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.

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.