myopia

Hello again, for lack of a better remark. I don’t know if it’s good to be back, a shadow cast on the regression-lover that I usually look to be, live to be. The occasion in itself is pretty welcome, the ambient is red and I’m wearing green – so much for coincidences.

All the same, I wrote this poem the day before yesterday.

wilted minds,

their tampered faces

whose creases hide

in ironed-out lines

they only help me draw a blank

and fill it up

with dust and sand;

and ‘what’s and ‘why’s

and ‘how’s and ‘now…’s

and second thoughts

sent voiced aloud…

it’s time to take my glasses off.

Appropriation is what I have been indulging in, lately. Flagpoles planted on places that come my way and not exactly relying on ventures to give me a newfound name. Same goes with ‘Myopia’. Kind of like how Clapton explains ‘Crossroads’, how Slash would boast about a no-brainer ‘Sweet Child of Mine’. This just happened.

And I have nothing more to say in this regard.

lucy in the sky

“I saw you.”

“I… it’s not like I was avoiding you anyway.”

“Why would you avoid me?”

I am told I have a throaty voice, but then I heard Bugs Bunny and he talks (he doesn’t talk of course, he was voiced by a man called Mel Blanc until he died in 1989) a mix of ‘Brooklyn’ and ‘the Bronx’ which are dialects that people speak in New York. Then I decided to call my voice as ‘Brooklyn and the Bronx without the accent’ though I know that is incorrect, because I know that people are allowed to do incorrect things sometimes, like lying or cheating or leaving other people. But it’s only as long as it’s once in a while.

“So…”, she scratched her nose and shifted on her seat. “I see you have changed.”

“Yes”, I said. “I took to wearing shirts and I go without a belt because I get rashes around my hips. But then my pants slide down and the elastic on my underwear shows and I let my shirt out because I don’t like my underwear being seen.”

She laughed. I like how she looks when she laughs, her eyes reduce to creases but her pupils show, magnified by drops of tears. But I don’t like her laughing because I don’t like people laughing, because laughter to me is always one sided. And then she took a cigarette, clicked her lighter two times because it failed to light up at the first and she lit her cigarette with it. She took a puff on it and turned away to blow the smoke out. And then she looked at me.

“Heck”, she said. “I almost forgot…” and she made to throw the cigarette away.

“It’s alright, I don’t mind.”

And that was a white lie because I do mind smoking in real, but I didn’t mind other people doing it because I know it’s part of their system and that my repulsion would only be the same as that of a vegetarian towards someone like me who eats meat and feels good about it because it tastes good.

She looked at me for a half a minute, cigarette still in her hand – the longest she did in the twelve I’ve been with her. And then she smiled, and I smiled too and it didn’t bother me much. I like smiles.

“Did you know that it takes 8 minutes and 19 seconds for light from the sun to reach the earth?”

“Jo”, she said, her smile subsiding. “Do you still think I care about those things?”

“I know you don’t”, I said. “You’ve told me that twice – three times if you count this one too.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

I looked up at the sky because I didn’t want to look at her face because she looked angry. And I know that skies are more interesting to look at because there are things happening as you see them, like stars dying out or new stars being created, only that you can’t see those. And I didn’t answer her question.

“Scientists say that the Sun would die in 15 Billion years”, I said. “And before that it would swell and engulf the earth or boil its water away. And that means the earth would die before the Sun and that the world would go a lot before it. And that means there is no forever.”

She leaned forward and rocked on her seat repetitively and then she placed her face on her fist and looked what people call as ‘distant’. And then she spread her fingers out to cover her face and she shook for a while, like when someone laughs or shivers in the cold. And then she stopped shaking and looked up at me and her face was wet with tears and dirty with marks from her eyeliner. And then she looked away and looked down and asked me if she could leave. And I told her I had to go too.

“Oh…”, she said pointedly, past a sniffle and a check on her handbag. “Who is it this time? Andromeda?” she threw her bag over her shoulder. “Or Bellatrix?”

“No”, I said. “It’s Lucy.”

the Duet

Here's something that 'was' - the piece of me I'm done with anyway. Part of 'the Patricide' (draft One) and probably better than what I subsequently came up with, but incoherent. And I guessed it's better to make sense than to try desperately to not.

the sky is white,

its spaces blue,

its diamonds bleak

and purple too

with leaves in grey

when leaving brown,

with orange lights

to smile a frown

and with you around

your jaded gold,

what can I say?

it’s a racial world.

now the sky is red

and yellow too,

with all the shit

that’s falling through

and I do my best

to keep it clean,

and not wait for yellow

to turn to green

yet I find my name

stuck in the flow,

what can I say?

it’s a preposterous world…

the sky is crying

the sky is crying

the sky is crying

go make it stop

no bucket enough

to hold the drops

but one like you,

you’d soak it up;

like shit in water,

a face in the mud

you pulled my chains,

you cleared my line;

but… (emotionally) I’m not gay

Rozario: Neither am I.

the scene ends with both of them (there's two people, unless you haven't figured that already) looking into each other's eyes, pretty much at kissing distance. And both are men, yes. Probably think Marlon Brando with Dustin Hoffman (or someone equally tiny, and as intense) except that he'd play guitar - enough to walk on Clapton, King and Stevie Ray.

I know. I'm from Mars, or a parallel equivalent.

first love

It’s curious how I need a worse load of bullshit to actually get me to do this, you know – I find that I simply cannot get myself to write unless I’m decidedly screwing myself up in a major way that this seems less intolerable. It’s a sickness to sit with words and arrange them on a document, but its torture to approach an examination without digression. Hence, here goes.

Not that this is going to be anything new to anyone who knows the remotest part of me (or those who like to think they do) but I’ve suddenly taken too much to this song. Okay, well… It’s ‘Half of my heart’, there I said it.

“half of my heart

has a real good imagination,

half of my heart’s got you;

half of my heart’s

got a right mind to tell you

that half of my heart won’t do…”

no one would take my word for this as is immensely obvious, but no one other than Mayer could possibly spring this up and mean it too. I mean, I see him board a taxi in that absurdly underdone music video and it’s so… relatable?

Consider this, and do so seriously: Do you think you actually believe in love? I can’t probably thrust expertise into this after Woody Allen, after all that’s subsequently happened, or maybe I’m ahead of the bend and I look behind and see nothing. It scares me to think that I don’t really even think about someone I used to think about all the time, how frightening can emotions get, really. We’re so excessively reminding ourselves to do things that we forget that we wouldn’t do them at all if there weren’t that unnecessary bit of driving force. And why do you have to do that?

Heck, I’m exhausting myself again. It’s sick, seriously sick to having to read myself write what I know already… I mean, how productive is all this, what am I writing this for, am I actually going to change anything by putting this thought out? It sucks to think that every little burst of thought, every possible inspiration to make something is nothing but masturbation, that you only want to get it out but you don’t care where it goes – even if it means ‘down the drain’.

But take this back, though – I never even think about a lot of people that I thought fascinated me at a point of time, maybe they do even now but I just see their Xs and Ys, I place them and now that I know, it’s not as intriguing at all. Nothing is, nothing can ever be. Everything has this expiry date, everything is this milk product where you’ve got to eat it and not save it for later or hold it out for a half a lifetime. And when you eat it, you’re done. It’s done. And I don’t think I need to tell you about what it becomes, then – you’re bound to think that I’m some sort of weird-freak if I did say that.

I think this, I think ‘Bicentennial Man’ – 200 years, hell. Thank the force that that was a robot.

lydia(?)

Maybe I’m getting to speak so straight these days that I’m not getting to ride the bend at all? I don’t know, but it’s a hell lot of fun to be coming from around the bend because people don’t see what’s coming until it hits them, or even after it hits them, and that makes the bend the only tangible way for the world to be dealing with things it already has.

I’ve been having these thoughts lately, and these aren’t cosmological thoughts, they’re just plain depressing ones, perhaps, or just… thoughts. I’ve always questioned the idea of a lot of things coming from a less-constituted something that was actually pretty substantial to be making the whole of it, and then I figured the earth was just a mass of an oddly shaped solid ‘balled’ by chemicals – and that that’s about all of it. It’s not a round anymore, it’s just some weird spiked ball, it’s chemicals and it’s gravitation – just like some bunch of laws, observations and interpretations stringing it to be what it is, and boy isn’t that depressing!

Kind of made me remember the ‘Dreamers’ quote again – “Everything shrinks.” Everything does shrink when it starts to make sense, and then I wonder if it would be better left alone than explored. That way footballs would stay footballs and not projections of ultramicroscopic dots in space.

Let me head out of that track with that picture. I’ve had this ‘Annie Hall’ idea inside my head… okay, wrong way to begin it. I’ve been having this idea inside my head to make something out of what I’ve come across about ‘two people’. Wonder if I could make it into a term, you know ‘two-people’ and kind of brand them as an entity that can simply not exist in fragments. Like, if you’re taken once, then you’re just half the man and you’d always be so. And this isn’t some cushion for the ‘singles’ to lean on. It’s just a special kind of ‘singles’ who are allowed to empathize, and that’s ‘single’ and not ‘awaiting response’ or ‘taking a break’ or ‘bachelor party’. I hope you get what I’m saying.

It’s going to be a huge challenge to write this without actually resembling anything in the varying degrees of history – ‘Annie Hall’, ‘(500) days of Summer’, et al. And it’s not admitting defeat to actually base things upon those movies and go ahead and embrace them, instead of trying to stick out. A Woody Allen type of humour is entirely tangible, as is Marc Webb’s (I forgot the writers’ name, not looking up) idea of making sense and steering clear of bullshit. So, I don’t know where I’m heading with this from here, although I see some patches of road blurred by sun – sometimes things are too bright that you can’t make out what they’re structuring themselves to be. It’s not always darkness that blinds, or it’s never the darkness that blinds. Someone quote me on that.

I know one thing for sure – I’m not going to name it ‘Lydia’ and that’s just because I know a Lydia and it’s no offence. Not ‘miss B’, either (not that I’m beyond ‘her’), I’m just looking for something that would cut me off of the threads that hold me down so I can at least float around and make some sense? ‘Lydia’ (as made famous inside my head by John Mayer, twice) would mean flesh and blood; a quantization, and I wouldn’t want that. I’m not looking for entities – I’m looking to create one.

Let me end this thing with a line I conceived for this play or film or whatever it would come out to be.

(pompous-looking ‘showgirl’ with coy smile) “you're imagining me naked, aren't you?”

(Woody Allen sarcasm) "trust me, there's not much for the mind to do."

goes with how she’s ‘dressed’. And that’s definitely not the ‘Lydia’ replacement.

titling not necessary.

wow, here's something that's actually entirely 'blah'. But I did write it, so... yeah.

propel some bullshit

to make it sell,

a mark of things not going well;

a mountain adventure

for the mole I need,

slipping down to make ends meet…

what’s with a fall

if you’re not falling hard?

what if it’s futile,

what if it’s not?

I mean…

I just found the flower

in a knowledge spark,

that if ends did meet

then there’s no end at all.

and I guess the problem is living with it.

It's confessional, conversational, I'm just springing something up. Could be potential enough to make you want to not come to this place ever again, but did you ever in the first place?

midnight train

the night was noiseless, so I had to talk. But I needed place, ‘anywhere’ didn’t seem viable enough as the moment saw it. Consciousness came with this ‘no vacancy’ sign, and I had decided to sit it out anyway. On a pair of legs and a changing road.

“I don’t drink.”

“I don’t play football.”

And I saw her smile, between me and her. And I smiled back because I got to see her for once at a place where I’ve not kept her but where she actually could choose to be. Because I know she won’t choose me, the ‘Which Will’ way and that’s knowing asphalt by the crunch of it.

“I’m this…”, I began, only to shake my head. “Consciousness freak, I... cannot let anything control my emotions, I… cannot lose my emotions… palm-of-my-hand, you know-”

“Do you really think I don’t see what’s coming?” she cut me across, when she wasn’t listening.

Gesticulation, overdramatic pauses and excessive emphases? I should stop writing dialogue.

Writing’s all about writing what you don’t think you should be writing anyway. But how would that work? You know what, I don’t want to write this.

----------

I think ‘Once’. I’ve this vivid visual of Glen kissing Marketa on her cheek and a dying sort of audio on ‘When your mind’s made up’, but is it only natural that I think that? Although it is unnatural that I seem to be going with a force of nature than conjuring up my own toothpick bit of bravery.

“but you are just a wisp of smoke,

in daffodils and diamonds, clothed;

no ocean strained,

no feather moved,

as off my chest to the world I blew…”

These bunch of lines are serving to be my present ‘Northern Sky’, the sort that gets me emotionally soaked within a moment of construction and faithful recount. Of hours of thoughts in the minutes I felt them, the time where my clock had stopped to pass me by. And then I think of the times that I looked down on the road that I was walking on and waking myself up from this state of mind that only completely refused to believe that I was where I was.

Like the time when I absolutely need a sign of green to let it flow; to let it grow. And it’s like these trains are full of people who aren’t meant to be leaving in the first place, and that they’ve stoked its chimneys full to fit a million years of stay.