from one Ejaculation to another

The man had so much to say that it was like he lived with us. Or exactly the opposite. It wasn’t romanticism, for there was nothing there to build upon. It was fanciful to the point of being absurd, but it wasn’t like I was trying not to laugh for the sake of being dignified in a gathering that, clearly, was meant for something else. I was moved too by his performance and yes – it was a performance. The tone was robotic, synthesized; almost like medicine, prescribed and paid for. 

He was just the undertaker, after all. He couldn’t have meant the things that he said. And yet, no one seemed to resist belief. 

 He mounted one glorious thing on top of another, inventing ways to venerate someone who’s definitely not done as much. Someone associated, in his time, with more disrespect than honour, his presence a burden be it lovable or loathsome. Someone who had my Father question his integrity as a son, and it was like he almost needed a forced regression in this twisted good-cop-bad-cop routine where you play all three roles of Cop and Fugitive; to indict yourself and invoke the guilt. 

Someone who lay dead and cold in front of us. 

My Grandfather. 

It was every other morning of waking up in my bed in the room that I had to myself for the whole of two semesters, my final two semesters at college which were busy spent making plans for elsewhere – like planning dessert when halfway through the main course; as if there weren’t enough ways to objectify life even more. It was earlier than usual; my usual. It was a Saturday. There were calls from my Mother in the morning that I had missed and there were calls from my Father as well. Usual, again. They’ve always alternated with their efforts to reach out. 

What was peculiar this time was the time they had called – early to be ‘early’ but not too much so. It was like they were waiting for me to wake up or at least be in a position to wake up; where it wouldn’t be unfair to wake me up, if you get what I’m saying. You’re woken up at 2 in the morning, you know it’s an emergency. You’re woken up at five, you know someone has died. 

It’s something I assumed as I’ve seen neither before. 

I knew this man was sick, almost crippled. I have seen him sick; demented, broken, blind and living in shambles. And except for those times that I’ve fancied myself to be from this family of Superheroes where no one has died (on my Father’s side, at least), I’ve expected it; I had to. Some day, I knew, he was going to die. Some day, I knew, I had to quit laughing about it and take it with a straight face. 

I thought about the interview, then, in a rush of thought. There was this interview that I had to go to the very next day. I had to go to another city, report at this place that I was supposed to stay and get myself prepared for the day after. And I had had more than one reason to go to this place, to the interview. 

Now I had another. 

xxx 

Every time she saw me, she would turn away. It wasn’t even nice anymore; it was an act that had surpassed its glory and gone on to spaces I wouldn’t dare explore. I had my guilt subdued, if I ever felt it, and it irked me to find that she had hers intact. 

Actually, I didn’t know if it was guilt or embarrassment or anything of that sort. 

At first I thought she had gone anti-social. I didn’t see her in class, I didn’t run into her in the corridors, I didn’t see her at the hangouts, I didn’t see her up and about. 

I thought she was depressed because it was so like her to be. 

And she also had this nervous condition that gave her migraines and I knew she ailed – yet another demon to ascribe her abduction to. She hadn’t called, she hadn’t responded to my calls. But I knew she was around; I was told so. If only those people knew how it felt when they knew something that I didn’t know about someone I thought that I knew best. 

One thing that I did know is that she was to act in this staging of Stoppard’s play ‘the Real Inspector Hound’, where she was to play the seductress Cynthia, one who has wooed many a men in the audience and beyond with kisses showered on those on stage. Those kisses that got catcalls and cheers from an overawed crowd; kisses that were but caricatures that meant nothing compared to the tenderness for those we shared.

Kisses that were never shared, for it was a college stage, and yet they drove me mad with sheer malicious intent. She knew I’d watch, she knew I’d be there. I searched for a sliver of recognition beyond walls of lipstick and lotion, amidst a sea of people in forced orgasm that bordered on hers. If anger were orgasm, I had my share. 

I wasn’t past confrontation, though. 

In fact, it was all I wanted, but I wanted it chanced. She wouldn’t listen to plans, I had to run into her. She wouldn’t listen to whispers, I had to cry. She wouldn’t pay heed to tears but I can’t fake smiles in a massacre of emotion. 

I told her all this when it finally happened because I made it. It was like watching a concept take shape in form of her face, when what was merely a reflection of my energies transformed into a person who could sweat and weep, for she did both and I saw her do that. 

“Shit”, I said to myself. “She’s a girl.” 

She didn’t say much but she said enough. There was someone in her kettle she was drying to drown and I knew that. The water was too little, the pressure was too weak and the kettle, that’s herself, didn’t allow it. All she had done until that point, with me, was let off steam with the smoke she blew. 

And it was like nothing had ever happened. 

xxx 

I’m a single stroke person. 

If there’s a reason I wouldn’t write something, I wouldn’t want to write it twice. Thoughts are obscure as they are and I wouldn’t want them to repeat. It’s something that the observer doesn’t permit in me out of compassion for the writer who doesn’t want himself out there. There’s nakedness in every exposure, every moment on film. 

So I sat myself down to write, got distracted on the go. 

And I left one ejaculation for the sake of another. 

I like bathrooms when they’re dry; I don’t prefer virgins, if that’s a contradiction. I looked around, I stood my ground and I figured myself out. It felt like verse, as always. Quick, quiet and comfortable. 

“Screw writing; rub one out instead!” could become a slogan with a catchphrase that quotes the classic “it’s sex with someone you love.” Woody Allen would endorse it. 

Writing is for people who take their time, I thought. 

Like Virginia Woolf. 

Like Annie Dillard. 

Dried-up old ladies who came to mind when the deed was done and I was glad they did for they helped keep afloat on a sea of hormones. I doubted that I’d dive again. 

It was then that it happened – as though a cosmic force had propelled him, “fluttering from side to side of his square of the windowpane” before he fell right in front of me, there by the side; almost exactly like she wrote. 

A Moth. 

The Acoustic version. The Night-Prowler. The Bastard Child. 

Life would have had him fly; but then, he had fallen. It must mean death, surely. 

In a surge, I had a haunt of everything that had passed me by up until that point. His Death, the Break-Up, the Interview, the classroom discussion – a host of such things that needed a Moth to remind me of them. 

In a second, they all came around. 

I looked at the Moth again. His wing was broken, his legs twitched. I could almost swear that he was one eye blind. 

He stirred, he stood up; he looked around. He then took flight as though he had always been meaning to. Out through the window, and I would never see him again. 

I stepped outside the bathroom, my head buzzing with the air-conditioner, my mobile phone alight; I had a call to answer, I had a deadline to meet. I had water outside my door, threatening to break its way in. 

Then, I thought, was a good time to write.

Croakin' to be Known

the Singing Frog 

live in Concert 4/11/2027 

Intro 

I’m halfway there. 

The worst that I could do to a bunch of growing kids is tell them that I’m halfway there. And I just said that. I’m not quite there, actually, but I’m soon going to be and it’s all I can think about right now. 

Any moment now the bell would toll and I would go on my halftime break.

“Am I in the lead?” I ask myself. 

“Does it matter?” I respond. 

There’s peace and there’s quiet. I’ve grown a beard and I’ve shaved it too. I’ve found my inner Dylan and made peace with him, if that’s even possible. I think life can’t get any more conclusive. 

You know you’re growing old when you write your autobiography. I am growing old.

(starts harmonica/guitar-strum. Song begins) 

a Blackboard for a worldview, striving to be clean, 

sign your name on the pamphlet, sir, 

and take one for the team; 

fighting with them crocodiles, an angel on the phone, 

describes a life invested in Croaking to be Known 

he started like a paragraph and broke it down to verse, 

a Song for you, sweet lady, and another song for her; 

“where’s the fun in that?” she said, 

he tried to tell a joke 

that described a life invested in Croaking to be Known 

his Humour on a mission, his anger not announced, 

with every word he uttered 

he was told to watch his mouth; 

a hundred ways to freedom, now, the road is not your own, 

describes a life invested in Croaking to be Known 

paint some Stars, paint some Stripes, get the lines to blur, 

concoct some broken images, 

put some powder and then stir; 

a minute on the pedestal you’ve been dreaming all along, 

to describe a life invested in Croaking to be Known 

“a Thousand!” called the Auctioneer, 

Ten thousand, and he sells, 

a time when but a hundred would do him fairly well; 

sometimes you’ve got to lose it all to find what’s going on, 

to fight a life invested in Croaking to be Known 

so He sat himself with children, with a paper and a frown, 

he saw their world, polluted, that he vowed to turn around; 

he got some war-paint, put some on 

and he sang a protest song 

to reprise a life invested in Croaking to be Known 

the Frog brought him fame that the Frog took away, 

and the summer stole his silverware 

that returned in silver rain; 

what’s the point in worrying when there’s no point at all? 

describes a life invested in Croaking to be Known 

and Yesterday was calling back, asking for a smoke, 

he blew some on her bitterness 

and threw her out the door; 

Today, he bought a building with a basement and a floor, 

and inside, a life invested in Croaking to be Known 

Croaking to be known, Croaking to be known, 

a life alive, a life aloud, a life – rest-assured; 

of juggling faces with a hat out 

for the coins you get thrown, 

describes a life invested in Croaking to be known 

my heart would turn her sullen, 

a rhyme would drive her out, 

but everything I seem to need, I seem to need it now; 

“ever struggle, never quit – go easy on the show,” 

describes a life invested in Croaking to be known 

Outro 

All proceeds go to the hunger foundation back home. 

It means you’re paying for my food. 

Be generous. Thank you!

to Annie, without Love

Annie, 

Have you ever lost a Moth when you looked at another? Or have you lost them both not knowing which one to look at? 

How many candles do you have, burning, in your room? 

What if the best you could recollect of death is a shadow flickering on your brazen wall; where ‘Death’, at that time, couldn’t have meant death at all for you just didn’t witness it? 

Between two insignificances, which one would you pick, to caress into meaning? 

There is a spider on a cobweb in my bathroom as well, sitting pretty on top of a mix of flies, dragonflies, ants and, yes, of course, moths – unsung heroes of a lost cause. There is a spider in everyone’s bathroom, isn’t there? More than one, in some cases, as though they symbolize the extent of predatory tendencies kept in check, realized but in conflict with mortal fear as we take the place of both assailant and victim at the same time. 

Just like falling in love. 

Like when you claim your ‘love’ for a person when you don’t know for sure if you really mean it but then you want them to know what’s going on with the hope that they, if not help ease you out of your discomfort, would get down and suffer with you instead. In ‘love’; ‘love’ as sadism, ‘love’ as treachery, ‘love’ as the single most selfish emotion in the world. 

Like how you derive the pleasure of existence outside of yourself; where the pleasure is felt not by the Moth, but by you, the Monster – the heartless machine that would pump its engines with the juice of lives that pass you by in encounters, both chanced and planned. 

If only for a second you sat on the Moth and saw through its eyes, you’d swap your candle for fluorescence to let it live. And you’d let it leave, because there’s nothing you can do to make it stay and death isn’t an option – not its death, not yours. You’d let it leave like how you’d have let everyone else leave or have learnt to, the insects of your life who’d have fed on your glow, whom you’d have nurtured, whom you’d have melted in front of before having to pull yourself together and collect yourself back again to get a new candle up – fresh, but recycled. 

That, or you could’ve fooled yourself with fluorescence and the flower that said ‘she loves me not’ (she never did) when the last petal fell. 

I read your work. I hated it. It was beautiful, but I hated it still. You can’t make me sad unless I have faith in you to make me happy sometime. I can’t let you do that to me. I shouldn’t have – for which reason, I hate myself more for having shown to you my naked self, not a strand of hair on my chest; naked thought and emotion – further naked. It’s like I spoke to but a mere ghost of you and desired more, only to find that you weren’t even there to begin with. 

It’s vivid when I recollect the time that I spent, under your influence; when I saw you sit there as you told me your story, shifting in your seat and glancing at the door all the time and I pretended to the best of my ability that I couldn’t see that because I had turned my back on you to make you some coffee, looking over my shoulder to check. And then it was like I came outside, disheartened, as I made this excuse that there wasn’t any sugar when, in reality, it was that I felt you didn’t deserve the sweetness of one who really cared. You didn’t get your coffee, I didn’t get my kiss. That tasted like fairness. 

The classic example of a reader’s dissatisfaction with ‘mere words’, if I can call it that. Where, in a toss between your garden and mine, I would ask for yours any day. If only you would let me. 

I suffered with the bounty of your mind inside my head, not knowing what to do with all the gold that I held, not wanting to spend, not wanting to count; dreading the fact that it would all disappear as it’s bound to. Not wanting to melt and cast into an image of my own in the meantime, where I know I’d fancy you to be the Bear that I hugged to sleep on the planet that I was, a million moons back – innocence. 

And now, dear Annie, I want you to burn in the black of mine. And I hope you burn a sunset Orange in a Purple haze, for that’s a colour I would ascribe you to. 

hatred and helplessness, 

Karthik

My, oh My, oh My

If only you were in the midst of my mind where I keep you alive because I need you around. You wouldn’t be talking about ‘things moving too fast in life’, then. 

I wanted to draw a picture of you and I couldn’t. Perhaps it was the thought that I had your image perfected inside my head and ready to replicate would have you admire me more; as though you didn’t admire me enough without me having to do that. 

But then, what do I admire you for? 

It’s not something that I’m not aware of and yet can’t explain. It’s the voice in my head that sounds like David Gray when he goes: 

“There’s something in your eyes 

That makes me smile... 

Oh, yeah.” 

There IS something in your eyes that makes me smile. Like I saw the glitter on the cover of those Pokemon cards I was caught stealing and got slapped for in seventh Class. In them, I find my desire to be a better person. In agitation to be more mellow. More nostalgic, more beautiful, more insightful, more fun; more of ‘me’ than I could ever be and I still want to go further. As if better versions of myself are all that you asked for. 

And that is because I don’t know what you want. 

This is my most fragmented narrative of all and I find it in order; in adherence to my mind’s sequence, a place where I’ve got it all mapped out – a plan so frantic whose potency I can’t keep pace with. A place where I get lost often; where the last I remember is holding your hand as you left me by the street on my way back home. Two kilometres in a head filled with you, in street-art, in car-headlights and the eyes of an occasional dog that I had to fight to avoid; that so terrifies me. In the most hazardous of times, most comforted. 

“If only life were like ‘Before Sunrise’,” I told you, if you remember. “I would kiss you on a roller-coaster with the sun in your eyes.” 

I couldn’t say the second part to you and have you scandalized. 

Why is it that I can never like someone and feel comfortable standing? What is it about attraction that it’s got to be so discomforting, compulsively, putting me in a whirlwind that sends me spinning to an Oz of my own where they’ve put up posters of you, your smile in red, your face in yellow and your eyes in sunset orange, lined by scanty kajal that you never knew how to put. Like you were the proud drawing of my six-year old self that I called ‘Dollie’ and showed my parents with a naughty little smile on my face. 

Where your hair was green and your retainer blue, for I only had a six-colour box where I had used up everything else. And I found you beautiful like that. 

If only you heard the things I said to those I complained about you. You’re the stomach ache that has me starve – to eat would mean to replace you for that’s where you reside, soothing against the acid; tickling me from within. We tried my heart where you were cramped for space. I suggested we move you elsewhere. And I suffer from my suggestion, only too sweetly. 

I’m clearer now. It’s like I’ve woken up from waters that you pushed me into, off my bed as I rolled over the side and lay sprawled on the floor; drenched, but never cold. I sleep without air-conditioning. I don’t remember if I’ve told you this before. 

I’ve found I can’t write when I’ve lost track of myself in my scramble for space and time (with you); I had to turn some pages to get familiar so I could write these things that I thought about you. And I had my hand on my mouth with a smile on my face and my head shaking in disbelief as I read these lines that I once wrote in a distant-sounding song. I had called it ‘Shame.’ 

“...and we’ll make love on sunset-streams, 

Splashing in the sand...” 

I was outraged; embarrassed that I had written/thought something like this before. Like I could pull my shirt over my head so no one can see my face turn red.

Look at how little you’ve made me.

SECRETS - II

This isn’t a commemoration. This is second-time honesty. 

I’ve been crazy the past few days and I even know why. I can’t say it though. I wouldn’t even hint at it, which is ironic because the very intention of this post is to do just that. Or to remind myself of a pitiful state of mind that I’m already aware of with enough of a dose to incite retaliation, intimidate my senses and to threaten them to cooperation with the fleeting vision of a doleful ‘or else.’ Not gruesome death as a ransom note that would sign my own release papers, but eventuality as the brick-red wall that grows with my efforts to climb it. I think I’m trying to put in words the inimitable agony of what it takes to ‘snap out of it.’ Which is what I’d try to do with the rest of this post as well, at the end of which I shall either have ‘snapped out of it’, or have admitted my failure to do so. 

The last time I shared my secret with you, I told you how I anticipated the time I would see you on screen and ask my mother to quit it with the Divas and take a look at mine. That song-and-dance routines never change was the bottomline where I wished for your intervention in that hour-long slot. And yesterday was the first time I felt threatened by that notion. 

Not that drastically– it’s not like I’ve never had to eat my words before, I think that’s primarily why I try to cook them up this well, so I wouldn’t have trouble eating them back in poor reception. That, of course, is a cooked-up statement as well. Words aren’t vomit where the mind is a takeaway counter that rings with the bell at every summon of thought delivering itself like a tasteful salad that’s both healthy and cold so you could relish it and it wouldn’t burn you and yet leave you like it should – warm in the heart and satiated in the belly. I’m going to go have one in an hour from now. 

Ah, if only life were as simple as a train of thought that I could take to the poles and bring back home loaded with Christmas gifts. Then I would have you gifted a record that played this song for you that I’d already have written and kept aside for the moment to come, except I wouldn’t remember it and you wouldn’t have expected it and both of us would be pleasantly surprised. You, with my intention, and me, with my ability, rediscovered. Too clichéd? 

And it’s not that I’m incapable of poetry. It’s that I despise it. Poetry I write for you is inevitably mine. I’d be a verbal exhibitionist encroaching upon you, puffed-up with the rise you gave me, wielding a baton you would never take in hand even though you might appreciate it from a distance. Appreciate and not be alarmed, because you’d find me beautiful, naked; because I’d have found you beautiful and I’d show you as I saw you through my eyes that made you so. Your beauty could be twenty two, about as old as you are, but I shall have made it twelve years old, sexless and naive. Part of me calls it 'inspiring consent', but then I hear a wry little voice saying 'Rape.' I'm no predator.

I can’t tell you, I can’t write you a poem, I can’t sing you a song, I can’t make you a movie that has us both as characters where the one that’s me tells the one that’s you exactly how he feels, and I can’t do that because I don’t know what would happen after that. Would you still smile the smile that you smile so often? Would you deem me misguided and spin me around so I could find my way, except I’d spin myself around and head back to you again? Would you be offended? Would you be kind? Would you shame me with your sympathy? Would you honour me with your anger? Would you dust me off with condescension – the air of one who’s seen much better, much worse that my adequacy wouldn’t impact you enough? 

I don't know if you made me, I don't know if I brought it upon myself, but for the first time in a long, long while, I'm speechless; clueless. For the first time in a long, long while, I ache. And for the first time in a long, long while, I write.

a little bit of soul...

I would write her in as one to be begged to in a film about a self-absorbed rockstar, she’d be the part of life he’d always miss – something that’d have him have his back on the rest of his life all the time so that all said pleasures, all ‘accomplishments’, all conquests and all flags planted with have to wave from behind, gathering only as much attention as his peripheral vision allows.

isn’t she too unfamiliar to be written about? too much left to be introduced? too much of distance in jaws, apart, of walnut cake and residual chews?

of all that I have, that I have to show are but questions and disbanded views; set in open-D, on Cort Guitar: a wonderland in place of two

Ah, if poetry could do a thing! I’d probably be on a plane that lands me in exactly ‘now’, through the future and back again; to see about the Banyan tree, to see about her, brown in the nude; to see about the cups of tea splattered by the storm she brews; to see how tall she looks beside, to see how much she weighs (her eyes) when lifted and when lifted high, and through ugly hugs and shameless gaze;

and see, and see, and see, and see, for there’s so much to see, so much to feel, so much to ask, so much to empathize, so much to nod to when not listening actually! so much to be recorded, so much to be absorbed, there’s just so much about you that I can’t say it all for I don’t know it all: or well, I can’t even think it all!

sitting in thought, writing this thing to raise a smile or make you laugh, through innocence or insightful string; or maybe I should play guitar, try Clapton-ing some candid licks; but you know, I could go on and on with this nonsense, so enough with the tricks!

I found you erroneously, and I liked the wrong; there’s nothing here to rationalize, if it’s fate, too fond;

and I have my own reservations: I’m no golfer, I play table tennis; I’m no poet, I draw! I’m no singer, I’m no songwriter, I’m no jack of heart!

but I know of this and I know this much:

that if this poem were an exclamation mark it would end without one.

and let this be no poem, but a work of heart.

I would play the rockstar as a representative of thought, not form. And I’d fit in his shoes perfectly, for he’d be the sized 9 that I write him in. Converse doesn’t go good with me, though.

Thought I’d flaunt some title, thought I’d flaunt some title design. And I thought I’d frame a tribute so that you’d know. And you know it, don’t you?

the Abominable Firefly

Yet another from the hated side. But this one came with a reason, part of a 'greater good'. Funny how each poem comes with an assurance to screw my imagination up further, and I'm having to think outside the box at every clench of the pen (or press of keyboard, in my case) - and it's not a carton anymore, mind you. Kind of like some holy vessel except there's nothing holy about it. 

If you didn't understand the above lines, let them pass. I'm pretty sure you'd make sense out of the ones that are coming.

a shield against her summer strikes:

no warmth within, no warmth to keep;

“for what’s the world inside but ice

warmer ‘cause it shows to be?”

or so Miss Winter justifies

her taking over time to freeze;

the ignominies of captured life!

brazen to the core – besieged.

enter darkness, exemplified

by spotlight traps as emotions flee;

in blatant truth, like irony hides

in tiny little vacancies.

so what if there’s no fire to fight,

no race to run, no speed to beat?

so what if you feel left behind,

no second breath to help build steam?

no, ‘what if’ is not the way to find

your dream envisioned, fate conceived;

but what’s pinhole light to the firefly,

when the glow inside is guaranteed?

That's not what I think of when I see fireflies. But then again, it's an angle all the same and I think it's pretty much mine. There's not enough optimism in the world to stay alive with flashlights on than to sleep it out and wait for the sun. That's kind of an ambition to me, actually.