...and then Stella looked him in the eye and said
FUCK OFF Astrophil...

If It Could Be Said

If it could be said.

We would not muddle over mojitos
All night. We passed by this road
And kept getting lost at the same
Red light. Turning a violent green of the
The heart. But it aches and nothing will
Kill this pain. Not until

It has been said.

He slapped me for no reason she said.

When Emilia asked what the blue face was all about.

Then she thought of all the other men she could have been with right now.

Men who had sworn to love her perfectly.

And amongst them she thought of that boy,

Who, would stand under her window,

Drunk like the gondola he was on

Plucking an elaborate tune on his guitar.

She thought of his slightly ugly face

How his hair had curled, in all the wrong ways.

She thought how pathetic he had seemed back then

On his daddy’s boat.

But today she took out her phone book

And called him before she could change her mind.

She wanted out of this prison island for good.

And his daddy’s boat didn’t seem so bad after all.

She dialed his number, hoping he’d still be there.

It rang and she could tell he was on roaming.

First ring, second ring, third ring, she decided she’d hang up if he didn’t pick up by the fifth ring.

Fourth ring, she was desperate…she decided to hang up on the seventh ring.

Fifth ring, then a beep and a voice on the other side said “hello”.

She lifted her head and looked into the mirror. The voice said “hello” again.

In the mirror she saw her life with him, in shades of pink and blue.

She ran to her bathroom because she thought she would be sick.

She hung up.

But that night she went to bed with a swan – song and a dagger.

The song was for her husband. So was the dagger.

Tomorrow she thought to herself, as she lay in the dark for him to come to bed.

Tomorrow will be mine…

Spring...is a very long wait...

After the cages
one day a very sudden day
the sun will be just right.
And its heat will travel deep into
the bones of an old woman
so she exhales with all her might.
This smells like spring.

After all the solidity of drudgery
one day everything begins to float
not on water but on nothing.

Wednesday

"Estas astravesada como el dia Miercoles"*...
..because you bring with you the hindsight of hope
and the foresight of heartbreak...
sometimes you're like an impossibly bad film
at others you're a friendly cafe in the middle of nowhere
when I've walked for four hours and there's only four more to go...


*"You are like a wednesday"
These lines are from a fantastic play by Sarah Kane called Crave

To you all; the keepers of my culture,honour and shame...

Dear Boys from the Ram Sene (and such like),
I admit that I have been a complete failure at upholding my "honor" even though I am an educated, intelligent adult citizen of this country. I have been quite vexed at my own actions and I must confess my crimes immediately to you -
-occasionally having a quiet drink with friends at a pub.
-going out dancing because I love to dance and have always thought it a great way of unwinding after a long and tiring week.
-going back home on a bus with a boy who studies in my college. I see why even though we live close to each other we must not get on the same bus to go to college (i will suggest to him that he should always take the later bus, so what if he misses a lecture...afterall we're talking of "honor" here).
-wearing "western" clothes because they're comfortable and easy to manage.
-speaking my mind and striving to forge my own identity as a woman and a human-being.
-falling in love and showing the person I love that I love him.
-acknowledging my body and its needs and desires.

You have opened my eyes now. But I regret to inform you that since I've spent too many years in the habit of being shameless try as I may I am unable to do things differently. This worried me quite a bit until last week when I saw you all on t.v. I am so delighted that I no longer have to worry about my honor since you have decided to take care of me. What would women like me do without you?

And so I am thrilled to send you my pink panties today. As keepers of my shame I hope you will take care of them. I will now roam the world less burdened with this matter of my honor and reassured that my shame is well taken care of by all of you who have so graciously taken the role of being the "keepers of my culture, honour and shame."

Yours sincerely,

A Shameless (& now obviously panty-less) Indian Woman.

Gaza

There is a war out there.
And no one is able to say who started it.

There, people shrouded in glowing white
Move around, mostly children.
It is a silent procession through broken down buildings made of alphabets
A playground that came apart under lights, like a nervous acrobat
With a spine of cactus.
A little farther down the road, is the " Dead Mothers' Lost and Found Dept."
"Finders keepers", they say, "Losers weepers", they say.
Continuing into the night, they will find their favourite film star,
On fire, frightened and not such a hero afterall.
He will die, forever, and the thought will break that girl's heart.
They come upon a barbed mirror and ask;
"Are we on the wrong side, or is that the right side?"

Then the youngest and weakest of those children
That boy right at the back of the amnesty queue
Who has silently been fitting together these pieces of alphabets, acrobats, dead mothers
and broken hearts into his jigsaw puzzle memory,
that boy will say
"I can't wait to grow up and find out"

Do you ever wonder
about the terrifying whirligig of time?

Love Song for Mephisto (1)

In your eyes, Mephisto,
Are promises of a hellish love
I'll take it; Because you see
In these years I have come to doubt
That there is any other sort.







www.oleanova.com/gambling_art.htm
By the artist Olea Nova

Trust

with some i can never find
and others i was completely blind...

There is such sadness in the music that the Cello brings. A sadness capable of immense inspiration or it might unravel all fortifications that one makes around the soul. The Count said to the other courtiers - no he did not say he asked because he did not know himself - the secret of forgetfulness...

Why are we taught to fight all feeling? Especially feeling that might make us honest or vulnerable...Truth is fragile and often breaks like old women's bones. A broken heart. A scattered smile. The wish to draw tortoise shells on all the walls and breathe life into them...But

Never go so far that you may not return. After all death is so incurable. Static and stubborn like a finishing line. It takes away the beauty of a place, borrowing from it its eternity - never, never to return that moment of the sea.

This is who I am. Who I wish to be. Why must I fear that eye which looks at me. It is mine own. I must speak because this silence will drive me insane. Sometimes the music envelops me - lifting me from this room and beyond the forgotten owl's nest. Only sometimes.

Then what of those green burdens? Can I leave them for the cart to carry when it takes me away? Power, Courage, Honor, Right, Success - I try to believe in all these things. Perhaps I even do. And it shames me so the believing and the non-believing only because often I get greedy for an answer, which is which, who is who.

And then you say there will be time for everything.

Ah! that these days might have passed by a blue sea or in sun flower fields. But now these things; the blue sea, the goldmines of a sunflower field, aquatic life, other galaxies and the sadness in the music that the Cello brings - now they must be collected and pressed into folds of words - one day, a Spring day, to be found out again and thrown away into that place where we throw away everything that ever mattered.

Poetry has left the room...room has left the poet...left poetry in the room...

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.