beautiful is happening

the snow is changing color

above the earth’s ripening sheen,

and a dew moistened flower bursts

into a myraid colored dream.

overwhelmed
he held my wrist
and kissed it
with lips shaped
like molten perfume,
and indolent desire 
whispered, “I have been exhumed.”

the afternoon air was suspended
over us with dust like a canopy
intersecting the narrow divide
of wakefulness and thirst,

somewhere echoed the distant
shouts of children playing
and a phone incessantly rang
unanswered,

hellishly bothered,
I tore up the fancy
that I had thereto made up,
child of imagination
what rubbish this boredom
oft infidelity renders.

A couple of minutes ago, I was curiously reading Kundera’s Immortality (a book, that my friend passed on to me), and I was struck by how fucked up this writer was. He was describing in a passage, a scene, where people were incessantly in a symphonic manner yawning or stretching open their mouths, and the absurdity of capturing such a moment struck me as inane. Not only did the writer integrate this mundane moment into a paragraph, but managed to write an entire book, disparate in essence, depicting random nonsensical associations of people and situations that an otherwise semi-intelligent individual would perhaps only ponder upon in his feverish reverie. Thus the manifestion of it in an actual bestseller would seem very foolhardy.

I am not sure what merits a bestseller, the intelligence of the judge who picks out the book or the intelligence of the readers who sustain the sales pitch of the market? Let us assume, the judge adores the said novel, he is blown away by the simplified narrative/structure and cannot wait to let the world know about it, so he makes the announcements, and the book is awarded, a pulitzer, booker etcetra. But a certain inquisitve reader out of the million others, happens to get his hands on it, spends an evening trying to invest his concentration to look for that ’something’ but never finding it, assumes he is perhaps lacking certain neurological functions.

A Hundred Years Of Solitude is another such book, which petrified me, and I was never able to complete it. My father on many an occassion has said to me, and well himself, that if something is incomprehensble, don’t attempt it, don’t go near it. In short, he meant, things should be simple, or they’r not worth your time. Now, he is not a simple man. His kind of simplicity is the highly complicated kind. The mental maze, and puzzels you’d have to navigate in order to stand by his side, and understand his vision. Marquez writes a book, where the character names are beyond difficult to follow through as one continues to read, as well as the story which fails to sustain attention. I am not sure now, whether these writers encompass the greatness that the world professess to, or I lack the intellectual vigor, to amass what they have expounded upon.

The wise men say that if you possess inner clarity, your words, your actions, and your speech will likewise be. In reference to Kundera, or the likes such as Coelho, who attempt to relate to a civilization, that suffers from its own disintegration, elucidating rationalizations of love and life, in an attempt to create cohesion, where none can possibly exist, I can only arrive to the conclusion that we as a people are simply too complicit to fight our own selves. Societies like relationships fail, when efforts are ceased; the act is voluntary, and thus, the reticence to admit otherwise.

—-

Note: I bet whoever reads this will be like, the nerve of this woman to condemn famous authors!!

Insignificant without the other.

ah finally, I have the right title, idea and desire, to write.

i am not sure whether to celebrate or mourn the emotional slogging that lies ahead of me.

–
*(Making Feet and Hands by Benjamin Peret)

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.

If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips.
it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside the door.

–
*Leonard Cohen

i have often realized that a state of despondency comes over me like a dark shadow, during the days when i don’t write. all the horrors that we speak of existing in the world are initially conceived within us, that they will formidably swallow us one day if we do not keep at bay. a swift kick in the butt might initiate movement, or say, some michevious event in the near future, to keep the devil happy and content enough not to severe the suffering individual’s umbilical cord with his beloved muse. speaking of cords, or alexander graham bell (which also reminds me of certain cookies), who invented the so-called telephone, which has been upgraded with the much hip cellular phones, i think back to a time when communication was far more ‘actual’ in the sense that if one wanted to speak to somebody, all they’d do was pick up the phone and call them.

today, however, we have alienated each other in the process of increasing accessibility, through means of text messaging, chating and emailing. speaking on the phone has come down to mere professional or impersonal communication, well i suppose i speak for myself here. i am sure there are many normal folks out there who follow the old school ways. growing up as a chatter box, i used to constantly stay in touch with my friends on the phone, after school. perhaps it has to do with age? a propensity towards the goth-era of self-pity or the fear of putting one’s vulnerable self out there, to people whose kindness you are not sure about, that has reduced the warmth of socialising. the effect is radical, revolutionary, and surprisingly ironic. technology has had its side effects, whether anyone wants to admit it or not. but that follows for everything, every action will have some reaction, barring its nature of course, i.e. positive or negative; an interpretation that rests soley on the individual contemplating the particular topic.

perhaps we are all too prejudiced with our selves, to have any space or time for others. who knows? is it our education? the economy? that’s sucking the blood out of our lives? everyone’s worried about paying bills, making ends meet, that we don’t have time to live for the good things much less appreciate a good laugh, and the days pass by inconsequential. it’s quite idiotic how i look forward to only the certain minimal reduced responsibilities or events, and disregard whether it is morning, noon or night. while i turn my face away from nature and her kindly unwavering continuation of existence, i find myself, reduced, compressed like excess unused data in an old hard drive.

not only has existence become a curse for everyone (and you know what i am talking about), but it has become a burden as well, something which it is not supposed to be. we as a collective humanity, have managed to rape mortality out of its innocence, and today suffer the humiliation, the sin of a mortified decadent civilization, too wary to want to continue forward. so there is nothing new to be done? somebody went to the moon, somebody came up with the religions, the renaissance is over, and mona lisa is overrated, people are so bored that they’re re-making all the classics or mocking the normal movies. it is repetition, my friends, an impotency, which makes me quote tolstoy’s famous words, “where do we go from here?”

–
*Walt Whitman – Carol of Words

In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
– Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly.

bitch. cunt. I am so mad right now.

sometimes people like me, need a nice grandmother or grandfather, instead of shallow siblings and parents who are too concerned with the present, like a bunch of narcissist good-for nothings, who cannot see anything beyond their every-day superficial needs. who are like rats running nowhere and feeding off the cheese of stupidity that this world defecates.

the elders are dead. those remaining, too intimidated by the modernisitic approach of my siblings and parents, stay away. i was pleasantly surprised to receive a phone call from my uncle, who i haven’t seen in about four years now, and talking to him felt like coming home.

this country is going down the drain, and i am happy it is, it is time people learn what to actually value. the best lessons are learned in times of desperation. cheers to a contemporary age of incessant failures!

i am unaware of my external persona, however we are all beings who communicate what we experience, akin to intelligent mediums, who transpose their acquired knowledge within their social circles. so basically everything is within reach, if it has been understood. like men and women who were born blind and never learned to see the light, will at some point, begin to understand the different facets of this brightness, its warmth, effect, purpose and such, whereas someone who entered this world, and was able to see everything clearly, will take this very light for granted, see it merely as light. the very singularity of his understanding will begin to cripple his growth. he may grow bodily but the essential comprehension will remain undeveloped.

the idea that we were all thrown into our supposedly independent adult lives like a bunch of cannon balls, and that we found everything as it was, came to accept it fatally. i do not shy away from the concept of fatality if it is coupled with a sound sense of questioning ingrained that will so oft raise the skeptic’s proud head from its dark den of habitude, to perform the sacred rites of ablution. to be baptised by the uncertainity of everything around us, our presumptions, truths and beliefs, is by far the only commendable act anyone may ever hope to achieve. why? because it is a neutralizing factor that is capable of extinguishing our prejudices.

everything else is hogwash.

last night i was attempting to clean the kitchen floor, a detestable job no doubt, and everytime i ran the mop in a particular spot, i would turn around to get something, and notice a dirt mark, after a couple of repetitive attempts, it dawned on my rotund brain, that the slippers which encased my feet, were in fact soiled from having gone outside, and they were the guilty culprits. it made me think of how we as men and women, fight all our lives to set rules and morals, attempting to redefine lives and act revolutionary, while utterly failing in the act and wallowing in self-pity and whatnot. we fail to see that perchance it is our feet that are not clean, that the people who attempt to bring change do not sport the very change which they speak of. this hypocrisy and irony thus in a stealthy manner reinstates all our previous failures.

One fine evening of utter despodency I decided to order the biography of Proust, thinking to myself, how fascinating it would be to read in depth about this wonderful author, and I go ahead and make the purchase. When the book arrived, I was like wtf, it is fatter than a chinese sumo wrestler. So anyways, now that it has graced my presence, I realize what a mission it is going to be to complete it, and I have only traversed about twenty pages of the nine hundred something that it is made of.

Of the many authors I have read, what I most love about Proust is that, as a writer he was pretty pro-active in encompassing all the senses of a human being within the limited and narrow cage of verbosity. Even though his stories were not the stories one would naturally expect, they were scattered bits of moments and recollections captured together and glued with a lot of descriptions of people, geography, the weather and his infinitely strange attachment to his mother, ‘maman’ we all love our mothers, that is an irrefutable truth, however akin to Freud’s oedipal complex theory, here we find Proust initiating his awareness of his surroundings through his mother as the common denominator.

Stories have a strange way of telling themselves, whether through the mouth of a horse, or a relentless branch waving to the sky shamelessly for want of attention. We find how altruistic these attempts are, that they may not appear to fit in with any pre-defined mold, yet each voice seeks to be heard and that is where the slow and silent journey of transcribing begins. We trace our lives back to the root, the seed of conception, and ruminate over our hearts. How, many a times we step on these delicate organs, push them behind our sights in order to have a clearer view of where we are going. All stories have a begining, and they eventually tell us when it is the right time, to put our pen on the paper.

–
*Lethe

There is a rain
There is the shadow,
You flit between these two
Like a clock hand
In limbo.

–
*Cascade

What kind of fuckery is this?

Main Entry: nos·tal·gia
Pronunciation: \nä-ˈstal-jə, nə- also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl-\
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin, from Greek nostos return home + New Latin -algia; akin to Greek neisthai to return, Old English genesan to survive, Sanskrit nasate he approaches
Date: 1729

1: the state of being homesick : homesickness
2: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition ; also : something that evokes nostalgia

as mad as mad as
mad can be
the sky
that dips its
hands
into the firmaments.

it breaks the lie
beyond the die
of shadow and dream
like a blue smudge
of an irrediscent flame.

the dance, the step
the whirling
of the dervish
given over by the pain
he walks and talks
unconscious of his name.

Speak not of guilt, speak not of responsibility. When the Regiment of the Senses parades by, with music, and with banners; when the senses shiver and shudder, it is only a fool and and an irreverent person that will keep his distance, who will not embrace the good cause, marching towards the conquest of pleasures and passions.
      All of morality’s laws – poorly understood and applied – are nil and cannot stand even for a moment, when the Regiment of the Senses parades by, with music, and with banners.
      Do not permit any shadowy virtue to hold you back. Do not believe that any obligation binds you. Your duty is to give in, to always give in to Desires, these most perfect creatures of the perfect gods. Your duty is to enlist as a faithful footman, with simplicity of heart, when the Regiment of the Senses parades by, with music, and with banners.
      Do not confine yourself at home, misleading yourself with theories of justice, with the preconceptions of reward, held by an imperfect society. Do not say, Such is my toil’s worth and such is my due to savor. Just as life is an inheritance, and you did nothing to earn it as a recompense, so should Sensual Pleasure be. Do not shut yourself at home; but keep the windows open, open wide, so as to hear the first sound of the passing of the soldiers, when the Regiment of the Senses arrives, with music, and with banners.
      Do not be deceived by the blasphemers who tell you that the service is dangerous and laborious. The service of sensual pleasure is a constant joy. It does exhaust you, but it exhausts you with inebriations sublime. And finally, when you collapse in the street, even then your fortune is enviable. When your funeral will pass by, the Forms to which your desires gave shape will shower lilacs and white roses upon your coffin, young Olympian Gods will bear you on their shoulders, and you will be buried in the Cemetery of the Ideal, where the mausoleums of poetry gleam conspicuously white.

(Cavafy)

I have often wondered how important it is to be honest with people and family, or can honesty be limited between whatever deity we believe in and ourselves?  The relation however being hypothetically non-functional (a dilusional comfort factor for some) or perhaps the deity here is our concience, (I not possessing any will replace that with God).

I don’t know why but I just can’t seem to bring myself to be companionable at times, the mere effort of talking is like attempting to dig a hole in the earth in search of water, and we all know how deep that is going to be. I can think of two reasons why this state of reticence takes effect, the first being, my love for books, for knowledge – since knowledge does not force itself upon me, but rather sits patiently, until I figure it out, assemble, and re-arrange it in my sphere of comprehension, then after we have established connection, we are friends for life. Now compare and contrast that, dear reader, with an actual living, moving, talking person, who comes along with a bunch of preconcieved notions, a personality & mind programmed from birth into the ways of our society, a society used to condemning differences with a hammer bang – bang – bang and you’re flat out reduced to nothing.

The second reason is my need for invisibility or non-being. Invisibility is good because it helps me determine who has night vision, who has the depth and insight to see things without the aid of external help, can you close your eyes and know where you are? If you were trapped in a small box would you have the ability to sustain yourself and figure a way of outdoing your circumstances? People who can generally see are blind in my opinion. They are seeing things which are already there, and hello? I am not even interested in you having to describe and tell me things which I would know, if you cannot detect the subtle changes in the constantly shifting intellectual paradigm of your exsistence, you are as good as an obsolete being. Go get an upgrade.

Like all living things, our world is a breathing, oftentimes hurt, entity that is thrust with the immense weight of our stupidities combined with the physicality of our bodies. We may often times reduce it to a mere piece of land, rocks, stones, and whatnot, and forage her womb until she is on the verge of an irreversable breakdown. Our destructive activities are not only limited to torturing the earth, but we gleefully engage in doing the same with each other. I can picture so many scenarious where siblings, lovers, couples, parents, etc would attempt at picking each other apart and then be driven miles away in hate.

So the patient earth (perhaps she seems patient because she cannot speak the human vernacular and we are too stubborn to learn hers) waits for just this one random day to strike out in anger and cause havoc on the ones hurting her causing mankind to scream, petrified of the disaster. I sit back and smile, happy that she has taken the initiative for revenge. Somethings need to be balanced, who hasn’t learned of equilibrium in economics?

Going back to honesty, how shall we be honest with each other? Let us begin by not trying to be anything in the first place. Second we aim at attempting communication. Which does not mean I ask you how good was dinner last night or whatever you did after that, neither would it be communication in the form of incessant complains. Communication if objectively defined would include, transfer of information, between two people/entities in order to create dialogue, to exchange, learn and grow by an active inter-play of ideas. Oftentimes I cring at having to communicate with members of my own family, knowing what they will ask, say, or confide, because in my length of vision, they are not attempting to move anywhere. I don’t hate circles, but if you love them so much, I’d suggest you join the circus. Lots of circling and trapezing going on there.

The biggest mistake we as human beings make is attaching ourselves to limited entities, then festering with them, like a puss filled pimple, waiting for it to break, which godforbid I should witness, ever. What we should be doing is, attaching ourselves to the unattachable. For then, you have a wide road ahead of you, of infinite possibility. May the Gods we believe in, grant us such a means, to attain what is not seen by sight, to acquire that which is not acquired by force, so we can deserve to be the rightful inheritors of knowledge and wisdom.

I think I am ready to start school again, but maybe….after I have some more shit cleared out of the way. Then I shall serve my purpose of being on this earth.

my blog shall be on a short hiatus. but i will be back here when it begins to rain and i need a roof.

Someday when I am tired of rebelling
I will let my hair grow
And you can play with it
Lying by my side
My head on the pillow
The sun kissing our sleepy eyes,

Someday when I am tired of hiding
I will tell you about the things I love
Unafraid of their lies,
I will stop making holes in my heart
And you can hold your hand up
To stop the wasting of a life.

Someday the leaves will stop falling
When the wind gets tired
Of the big giant trees that cry,
And love will be what it is meant to be
A song, a whisper, a sigh.

I love my new kitchen knife. It cuts through the vegetables effortlessly, and I realized this a while ago as I was chopping up the eggplant to cook vegetable stir fry for dinner. My friend often comes over and likes to utilize my unused kitchen apparatus for the purpose of cooking or experimenting as I would call it. Most days I am too laid back to bother concocting recipes to formulate any edible dish, which leaves me in the deplorable hands of bread and whatever I may accomadate between it. Peanut butter, jelly, hotdog, tuna, cheese, or simply lettuce and mayonise with a dash of green olives. Call it sloppy or unseemly, it is food neverthless. And the quickest to prepare when the stomach begins to get louder than one’s mother.

My friend rapidly growing accustomed to my place proclaimed several times how she felt at home and began to notice how I was missing things, she even got down to writing grocery lists because of my apparent lack of domestic concerns, she realized that the knives I often used were not sharp enough, and decided to take me shopping. We bought a set of knives with red handles, that gleamed and looked sharp enough to chop off human limbs. Sharp things do not scare me as much as having anything to do with fire, lighting a match etc.

So I decided to enjoy my knives, and used them today with considerable ease. Then it struck me, like a sort of divination, inbetween the smell of burning onions and garlic, that people may unwantingly enter your life and bring about certain changes which we had hitherto been unware of. I am a loner and I do not like being bothered with social concerns, as the dear human populace may wake up in the wee hours to groom themselves, I may be found dragging my blanket around in the kitchen huddled up, clad in a t-shirt and shorts, trying to stay in the cocoon of warmth, and nothing would be more irritating than listening to another person relate tales of their mishaps and adventures expecting cheery responses.

Misanthropic as I have so slowly become, I often encounter instances where it is better to let go trying to understand things and analyse them or worry about how odd I feel in the random sequence of events that surround my life. The beneficient lord may attempt to shower his blessings in innumerable forms, but how can illogic be made to appear logical, and must all beings be fitted into a predefined, preselected role? What if the programer who designed the program gets duped when the program becomes dysfunctional and cracks its own code?

A feeling of complete randomness often strikes me and I wonder what I am doing here in this country, do I even belong here? Will I ever feel at home? Forever stuck in a long meaningless journey, the likeness of sitting in a train, a train that has been journeying through a tunnel. Of being surrounded by idiots, I will not dispute, nor the difficulty in being so often misunderstood that I fear speech itself. The surprise of discovering infinite digressions of intelligence and character, the truth that no matter how much you try some people do not deserve what they have, that somehow life does not make any sense, and you have been cheated by God, because he had his fun and is probably laughing now.

I know for a fact that I will move on, I do not succumb to meaningless distractions. I make peace with myself before I sleep every day, I forgive myself for not falling down to other people’s shallow levels, I pat my back for following my own conscience, and preserving my sanctity and sanity, but I will move on, and leave everyone and everything behind. The question is, what will this time spent measure up to, an experience or an experiment? Or years lost in extravagance?

one more step to take and i will be there.

–
*Victor Hugo

Words are beautiful and when they are fused together coherently to create an image, represent an idea, a thought or a feeling, it becomes language. For as long as I can remember I have been interested in learning and researching the intricate fabric of lingual and cognitive sciences. If my doctoral thesis subject is approved, I will be found scattering my musings on the pages of my blog. Like restless birds in constant search for the skies, I will traverse the infinite shores of my consciousness to observe and collect the hidden pearls of knowledge.

he was a mystery to me
the boy who would not be.

a secret
sublime.

the ocean fought
the wild tide.

day break
followed my song,
i sat up through the night.

he was a mystery to me
the story of a thousand nights,

and like a bird
love sought her cry,
between the wings of a dove
searching for the answers
earth denied.

I had nothing

but the cage of mortality

to bind me to death,

to free me

from myself.

to think of how much they had loved
through the fights
arguments and heated words,

like the aftermath of a holocaust
clinging to the remains
despite the ugliness and hurt,

to think that i might have learned
how not to love
how not to hurt
how not to touch.

but oh like an island
lost in myself
amidst the distant cooing
of birds,

the rain, cloud, and earth.

to think that I might have learned
something from their song of love.

on a night like this
when the right words won’t
come,

a poem
breaks away from the tree
of silence

and falls down
into an accumulated pile
of unspoken dreams.

the music
of the hour
stains

my fingertips.

if you haven’t learned by doing
if you haven’t burned by touching

by the giving
and the forgiving,

negating
the very means
of your existence,

holding on to that aching piece of flesh
on the left side of your breast
afraid to lose,

you have gone nowhere
nowhere that i know,

irrespective of the distance
traversed by your dusty shoes.

i pray because i am imperfect.

i pray for the hate
within myself,

to gauge a flood 
that may never rest.

But nothing is important
when it comes to love,
and neither you
nor I
can ever come between
things that
will
one day
overtake us,
empower
and break
who we are
or
could be.

Four hours of sleep
and I am
good to go.

The whole point of existing, of coming into being, in this world – is to be able to do whatever you please. Not to sound too incredulous, the old age rule should however apply i.e. do unto others as you would do unto you. That moral issue cleared from the way, we must all, then like curious children, be happy (& devoid of conscience*).

–
*(this rule does not apply to sadists & masochists)

The price of freedom is bought by poverty,
while security entails slavery.

some days i face the blank in the wall
in my life,
and I smash the shadow
teasing on the glass
smothering the light.

someone did something,
someone went somewhere,
and then we all had a good laugh.

what are you
when you can do
without love?

–
*Like the very gods

Of all the sicknesses that humanity as a whole suffers from, one very repugnant; the root of many evils is reactionary behavior. This force not only initiates impulsive anger, a sense of irritability, instability and threat, but impinges on peoples’ right to be. Most of the folks I come across online in forums or in actual physical presence seem to suffer from this reactionary syndrome. It is as if one has lost his/her intelligence to process what is reflected onto them whether by society, media or simple randomly expressed opinions. A certain element of hostility thus constantly prevails in the air.

In your mind’s eye, you can probably picture a ball being passed back and forth, switching hands, getting dirt from each individual, till it tatters and is shredded beyond recognition. The ball – here being an idea unanimously expressed – eventually declines to a state of abused mutilation. In the early stages of preponderance, I assumed it was a character defect, a personality disorder, some Freudian or Jungian phenomena, that should be left in the hospitals and asylums. However, confining a disease within walls does not imply we sit comfortably on our behinds and overlook its existence out here.

Where does this behavior begin? Homes, schools, or the streets? Everything comes down to instant retorts and remarks. And those who do not respond with the quick speed that our defunct culture functions at, you probably ‘didn’t get it’ – ‘too weird to fit in’ – ‘better left alone’ – or ‘bitch – cunt’ Obviously we have beheaded silence and adopted the crude route of thrash and thrust the finesse of our latent composition. Good people go bad because they are not treated well, the bad go bad(der) because there are no set limits to anything and hence we are happily riding the rollercoaster ride to free will, all the while dehumanizing each other. Welcome to earth 2009.

–
*your jaundiced presence.
–

[bobbing head, weird accent - Thank you, please come again]

I am sitting in my room. The window is open and the smell of freshly cut grass wafts in. I can hear him, over my earphones, engaged in a meaningless argument with my mother. The neon blue paint on my left index finger is chipping. My dad is arguing about something on the phone as Carla Bruni gets louder. A brainless grey butterfly, the size of my thumb, adds the special effects by hitting herself incessantly from the outside of the window. I look to my left and see him standing at the door. Laughter and pretentious mockery escaping his eyes.

if you were my bootstrap
i’d tie you once
and then twice,
cross you up
make a nice design,

if you were my bootstrap.

we would
stay together
through rain or mud,

and if i lost
the desire to fight
i would give my feet a shake
and we’d pull through
just fine.

it all began with a bet, a game
each of us were blindfolded,
twirled in a dance
and left alone
to chance.

It is the warmest in the
month of August,
when the smallest of creatures
pine after the cool shades
of the evening sun,
and the memory
of the beloved’s voice
dies down like
a flickering
russet
eulogizing the past.

sometimes i think that i do not have much to write about. my life revolves around its own fixed axis, narrow and purposeful, with little or no room for spontaneity. stability can be applauded for the assurance it offers one, but it oftentimes assimilates the identities of those involved. certain people can have a knack for multipilicity, they unfold and scatter like a manifold layered spectrum, wild and colorful. others expand within their spheres of comprehension. their knowledge of the common and inconsequential defines their being. they are not spectacular, they do not go the untrodden path, but like stones and pebbles on an oft ill-used road, remain – stoic and irreplaceable. yet they are what makes the road possible.

allergy
allergy
allergy

i defined my thesis intent today in class, if i pass with a minimum of 84-85 after the three weeks of this course, i will be admitted into the program. otherwise, well there’s always the profession of a custodian awaiting me. reading excessive school text is very dreary and annoying however with some divine help, i usually pull through, not without a few pauses here and there, to write something, or talk to someone, while the old carriage of academic jargon continues to troll around my cerebrum, habitating the finite and infinite of what i am about to do. formal learning has always been aversive, but ironically i am still doing it. they say that contraries sometimes make up a person for who he or she is, i think, such opposing forces rip apart a man until he or his self is no more. so that leaves a lot of room for innovation. imagine a man, who might go by the name of jack or tom, but he no longer is a jack or tom, just a being habitual to his daily schedule, subjected to the needs of his family or immediate responsibilies. does the earth return to its previous intact dermal after an earthquake, volcano or unseemly excavations? beats me. let’s ask the archeologists.

If poetry is an eruption
volcanic and unsurpassable
caused by a build-up
of intense heat and
concentrated pressure,

then, it is the duty of the citizens
who guard the prison gates
of love,
to reach for cover
until the smoke clears.

half-leaning he held the palm
of my left hand,
and with a mock frown
peered into the zigzagging lines
crossing over the hills and valleys

dark
light
spidery,

the life line
and
the love line,

“there will be no children,
at least none that I can see,”
I know a joke
when I hear one,

the rain had stopped beating
on the roof,
I shifted in my chair
crossed and uncrossed my legs,
fiddling with a stray thread
on the hem of my yellow cotton skirt,
nervously chewing my lips.

unsuccessful in the human cacophony
of artifice,
I might have been
an ant or a bird in my past life,

but
who cares?
some of us are better off
on this side of the street.

I laughed
and said good bye,

pretending the tea had not been
so bitter
and the porcelain cup
an ugly red.

if you roll the dice
and it’s a two,
if you roll it again
and it’s a four,
we make a hundred today
minus the drinks
and the bets.

so…

i was about to write something,
but
i have nothing to say.

you know how it is with women,
they say a thing
and mean another,

and you know how it is
with men,
they say
nothing at all.

then there are
some children
wise enough
to stop growing

before the balloon
is stretched out,
in a field of thorns.

the woman who longed
for something greater
than herself,
vowed to refrain
from the oblique nature
of sex,
sat upon a throne
of emptiness
ruminating
the earth
from a broken piece
of
an hourglass.

bitter, bitter,
there will be no end to it.

the ant scurries up
the hill,

leaving a trail
of work
unfinished.

the grasshopper rolls
and jumps on the river bank,
“sit up, sit up,
do not frighten the mice,”

and the curious cow
shoo’s a mosquito
then blanches
into death.

I need a tutor. School sucks. My first paper came back from the instructor and it was full of bullshit (i.e. my opinions instead of quoted research). Whatever I quoted was in an erratic manner, it did not sound cohesive or tie together the important thoughts. Not to mention the fact that I stayed up 24 hrs to write it, with a slowing down brain fueled with caffeine. I am not very good with beginnings. It is true. If only the curriculum was made up of PowerPoint presentation assignments. Sometimes I wonder if I am intelligent or stupid and dumb. Then I look at others and take back that thought and wonder if God is retarded or simply has an outstanding sense of humor. Some day I am going to get him for that.

Anyways, blah blah blah. This is what happens in families where no one gets a higher education degree and I have to be the first one to go thru the narrow gates of scrutiny. So people go make babies, fornicate and waste your lives (and sperms) while I spend the next four years confined to a desk, writing papers as I lose more hair and my social skills.

And then when I graduate, 28 years old, with no social life, boyfriend or husband, and some horrible eyesight deficiency, I am going to make sure I rub my degree in anyone’s face that has ever been mean or inconsiderate to me.

[Ah, it’s always good to blame others for one's misfortunes.]

O hour of my muse: why do you leave me,
Wounding me by the wingbeats of your flight?
Alone: what shall I use my mouth to utter?

How shall I pass my days? And how my nights?

I have no one to love. I have no home.
There is no center to sustain my life.
All things to which I give myself grow rich
and leave me spent, impoverished, alone.

Translated by Albert Ernest Flemmin

Suppose your whole life
you went your way, belonging
to no place, no school, using
your wits to gainsay every trace
of influence or imitation, wiping
out anything that reminded you
of anything.
You knew how
browbeating memory, the rule
of the past, can be, how easily
it thrives in wiping out the new
since seen for the first time
only.
So you kept yourself
to yourself, doing only chores
you had to to survive.
Unknown to anyone–almost,
for its engrossment, to yourself–
you gave yourself to your work.

With you gone they found it
something unspeakably, if not
unbearably, your own. No matter
how they tried they could not
digest it into a name, a scheme,
an explanation.
Except for this
they might not have been sure
you’d lived at all. But this,
unblinking, brutal in its
authority, made it impossible
for them to deny it or to call
you a minor this, a crazy that,
eccentric at best for his battle,
rejecting the main stream.
They
might turn away; they could not
altogether still the whispering
fear that, after all, that stream,
notwithstanding its deflections,
its passages long underground,
had gone this way. Daily now
the stream grows louder.

current status: sleep deprived

“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

maybe someday i will stop badgering myself. get on wid it…life is too short

Love is an old dog,
too loyal to leave
too tired to bark
broken he lies
by my side,
while I think of
the good times.

in whose tired arms would you seek repose
if sleep was a bird and this lock a key
and the arrows flew as they were shot
pity those arms that flung the gasping heart,

in whose tired arms would you seek repose
if not in the gentle dying mirth of her laughter
and the receding shadow of a sunburned hour
woe to the ill-begotten traveler, long is the winding road,

will the arms as an embrace ought to
nestle a tide moving towards its shore
that set its monumental gesture
if not to the ill-begotten traveler,
receding mirth of her questioning laughter
settle down a floating feather, in this darkening room.

well, there has been a lot of traffic here lately. i wonder why lol.

He has afflicted you from every direction

in order to pull you back to the Directionless.

Rumi

Au milieu d’une île étonnante
Que ses membres traversent
Elle vit d’un monde ébloui.

La chair que l’on montre aux curieux
Attend là comme les récoltes
La chute sur les rives.

En attendant pour voir plus loin
Les yeux plus grands ouverts sous le vent de ses mains
Elle imagine que l’horizon a pour elle denoué sa ceinture.

—

THE BIG UNINHABITABLE HOUSE

In the middle of an astonishing island
That her limbs travel
She is nourished by a dazzled world.

The flesh one shows off to the curious
Waits there like harvests
To fall on the riverbanks.

Knowing she’ll see further
Her eyes wider in the wind of her hands
She imagines the horizon has unbuckled its belt for her.

tr. Nancy Kline

1

من بين عشرين جبلاً ثلجياً

الشيء الوحيد الذي يتحرّك

عين الشحرور عندما ترمش

2

كان لدي ثلاثة عقول

مثل شجَرةٍ

عليها ثلاثة شحارير

3

حامَ الشحرور في دوامة ريح خريفيّة

كانَ جُزءاً صغيراً من مسرحية صّامتة

4

رجلٌ وامرأة

واحِد

رجَلٌ و امرأةٌ و شحرور

واحِد

5

لا أعرف أيّهما أفضّل

جمال المجاز

أم جمال التوْريَة

الشحرورُ يُصفّر

أم ماً بعد ذلك

6

رُقاقات ثلج على امتداد النّافذةَ الطويلة

تشكّل نقش بربريّ في الزجاج

ظلُّ الشّحرور

يتخلل المشهد جيئة وذهاباً

المَزاجُ

يقتفي في الظّل

سبباً مُبهَماً

7

أوه يارجالَ هادام الناحلين

لماذا تتخيّلون طيوراً ذهبيّة؟

ألا ترونَ كيف أنّ الشّحرور

يحور ويدور حول قدمي

المرأة القريبة منك؟

8

أعرفُ لهجات نيّرة سامية

إيقاعات لايمكن مقاومتها؛

لكنّني أعرفُ أيضاً

أن الشّحرورَ له علاقة بذلك

9

عندَما غاب الشّحرورُ عن النّظر

ترك أثراً على الحافّة

لواحدةٍ من الدوائر العديدة

10

عندَ رؤيةِ الشّحرور

يُحلّقُ في ضوءٍ أخضَر

حتّى الأصوات العذبة

من ماخور الداعِرات

تبكين بحرقة لذلك

11

ركبَ فوق كونّيكتيكت

في مركب زجاجي

بمجرّد

مانفد الى قلبه الخوف

تماماً في تلك اللحظة أخطأ

ظِلّ حاشيته

لكل الشحارير

12

النهرُ يتحرّك

الشّحرورُ لابدّ وأنّه يحلّق

13

كانت أمسية طيلة الظهيرة

الثلوج تتساقط

و كانت تبدو أنها

ستظل تتساقط

الشحرور يقبع

على فرع شجرة الأرز

بما أنكم تسألون

فلا أتذكّر معظم الأيام

أسير في لباسي

لا أشعرُ بزخم الرّحيل

حينها يعود ذاك الشّبق الذي لا يسمّى

حتّى و إن لم يكن لدي شيءٌ ضد الحياة

فأنا أعرف جيّدا شفير الأعشاب التي تذكرون

ذاك الأثاث الذي وضعتم

تحت حرقة الشمس

غير أنّ الانتحارات لها لغتها الخاصّة

تماماً مثل النجّار

يريد أن يعرف كيف يستخدم الأدوات

لكنّه لم يسأل مطلقاً

لماذا يبني

لمرّتين وبهدوء أعلنتُ نَفْسي

امتلكت العدُوْ, ابتلعت العُدو

وعلى مَرْكبه أخذت معي سِحْره

وفي هذه الطريق، م

مثقلة و مُستغرقة

أدفأ من الزيت أو الماء

أنا قد استرحت

وسال من فوهة فمي

لعاب

لم أفكّر في جسدي عندَ وخزة الإبرة

حتّى قرنيّتي وما بقي في من بَوْل

اختفى

الانتحارات كانت قد خانت الجسَد مسبقاً

اليافعون لا يموتون في العادة

غير أنّهم يُبهرون

لا يستطيعون نسيان لذّة مُخدّر

حتّى أنّهم ينظرون للأطفال

ويبتسمون

أن تَسحَقَ كلّ تلك الحياة

تحت لسانك

ذلك بحد ذاته

يستحيلُ عاطفة

ستقول، موت لعَظْمةٍ

يائسةٍ ومُجرّحة

ومع ذلك ستنتظرني هي

عاماً بعد عام

لأمحو هكذا برقّةٍ جُرْحاً قديماً

لأفرّغ شهقتي من سجنها البائس

نتكافأ هنالك

الانتحارات تلتقي أحياناً

نحتدّ عند فاكهة و قمر مفقوء

تاركين كِسرةَ الخبز

التي أخطأتها قبلاتهم

تاركين صفحةَ كتاب مفتوحة

مُهْملة

و سمّاعة هاتف معلّقَة

لشيء لم يُلفظ بعد

أمّا الحُبْ، أيّاً يكُن ليسَ إلاّ وبـاء

O come beloved and

for thy lover’s sake

untangle this contorted,

uncertain affair

Fill our cup with wine,

may it be sour or sweet

Before the potter fashion our

ashes and dust into hollow cups

with silent, parched lips

O come beloved and
for thy lover’s sake
untangle this contorted,
uncertain affair

Fill our cup with wine,
may it be sour or sweet

Before the potter fashion our
ashes and dust into hollow cups
with silent, parched lips.

by Omar Khayyam

All, thou gentle one, lies embraced in thy kingdom; the graybeard
Back to the days of his youth, childish and child-like, returns.