Cat.

Are you contemplating the sum of your nine lives
or simply bored?

Did you ever want to go to sleep and not wake up? Has the world been good to you always?

Oh Cat.

From Here to There

A poet once said
Don't ask me for that love again...

I know you who are there
Walking these same streets that I crawl on
I can see your face changing color like the days
When you pass a familiar ruin.

I too have played that chameleon game once
And I pay for those passions even now.

But so much has changed between our lines
Then when we did not know Love we thought that she was all we needed.
When nothing was old or new. I could lie then, without speaking.
And you believed me without listening to anything I said.
Such a world it was without a hell; only the promise of it.

Now hell is in my mind, in my clothes, and in all the bottles on the table.
I choose only one hell from another to consume everyday.
How can I love like that? Now that I know Love. She is as ugly as Truth in the old tale.

I know nothing. Except that they had us fooled all along.
They were only selling another miracle drug. And you know I don't pop pills so easy.
Now I run into people who've seen you mumbling to yourself at the corner of the street.
They say you look well and happy when no ones watching.

There is so much left to do.

I have little time left.

Surrogation

Everyday I swell for someone else
This joy is not mine to spend or invest
They come with gifts. Food for my joy.

Everyday I bury myself under shame
This is what I do for life...I make more living things
So that my own can live.

Don't you dare judge me.
I don't sell my body. I give boons to those who seek them.


Year after year this body swells and drops like ocean waves
And I am as unattached as the waves. High tide, low tide.
These are only technical terms attached to the profession.

One day these boons will take everything I have
And there will be one less goddess on earth.

But don't worry you who comes to me
My sister, she lives a few villages away
Is in the boon-giving business too.

Each point has been put forth
The facts of the case are all out in the open
The judgement to be passed is on a woman's character;
The jury might claim it was her double who killed Bluebeard afterall.
The slave girl;
Dark, violent, the sea, beautiful beast.
In China they consider beasts in bottles -
Submit (they say) to every kind of distortion or be locked up in footwear forever.
Such joy to watch the sea turn to pond or painting.
Quiet.
Still.
Dumb.
Dead.

At the edge of language I swim with you tonight as words dissolve in to prussian colours. I see you through latticed memories that are sweet in my mouth and bitter in my throat. Voices escape and make way for something more languid. Don't say a word, you might break the wave that is coming on. Can it all only be understood backwards? Shall we return through wires and electricity to where darkness lives to make that fall come true?

Fragment

These are deceptions that you and I tug at,
Like blankets on a winter night.
So quickly we have given away our words - the good words.

The time has come to speak badly
We exist ever so casually in our distinct hemispheres
That shall not come to any sort of agreement on dawn or dusk.

And we wonder...

(but never out loud)

So soon. Ah! Must it be so soon?

Narcoleptic

I sleep, therefore I exist.
Nothing provokes me because I am
where you cannot touch me.
I make the rules of my dreams and break them as I choose.

I sleep on these streets of hate and love
Dirt on my face like light from the sun.
I can be anywhere, the roads are all the same
Sound, your sound does not touch me then, like a caress.

Born here, and looking for my mother
Dog, lost on a crowded highway
Sure to be run over if I turn too brave
No one to shelter me when life rides away in a taxi.

Hyperventilate in a strange room
They leave me alone these men who want forty-dollars worth of love
Love is not death; death is sleep but I always wake up,
On a pavement or hotel room, it is all the same.

I celebrate at a funeral
How an old man lived and died of a broken heart
I look shallowness in the eye and scream - shallowness is fear.
I sleep again and again and again.

Let me sleep, I owe you nothing anymore
Thieves take all, someone picks me up
The roads converge at Idaho; potato country,
Where a green house still stands from memory.




Written after watching My Own Private Idaho, a film by Gus Van Sant. It is a really good film. Here's a link to a trailor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA0U0otWuzE
Thanks Aazar for lending me the film! :)

Maid

Girl of so many colours
I would never have known had she not asked
For a bright pink dress last diwali.
And so I had picked the one I hated the best.
She loved it.

Girl wants smooth skin
As smooth as the lotions on my dressing table will make it
In my sick mind I can't allow it.
And so I ignore the roses she leaves on the bed while I'm asleep.

Girl of bright sparkling eyes
Talks back like any other teenager
But she's different, when she bends down to clean our dirt.
Mutineer, I must be revolting to you in my sunday garb, cigarette in hand.

Girl wanted more
More is not as much, but I can't give her anything
So she stole what she could not have.

Girl runaway.
Does your laughter still ring in someones ears?
Or have you grown up; still as if you were dead.
Dead to your fate.