Don’t tell my mother…

 

 

…that I am in love with him!

UnLove

La Vie C’est La Vie

And there’s a man whose lightest word
Can set my chilly blood afire;
Fulfillment of his least behest
Defines my life’s desire.

- Jessie Redmon Fauset

The Unknown Gradient.
He possesses the air of a razor-sharp raconteur. Or so they’d have me believe. The belle(noire) of the chaotic ball has finally found her match maybe?
So an anecdote becomes the antidote.

What is it with flights and memories?
The book, the view, the awkward position and the looming speech - conspicuous elements to render you uncomfortably numb and dumb for the rest of your sodden travel and perhaps your life. I, on the other hand, am given to such uniquely cataclysmic elements making even my oddest of days.Till it happened.
Till he appeared. Or re-appeared. White and denim. Casually casual. I am on all fours. Literally. Because I am searching for the keys that somehow made their way out of my bag and onto the crummy floor.
I dropped it just in time. It wasn’t premeditated. Maybe for God it was, but not for me. He bends to help - the Scent of a Man. Shite. I know him. My phermones must’ve blinded me temporarily. How could I miss him?
It doesn’t take much time for his cologne, the aquiline nose and his broad palms to jog my memory.
I ‘ve met him before. Another day, equally crowded and even more noisy environs. His cut glass accent, his crinkly eyes, his unusually gorgeous name. A should’ve been wedged in my recollection forever. Forever.
He recognizes me immediately. So it wasn’t as coincidental as it seemed.
He was the first of all the firsts. The definition or antithesis. He is the original wildchild, the first moonbeam on a raindrenched night, the gentle rustling through the majestic Euclyptus maze. The kind of boy who deserved sonnets and also knew what the word meant. He was just about as calm as an ocean at high tide. There was a sense of un-belonging to him. Like he didn’t want to be here or for that matter, anywhere. A ready messiah who detested the fan following his words, his thoughts and his deeds garnered him.
This is so far back in the past, Madonna was probably dabbling with bestiality and S-n-M and..well..actually that analogy makes it seem more recent!
As they say in Clichetown, history repeats itself.
I had known of him and about him. His is definitely twisted, likes gazing into the eye of a hurricane. The boy was mad. Really. None like him was ever discovered or even invented. He did the doing, said the saying and bore the brunt of being the  resident devil. Diablo. His heritage was as muddled as mine and his desires were as cocoa and alluring as mine. But he was notch higher.
He was the owner of a mind so uniquely brilliant. His honey dipped smile and cognac eyes made him even more irresistible.
But the question remained.
Who was he?
The wonderkid who could churn answers to cryptic mathematical puzzles faster than you could say Big Blue. Or, the recluse who sometimes went on without smiling for months but every time he did, the perfection of his smile could’ve left a million gasping for breath even in an Oxygen bar!
This boy was definitely twisted. A part and apart. Sometimes an escapist. He was the only one who seemed about 10 times as screwed up as I was when we were 13.
Then he ran away. From a home that was supposed to shelter him but ended up as his own mental asylum. He couldn’t handle his mind, thats what Sister Frances had said.
We heard of him and then about him. He was in Germany, El Salvador, Manila, Florida. He was an escort, a writer, a photographer, a sportstar, a junkie, a lunatic.
My first Muse was looking right into my eye and I was as unprepared for this as I generally am for everything else.
I had once taken his picture. Some hobby class et al. His eyes were remarkable. Still are.
It was one if the first virtuoso experiments ever conducted by yours truly. The fact that I subsequently lost the film and any designs I might’ve had on him is a different beast altogether and should be tackled a different day.
These postmodern Davids are prickly and priceless. I have encountered and entertained plenty(even as I was being entertained by them). This realm of life has never been exposed to sufficient light. Fear of destruction. A photographer’s natural phobia.
But here he was. Flesh and Blood, Again.
My mental horses galloping faster than you could say “Wyoming”.
He asks, ever so placidly – “Schezi?”..”Wow…You didn’t manage to grow cheekbones ..did ya?”
Hope sank faster than a 80 tonne iron plank attached to a dead whale.
“Not really. But Rogue..err..Vogue predicts a return to round faces this season” – Humor is not my calling card. Clearly.
“Going or coming?”
“Actually…I don’t know.” Note to self - nervous laughter doesn’t work. Ever. Not at client visits and definitely not while slobbering all over self when in the company of a really hot and really old friend.

“I am in town for a week ..lets swap numbers and maybe I can call you “

Really??..(whatthefuckareyouthinking)
“Sure”.
After effects of positive phraseology and the obscence number of employee development sessions.
Numbers exchanged. Fear builds small sweat puddles in the cab on my way back.
Am I fucking stupid?
He texts. Why did I run away? Meet him for some obligatory mid meal snack typa thing?
Yes. Of course.
Such stupidity is replete and so in sync with itself. Chain reaction silliness.
We agree upon a venue and a suitably clandestine hour. Vodka crates usually come handy at times like these. A bottle of gin is equally helpful.
We settle for the original drug. Cafeine.
The reflection is afloat. Stiller than the silence of obscurity. We mumble nothings about precedent and the current and the imminent. He loves my hair and thinks that insists that I must be related to Thandie Newton. Doesn’t forget taking jibes at my hyper-ventilating ex-self.
I nod, submissively. Hard candy. Indeed.
We participate in 13 conversations about nothing in particular. Then the unthinkable happens. He wants to take pictures. Of me. Did I mention that 4 hours and 2 locations past, he is now curiously placed between a four-poster bed and the dubious davenport that splits the suite into two beings.
Will we or Won’t we??
“We will now shoot”. He decrees.
He wants candid capture.
Do anything. Or don’t do anything.
Don’t pose.
This is role reversal. This time its him wanting to peer into my soul through his Canon Digital Rebel.

I wiggle my nose at the thought of his whole Turntable Muse and focus my attention on a peckish raven peering inside the loft. He continues to pace restlessly.

“I want to shoot frames. I want to see your eyes.”
“One of em is glass and the other belonged to me pet pig. Nothing incredible, you see.”
“Sanch..Look at me straight.”
The voice is laiden with intensity only he can manage. He is serious coz otherwise he would have stuck to variations of my first name and not jumped onto my second.

“Magnifique!” He mumbles.
Before I know, he is holding the hour captive. This leica lover.
I couldn’t ask for more. The outline falls into place.

“What do you do these days?”
“I watch people.”
“Continue with the glibness and I leave.”
“Photography.”
“Really…how did that happen?”
“You did it.”

Blank couldn’t be blank-er.
“You took a picture of me at school….I have it with me. You’d said that people can come and go but memories remain and everytime you take a picture you capture a little bit of that being’s life in the camera. Thats why you took pictures.”
“You remember that???”
“Forgetting it…You…wasn’t an option.”
“Stop…I might cry more than I did when I watched Steel Magnolias!”

Plonk!
A giant cushion lands an inch sideways to my right.

“You are such a trip”
Right back at ya.

I remember vividly when I first showed him the prints I had taken. He hated and critiqued each one of them. He was critical. Of my work and of me. Harsh. I hated that. My inner narcissisa could only handle so much. He had inspired vendetta and a certain indispensable will power within my unaffected psyche.

“Why do you still do it?” I question.
“Coz I get free tickets to places with names I still haven’t learnt to pronounce.” He retorts.
He can read my face.
“Also because unlike you I couldn’t choose from amongst a pen, a camera or a canvas. Because I found unparalleled beauty in commonplace Filipino hookers parading the low streets of Thailand. I do it because I couldn’t survive incessant rehabs coupled with constant medical collapses forever. I do it because I can go to Africa and for once feel grateful for my life and those with whom I share it. I do it because I am broken, bandaged and stapled on the inside. Coz I am falling apart. Every second of it. So, I find my liberation. I find my conscience in the confines of my camera and all that it sees. And this is it”

An unstable pause.
“I still hate the pictures, though” I pout.
Sure, you do.
“Oh! my callous Muse..” He winks.

Wow! 180 degrees and how!
We’ve exchanged places.

Just when I was being thankful for a divine disconnection pervading my senses the morning finds me with a hangover and no hubris.
This is how change affects. This was so reminiscent of a past I had just wrapped and flung into a faraway vault of Time. Except, the usual encumbrance of guilt that follows unforgivable (unfathomable) sex was nowhere in my ally.
There was the succinct displacement. Lust by Love. Love for the Art. His work. His life. Him. Any other day, this would have been a sorely wasted opportunity. Today, it was worth every ounce of rapture I had forsaken for rekindling an old passion.
Will He know about it?
No.
Will I feel the need to tell him?
Maybe.
Till then, the chaise longue must share this secure secret with me. The journey to becoming a sharp chronicler begins with this. A bottle of gin, a misplaced itinerary, a mediocre camera and a desire to come undone.
In ways more than one.

Post Party Interruption
4:05 am - Received: “The Vodafone kid looks like you. Plus she is 6 or 7. The same age as you were last b’day?!”
4:10 am - Sent: “The dog resembles you. And not in a cute way.”
4:15 am - Received: “I don’t want to leave but I have to. I’m coming back on the 19th. I want to see it through this time. I am already missing you. Your neurotic rambling mainly! Someday you will come around to appreciating Leibowitz just a lil more. The dog is adorable. Thanks!”
4:20 am - Sent: “Awww…Airports make you lose your mental balance, don’t they? Leibo-witch dont work for me Danny baba!”.
4:30 am - Received: “Did the fish swallow your tranquilizers again? Your tattoo should read A’s Z.
4:31 am - Received: “p.s.: I think I love you. Already sorry for how cheap that is going to sound when am less drunk and/or sleep deprived.”
Well. Not much to be said after that.

The Bakers of Dawn

See the fire is sweepin’
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way

 

 

 

What was my face before my parents were born?
Initiation.
The first Koan. To traverse the Self and I. Ego.
The Mind is embowered in a state of perfect peace even as the body aches from the constant stiffness of having to sit in the seemingly tortuous position. Though I am not watched over by kyosaku wielding roshi or senior monitors, this is equally arduous a task and the crack of a baton is sometimes more a mental than a physical castigation.
The path to Zazen isn’t paved with easy mantras and instant nirvana. And this reality more often than not causes some severe spiritual dyspepsia for the young guns looking towards the Shakyamuni for quick liberation of the soul!
Personally, I don’t mind the slightly longer route to the mountain, much like alighting upon the plateau during my frolicky days of Panchagani lunacy.
Its perhaps not the best combination that I have supplemented the three pillars of Zen with the rabidity of Rant. Palahniuk is hot. Literally and physically. What draws me to his nihilistic refrains are anyone’s guess. I must get my daily dose of Rant much like Casey Jr needed the regular rattlesnake and cottonmouth nibbling. The crazy world of Chuck is slightly less pristine than the one fashioned so elegantly in the Paris Review – my last read. Inventive, it is.
For the uninformed, Angelique Kidjo is fantastic. Summer’s bellowing rather gallingly in the bylanes of Bombay this time and no matter how many Inconvenient Truths you shove down our throats, We ain’t gonna stop incesting Mother Earth. Some reverence that!
News bulletins remain polluted by vexing typa stories about steroid infused He-men and their movies, returns of mythic deities to modern day whorehouses and occasionally even that casual stroll of the surrounding planets manages to find an hour long reveal in some garish tarot card poser’s incoherence. Amidst these noteworthy issues sometimes, just sometimes, a casual mention of a Dalit girl burnt alive elicits collective “tch tch” or “how terribles”. Anyway, for the latecomers, a 5 or perhaps 6 years old Dalit girl was charred for making the formidable mistake of walking the upper caste boulevard in the cowbelt.
Yes, in Indian Shining the glowering fires roasting nubile Dalit girls for walking down the wrong path must contribute some of the luster.

“Try to be better than yourself” - Faulkner

Interim

When I discovered D he struck me as beautifully androgynous. Honeyed perfection and absorbing. No body. Just sounds. Holds your attention, this lack of definitive shape, of being. Devoid of a body. Its is allowed that distinct freedom of running a riot without a bother or any uncertainty.
Emancipation.
About myself I know that I believe in certain things and am open to challenging my set of ideas; this is one of those things that redefine any line of thought.
On some days Life opens up like a raw book, a few corrosive, some conjured and a hell lot of tremulous pages that embody a peculiar chimera. Juxtaposed against unscrupulous reality.
I ‘d always write of approximations and decimations. Maybe because I am overtly wary of giving vent to the primitive urges associated with an uninhibited display of life. The body of trepidation.
But I am feeling strangely free or perhaps this is the right time to be freely strange.
My weave is self indulgent qua quality not qua quantity, primarily, coz I churn at an infrequent rate and yet your are bound to query your own sense of protraction from one day to the other.
Why exists such verbosity?
Why is it interspersed with inconsequential thematic representation?
It wouldn’t make any sense in the face of almost knowing zilch about the writer, what deductions can be drawn from her prose?
It threatens to be too abstract to retain any readership. My jottings.
But still. Jot I.
This, I realize, is about shared lives. It’s all about shared lives. Mine lived an instant earlier than yours or vice versa. The brilliant Russian reverberates with his “There is no fiction” premise. Indeed there is no fiction. In life we are possessed by the specter of veracity. Playing musical chairs. Becoming unforgiving and unforgivable. In love we are far more capable of deviant absolution. It’s an obvious representation of that adage. Everything that I go through is presented in an open space. Amplified. Its effect is manifold, it resounds in this empty open space. Like a tuning fork. Sets in motion reactions and interactions between those who aren’t clued into my realism. It took time to configure its relevance, of why it felt so alleviating to wake up and then keep on waking up evermore to the hollowness of things.
Either that or reassigning nightmares to truth.
Its been tested. The fact that its easy to disappear from life, to allow bones to turn into shadows and write interminable passages of correlation between self, that shadow and the shadow master/watcher. To reiterate Weil and his book. Yes, Life allows you that escape, that’s the easy route and it is the norm rendering it despicable in our book. When you’re forced to confront it, that is the exception.
I confront myself everyday. I’d try to reclaim parts of me from this one-dimensional continuation. So if a couple of days ago Tyler Dryden would’ve put a gun to my head and asked me “If you exit now…What will you take?”
I ‘d have said ..Me
But there is conscientious change now.
There exists that one moment where a (wo)man encounters herself forever and it changes everything. Everything.
It could become a forever present injury or the elegy or the salvation for her soul, this event. Whether that singular loss made me worse or better for repair is not my concern. I do know that it made me fear less. It’s established a deft connection between the Past and the Future. There is no more that vague feeling of waking up in Other places with Other people. There is strength devoid of a hunger for power, not shared egotism. Just a shared life.

Coming back to the antidote. The missing piece of the puzzle is actually invisible. The amorphousness this silhouette possesses is the greatest comfort offered by Life, like D’s songs, its unselfconscious and happy in being dissimilar and tenuous, and there are no fragments, no unrequited ardor, no Locus-stand-I.
To know that the antidote is inclusion. It lies in including People, including the Time spent with those People.
Then I stray.
There is that frenzied interval when I stand at JFK, sound hangs from the air, in a state of inert suspension, a frozen December hymn. The thought–stream halted, the question rose from the still-air, like an apparition….What if this is the interval that divides the Present and the Future?
Music is actually silence between two notes. The interval.
This interregnum is Life.
What if, like music, Life indeed existed in cultivated emptiness?
And suddenly Dave Bruebeck starts to spin in my ears.

Revoked

The Reconnaissance of a not so Inert body.

I am a plagiarist by nature
Steal your soul, I will
Negotiate some magic in your life
Before I go for my final kill

I had issues. I wrote because You asked me to. A risqué flirtation, staring at a blank document that holds an unambiguous and abiding promise of words that might change lives. The author must learn to love vacuity because in nothingness, everything becomes excruciatingly clear. After well studied departures to and from New York City,to and away from Los Angeles, to and from Mumbai. After incessant searching of spaces for families and mixing bloodlines the concept of Home becomes an obscure mirage.
Every blank page heralds truth about the inexorable life, the truth about love and laughter, the truth about death and disaster, the truth about hoping and wanting, the truth about living and waiting to live. Truth that may never find the accurate expression in uppity annoyingness of words. Words that are perhaps much like the expensive accessories to this white bland House. Words spurning from Thoughts. Thoughts – the animated expression of life. Words - the inanimate objects of my House. Insufferable implosion of words. Words need to be cleared. My search for perfect prose is my search for a perfect Home.
I have a studied apartment, a sparse and barren one. Sub consciously I seek transparency and experiments with B&W haziness have only strengthened my resolve to find absolute lucidity for images and people and places. Even as I juggle between concepts and creations and demarcations, I find a certain affinity for simplicity of kind and structure. I want the uncharted truth about You and I and all of Us.
So you start a pragmatic journey from superficial planes to a deeper internal environment. And You want to conceptualize truth about Us, the people, the human race. I can write about genocide and ethnic cleansing, of miscegenation and racial purification, of warlords and war games, of amputated arms clasping fired shells, small naked children reduced to that blurring line which separates life from death. Every landmine that blows up is God fragmented to a million pieces. In this moment of non-attention, you have killed God. The vedic logic says we created God in a span of 5000 years and now we are razing down that, what, we so ingeniously and meticulously created.That’s the truth. So, now, when you sit in your beige and bland chapels seeking the Higher Power, bells aka knells start telling you how the trinity bled to oblivion in the dusty Nigeria Lane. The issue is not as labyrinthine as I ‘d like for it to be, its as unforced as the precision that separates living from existing or light from dark.

What else is the truth?

The air tightened its grip
On an ennui inducing wintry snowboat
At a place I knew
About a story I wrote
On the skin shedding wall of my now gone Home..

That Home is no more. That I feel as nomadic as I ever could have. That I feel a pungent mixture of cheap soy sauce, rebellion and guilt making its way down my throat everytime I eat at a dilapidated joint. I will make unapologetic attempts though. To let my soul unsown of this cloaked contentment. To deconstruct Derrida and reweave Rene into my soulful caprice. Except this quirk is the idealism of desertion. A ragged afternoon breaks the day into two whole pieces. The Home you know, the Life you love, sit on one side and an airplane ride to a hemorrhaging terrain on the other. Pick, choose, decide. The Latter wins. I Leave.

Anymore of that much needed Truth.

Its not until you’ve tasted your own blood
that,
resignation from Life becomes a non-choice…

That I will love You and want You safe wherever I might drag myself to be. That I will disappear from life, a Perfect Stranger. I like that we don’t embower bitterness of vengeance or vendetta of yesterdays. That we are not futilists as great as we might have liked to arbitrate; instead we have learnt to acknowledge our suction into self created passionate voids with a little bit of charm and a little care. And an infinity or none, you are my companion for life and one beyond it. I might be a perennially drunk, bird watching, camera clutching hardboiled fucking idiot for the rest of my life. But, in this instance of tranquility, I feel Right – for my History,for my unborn childhood and my galloping youth. And for all the Unborn Time.

Wanted

The hearts are weak, the Guns are not.

You hear a whistling overhead
Are you alive or are you dead?
It’s only Thursday

You feel a shaking on the ground
A billion candles burn around
Is it your birthday?

Tired. Drowsy. Hoping for a nice Mocha cold to be offered to me when I finally make my way to the other building.
Reading something by Martin Amis. Nope, not a book, just an old article printed in a shabby rag about a million moons ago. Managed 50 crunches and a wholesome food shopping trip without losing much heart or stomach. Awesome stuff.
Oldboy is worthy of all its praise and its a total dog that I saw it so late. Fantastico! My penchant for cinematic violence is only preceded by my penchant for real violence. Kidding.
Samira Makhamalbaf is so damned beautiful. Its almost bizzare.
What else?
Yeah, the weekend getaway is almost here. Yay!
My Peter Steele mania shows no signs of subsiding. Sigh!
Making a documentary is serious work.
I’m not conditioned for serious work. There in lies a huge antithesis.
Ever felt like this is the moment of your life?
Nope, I’m not feeling like that right now. I’m wondering if you are feeling like that, though.
I’m feeling slightly normal tonite.

Voice

Inner Dj’s spinning - Victory(Instrumental version)

There’s a footstep in the clouds…
There is warmth in drops of rain…
There is a meaning to the words I say…

Fractals. SCORM specs. MACs and Pods. Visual Appeal. Bon appetite. Whipped creme. Cinnamon sticks. Whiff of life. Mocha dreams. 6 degrees. Launchpad. Nomadic traits. Entourage. Enchanted woods. Attraversiamo. Pillars of Hercules. Gibraltar Ascending. Ideas. Reality. Dimensions. Added. Fifth Element. Sixth Sense. Bombay Sappers. Psychedelic splashes. Motley Holi. Italian siesta. Thailand conquered. New Kids. Old Block. Arroyo shining. Powered by Pilates. Dan of Aidan. Love. Hubba Hubba. Hubba. 3’s a dream. Lush. DeLush. Volvo Maxims. Maximum happiness. Delhi diacritics. Average cheap delhites. Warranted exclamation Alleppey pickles. Quarter life crisis. Jobs. Partners. People. Desires. Definitions. Disappearance. Powerlunches. Courgettes. Not Zucchinis.Tajine. Not Biryani. Magnifique. Corporate Slobbery. Indigestion. I Exist. Still. Kierkegaard and Thumri. Khayal. The Big Bang. Just theories. Summer in Algiers. Bologna. Deadmeat. Downright. Airtight. Some Vision. Insight. Querelle de Brest. Brand New. In the same hue.

I had almost forgotten how much fun it was to connect the dots.

I find the truth in my reflection..
I see the meaning of my defiance…

We’ve started. Coming soon to a grouchy TV screen near you…Mz Zadie(”Scherezade?..No..that doesn’t work for us..will call you Zadie”) and the Klowns(”Ok..dee dee..dum dum”).

You need to wait for a month to completely comprehend this absurdity. Rest assured, I have finally made concrete, the concept we were playing around with, for a really long time. So, after 23 mediocre years I am finally doing what I have always wanted to do, professionally and personally. Connecting. With people.

Keep believing.

- The Suburban Noise Machine - S N M.

Ration-ail

On suffering a midlife crisis at 24 and a half. Again.

In the wake of insurrectionary attacks across the world, carried mostly by renegade youth(No Pita bread with this Hamas!), religious dysfunction and sundry(religion is not my prerogative though)I am left analyzing what is amiss with this generation and more importantly how out of place are we?
The Gen D is scrivening its own Gospel. And how.
Disturbed indeed.
But after 5 hours of careful consideration and cafeine, I think I ‘ll let this be about me for now, because I can’t claim to have figured out the truth bout x and y yet.
Then again, I am but an equal conspirator in this Odyssey 2008. So talking bout the oh-so-schlocky I would include some aspects of talking bout the larger Us.
I am this generation. In ways more than one.

Feeling acute saturation. Jaded to the bone. Exposed to the severity of everday violence, widening chasms, perpetuating differences and more differences. Religion. Race. Face. Skin. At least one component of this differential almost always goes kaput. This is the story.
The question and its reflection are afloat. Like lichen carpeting mangroves choking on its own density.
Where do we fit now?

Commercial hegemony , social subjugation…bundling cliches, I sat up all night penning verses upon verses and then eschewing the paper at the altar of the Garbage Gods. I am itching to find an antidote for our collective synthetic subsistence.

On the streets we are breathing out of polythene bags filled with antagonism and opprobrium, take a walk to the nearest train station and watch plasma screens glower and beam life-size images of unremitting perdition, of naked bodies and bloody shapes. Of Olympian  perfection achieved in blame-game tactics. Our daily intake of bitter juices and a cardstock of violence. Our Books are filled with letters frothing as if they are on some perilous medication and they fail to provide us our requiem. There seems to be such a long waiting list for any real answers to any real questions.
Godot it?
Where do we belong? Where are we headed to?

I dont know..

For those( like us, like I) who don’t dot their social calendars with hearts or march in and out of profligate parties in merry and gay(ironic) groups. We also fail to make the cut at the Art club with multiple pierced Nu Age uber cool elite who often forget that the very basics of painting involves an art brush and cowplop is and will always be a fertilizer better suited for the vineyards of Nagpur or Napa than the geometrical confines of an art gallery. We aren’t rocking the crib with the techno wizards or quantum kids who are usually rushing past some super-information highway with a bleeding hurry. And We definitely didn’t make the grade at the Karma Consciousness and niether were we invited to their unbounded spiritual orgies. So where exactly do we stand now?
We like to watch our gardinias in bloom while casually designing entire learning systems in hours that leads to immediate “genius” tags and truckloads of more projects that further lead to a sense of seepage in the soul. We are the ones who march out of  staid corporate boardrooms with equal ease, to the tunes of Bittersweet Symphony inside our head. Simply coz,…I can’t change..But I’m here in my mode..I am here in my mode..But I’m a million different people from one day to the next..I can’t change my mode no no no no no…

We are capable of a Harvard or a Stanford or a Wharton but bypass all of that for a road trip across Southern India because the learning experience should be measured in moments of life not as credits on term papers. We - the anomalies - who made guidance counsellors think twice bout their own career choices while advising us about ours. Too derivative. Too inventive. Too much of too little.
Sometimes this stratosphere just makes you realize that you are breathless and dying.
Niether hip, nor trendy nor intellectually liberated nor psychologically deviant.Without a tattoo on the tailbone or a mini ring hanging from an apathetic nipple.We are without clarity or chaos.
The inevitable Trishanku.
Sentient but burned in places by the materialistic desires. Cerebral and yet culminating in logic defying choices of extremely ordinary vocations that stir nothing but a few cells of itchingly caustic amore propre. Not composing ephemeral symphonies, just making sound. Not writing epochal literature just scribbling illegible sentiments on napkins and blotting papers that will wash away with the impending torrent. Sometimes of the emotional kind.
Niether swimming upstream nor downstream, just trying to maintain the lotus position in the middle of the damned brook.
Niether smiling nor frowning, just the occasional eyebrow arching and shoulder shrugging.
Niether straight nor bent , just gleaming in the blanche light of androgyny or suffering sexual identity crisis.
Niether sane nor invalid, just balancing bodies and souls on the bi-polar manic depressive trapeze.
Niether loving nor hating just debating. The possiblity of basking in easy happy indifference.
Are our principles susceptible to easy compromise or, worse still, a monetary bargain?
Are we as souless as I feel we have come to be?
Are we living too close to the edge or is our entire existence safely packed into a vacuum?
More glib than gifted?
More gifted than conscious?
Is there a difference?

Mind Games

The thing about power is that the controller can only win if other people agree to play.

And everytime You decide to play, I will win.

Too bad, no?

Girl Un-Interrupted

3 things.
1)It’s really long.
2)Its may not make any sense.
3)You were warned.

“In the end I was the mean girl..
Or somebody’s In-Between girl…”

I am road tripping on a bitter Monday.
Miles of shrunken solitude stretch as I step into the middle of nowhere.
Summers have pined for a single drunken strand from Parker’s finest instrument.
Wrapped in satin and set on fire by its own incandescence. This summer’s onset. It never felt this good to burn.
Nerfa nerfa burnin’ love.
Now when the water retreats and the streets clear, my mind feels the same way.
Will I see Nadja walking your granite again? Will I ever forgive myself for being so distant when you cried yourself to oblivion? On the breath of a long running thought, an imminent epistle. Should’ve dispatched before you were swept away. Black star. A jazz chorus overwhelms all senses within muted hours of darkness.
I have changed my Life but I  still keep coming back to You.
I cant express it. It wont do justice to emotion through words.
The absinthe in my veins, the Blues in my soul, the pensiveness hanging ever so softly in the air on this faithfully blind night.
Of a Life, lived Elsewhere. And in the wake of a much desired return to same Elsewhere in a short while.
Carved in stone, my faith and knowledge lay buried in the beads that glitter and through them each Mardi Gras another austere addict discovers the soul and the muscle and perhaps an anonymous ardor for Life. Here.
No hippie. No saint. At best just another upstate heretic in some measures, sinking with Polyrhythms and  uneven syllables. The Duke’s den dealt those nickel bags, strummed awry refrains. Inhaled enough to scream like a wailing banshee with green,  screaming veins. What is the real drug? I’m dishonest about how much I consume(d). How much honesty do you expect anyway?
How far have I come from that place?
Is the physical overdose any more painful than the mental ?
To have shot, snorted, injected and then some more. Still alive.

Life is, but, a four lettered word.

Unhappy with everything but not yet ready to let go of those things, then came back for more.

My city of severance and harmony. My antithetical equal.
Vortex of my infatuations and passions. If I could find a man with enough soul as this city I would die just to live another day in his arms.
Do I regret the lines of coke or sullying binges in your non descript bars?
Not.
I’m changed. The 5 year mark came to an end yesterday. This time I succumbed (once again) to the desires of these itchy feet that get stronger with each little sliver of spring thrown their way. Everything’s been washed away. Everything will be formed. Anew.
But I confess that I have loved living with you. And breathe into you, I would, the insatiate desire to Live beyond means and survive all that the testy lil’ cretins threw along our paths. And continue to. I would instill back the lunancy that descended me at the Presbyetre or even relive the romancing of Bourbone Street.
I made my transition
I made Me. Nomore am I the same girl who sunk into a heap on a wet bathroom floor making the millionth call to a deplorable bastard coz I had some hope of being loved back. Tied to the ugly, begging self in the foetal position and remained for innumerable hours. I don’t allow any more room for that kind of emotional self-flagellation.
I’ve found my flow. Again.
I am this city. I’m You. I will burn brighter every time they try to throw me into another room filled with darkness.
A precipitate compulsion, a rouge morning, heralds a not-so-random beginning.
And a brass spirit welcomed me into.
I haven’t left. I was gone for a while. I was interrupted. But I didn’t leave.
Now, you can’t recognize me coz it’s a transformation. Chrysalis, no more.

Of an article from my Past.That appears in my Future. My recurrent haunting. Fills deeper voids within this life. If Your Blues didn’t haunt me, what would I have come to be?
Would I ever find the strength that makes heroes of (wo)men.
Another lifeless form?
Battered barricades of rage to fling myself off of. Pure and unadulterated rage.
Slow dilution till all of it just becomes one.
A frantic breath of Life.
.55 for a long shot.
Violent poetry in motion.

I could’ve been the End of everything I’d created.
You salvaged me that once. Then so many times over, when I came to you with despondency, odium, and fury.
You are the wandering. The absence I feel when am alone. The tune of extimacy and intimacy.
My Pain for you, my reliquary, is much like my Love…
Unforgotten. Unsung. Undying.

p.s.: Its finally taken some shape. Even if just in my mind.