Mon Amour..

Pause a while, beloved city. Wait for me to catch up, catch my breath as the time dissolves like smoke in thin air. You disappear behind alleys, across streets of concrete, between yellow taxis and peeling paints of black on walls. You flicker behind old moldy buildings, patched together with postings, windows painted garish and people trudging towards made-believe destinations. Linger closer on nondescript nights when cold hands seek earthen bhars of cha and drink in the squalor of the metropolis and the repeating hum of life. I have walked with you in muted dreams when the street lights have glowed orange and as I stepped on my shadow, my thoughts formed without effort, without meaning, without shape and the dreamscape grew dimmer as I try to hold you back.

You gave me love, moments unreflected, run-of-the-mill poetry written behind stray pages jealously hidden, bruises hidden behind practised smiles, mindless joys, fear and fever, aimless days when the limitless sky was just a tease. I have seen you ignore me as I walked down, a filler of sorts, jostling against hundreds like me. Seen your love when smiles doodle across my face just because. And mixed in the wasting afternoons, sordid with hooting monotony of everyday life, your derision at my mediocrity...

So pause awhile beloved city, pause till I catch up, catch my breath and you take me in your fold, in your arms with your clamor, and your peace, your moody blues or calico days of reeling splendor...

I

In another day, another time, another summer, or some other night when the stars hide the nocturnes of the sky. Another me, but this same you. But now turn your back to me and talk about music, poetry or of the thousands of sunsets you stayed up to see. Talk cliched, talk in jangling verses of the happy, talk without another look at me.

II

Bad girl, dirty dirty girl, what did you do. Look at me, lower your eyes, confess the truth, don't open your mouth. Walk the line, curl in your toe, hold out your hand, do what you are told. Speak your mind, think as I say, don't break free, but go away.

My lonely girl, caught in a storm
Do you hear the winds moan
The sky flashes angry tears tonight
Where do you wander all alone...
I have known your kind, lady lover
Creep out at night like a rambling witch
With ankles deep in moors discover
Cruel ways to beguile, bewitch
I saw you wander in a tawny wood
And sing incantations to the air
A woman, often misunderstood
A little evil, beyond repair
You tear assunder and recombine
Bits of me, beloved witch
Feel my vision by degrees maligned
Lying with you, doing your hitch.

I miss you
In disconnected strains of conversation
Mixed in road maps, coffee stains and
Hints of smiles behind cupped hands


You could be anywhere now
Pebbled streets, street plays or catching thoughts
Or trading lives or undoing plans
Searching with eyes shut, building with paper cuts
Screeching cars halting inches from death

Where do you wander now
Where do you die
When the tempests break
Upon the face of your sky
when poetry agitates
Or cigarette ends don't light
When you become your words
Written on a nameless night.

Summer days meant lazed afternoons on smooth cotton sheets, drawn shades, melting ice cubes clinking around a glass of sweet lime and a book from the library. A summer afternoon these days, invariably means working for some really sadistic exams and occasionally fighting the urge to woolgather. But a summer afternoon today means, taking Macadamia's tag up and posting this very special something which I have been wanting to do for a while.

The rules [for the tag] say that you’ve to post five bits of information about you which you have never shared with your blog readers before. No "I plan..." or "I hope..." here - lets look at what has already happened.

1. My all time favorite childhood book is this Raduga publisher's Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. A few years back the book got misplaced and ever since then I have frantically searched for it everywhere...from the regular book haunts around the city to book stores, college street, Golpark, you name it and chances are that I have been there.

2. Once upon a very long time, my kindergarten teacher had called ma over to break the news to the lady that probably her daughter had some learning disability...specially with English for while the other babies had graduated to T or M or some other letter, little miss Acharya would still not say her A,B,Cs. I don't blame the teacher. I was too busy climbing trees or chasing butterflies and really didn't feel the need to know A,B,C,D.

3. I can be very whimsical. And I absolutely adore dogs [yeah, I am aware that the two statements had no earthly connection. And thats two points under the same point. *smirk*]

4. I once tore my ligament, displaced my knee-cap, suffered some hair-line cracks [all in my left knee] while playing volleyball and shrugged it all off as a slightly more painful sprain. So with a crepe-bandage firmly around the much abused knee, I did nearly everything that I was not supposed to do - like trying to run around and did I mention dancing?
Needless to say my Orthopedic was mortified when I finally went to the medicine man.
[Note aside for the two doctors, the rest can go over to point 5 - I promise, the next time I will turn myself in sooner.]

5. Taking me for granted is one of the fastest ways to lose me.

Thats that. Five things. And I tag anyone ready to play.


For someone with so called learning disabilities [:D], it was really feel-good to get all those comments for Sway, Sway, Sashay. But a certain someone saved the best for last. A musical rendition of my prose, something out of my wildest imagination and totally incredible. He composed, arranged, played the instruments, sang my lines and left me feeling absolutely happy. Here is the audio-

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Sway, sway, sashay across the floor, silver microphone in your hands, your raiment of gold. Sway as your silence keeps time with the rising tenor, sway against the veil of blueish smoke. What will you sing tonight...

My darling turns away her face, watch now as my darling turns away her face, flicks ashes and licks her lips of sullen brown. And she says, her hardened hands don't move as she says, what will she sing tonight?

Have you heard there has been blood on the streets tonight? Life here as stable as tomorrow's headline. Life here in the streets of homicide. On the streets of Harlem, I passed bruised bodies slouching against a reddened wall, on the streets of Harlem I passed the girl as she kissed every curve of her lover's darkening smile, on the streets of Harlem I passed all those who adore and abuse...listen the clarinet, when will you rhapsodize the blues...

Collapse...

Living life on tuna cans, cartoon strips and roadside colors absorbed by monochrome eyes. Twirling hair, vision obstructed by the kinesis of stationary landscapes, vertical lines stretching against the wind. Streamlined thoughts lost in translation and the jangle and pop of your ramshackle grace. Hooting of trains, the shape of your mouth left on half eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich and compact discs paperweights on disconnected songs written after last night's telephone conversation. Caught in the middle of stiff pretexts , in the process of coming undone, camera shutters and bare legs throwing shadows while they dance pointlessly on mosaic floors.

Stub your cigs on the wall, make an ugly graffiti with the scorched out shards of nicotine days. Or lie in soft diffused light, lassitude never looked more sensuous and memory's focal distortions shall never find a more beautiful you. And even when the night is lost, I shall love the infant like I loved the man. And I the same maverick who hitchhiked back home in a getaway car.

26

Have been hibernating for too long. So picked up this tag from Amazing Grey's blog. Some poetaster rhymes for my patient, forbearing fellow-bloggers-

A for anger, and a bit of heaven when we make up

B for banana pancakes, brush strokes across my easel

C for chocolates, dark, sinful, caffeine in a coffee cup

D for daddy and death when pop goes the weasel

E for emotions when expectations ensnare

F for football matches, food, freedom , fiction

G for Gypsy blood, a mind game of solitaire

H for haiku, hide and seek and hazelnut addiction

I for what I am, what I have, what I can't be

J for Jack in the box from days gone by

L for love that leaves you weak in the knee

M for music or marbles in a pocket full of rye

N for NHL and almost losing my best friend

O for occasionally swallowing my pride

P for procrastination and poetry to comprehend

Q for quietly sitting with you, by your side

R for the red herrings and rambling in the wild

S for shoulders to rest on and silly rhyme

T for twinkling stars I wished on as a child

U for uneasy silence, coming undone just in time

V for Violin and the fiddler's symphony

W for waking dreams of you and me

X for two bones under a skull

Y for coming years that don't gaurantee

Z for the zzz..gotta sleep, feeling dull….

And if you wondered where is K

K for keeping you forever and a day...

Not Entitled to Title.

My days are becoming something like the magpie's fondness for collecting shiny things. Being pulled back from bewildering dreams early in the morning, you finally realize that you don't want to lose yourself to sleep for reality feels better. Shards of sunlight throw patterns on the wall, on my skin, still softly dissolving music and a few moments of stillness before the pace of life quickens again.

Its been quite a while since my last post, hasn't it...and I am growing to be regularly irregular. But between the headlines and cups of coffee, between the hurried scribbles about whats keeping the world on it's toes and psyching myself for the upcoming 20th May exams, I have tried to catch my frisking thoughts but...words don't do my bidding anymore. And dear reader, try as I may, I could never give my mute expressions a voice.

And yesterday, someone turned the hourglass upside down. Going to the book fair, sifting through books I grew up reading, leafing through titles I have been wanting to read, and holding works I never knew I never knew, it felt honestly good. I felt like the six year old again who was bewitched by her first volume of Russian folktales...
Came back home with Tom Holt's Falling Sideways and a coloring book for my baby brother. Its mostly filled with pictures of grisly prehistoric monsters so I think he will be very glad when he gets it. [ by the way, Macademia what are Beyblades? I feel like a square peg in a round hole with kids these days...]


But what I wanted to talk about was going back to my flute. After nearly twelve years, I fell back in love. I thought when I played half remembered half forgotten tunes of long lost years, that it couldn't get better. But with N. Autist around to help me pick up chords[ yes, chords] on the flute and his D harp for company I am glad to say I was wrong.


Its growing dark here already...and the fireflies flash across, a piece of the night bounded by window panes. And the moon arched just like a soft smile on the face of heaven...life is good.

For Pseudo-Intellectuals

I could never write about silver blades,

Spools of dreams clinging on bloodied spades or

Strange prophesy babbled through obscurity.

I have known

Neither skill nor seen my visions fulfill themselves into

The geometry of the strange, only to arrange

My thoughts into school girl verse.

My pale hands slouch at my desk,

Inscribe the meandering and the grotesque…

some pretty, some perverse.

But my friend, your world is fake,

Feed on Thoreau and Blake,

And your borrowed parasitic lines seek to contemplate

Nothing new, just the metaphysics to construe , the recondite for its own sake.

[Addendum- I am rhyming too much these days. Blank verse is more becoming? What say?]

Breaking the Silence

'…for you, words are just paper boats in the rising tide. I fret with starry lines, incomplete rimes, and feel cut and dried. Through fevered afternoons with nothing but syllables of silence to bring solace, pieces of you in my secret interstellar space, I have counted the minutes to madness.

Waking unto you in the winter rise, G minor across my tin, I wonder if I should cross my eyes, or should I disappear under your skin..."

I am not where you seek for me
In shadows of your aging face
In those tripping beats of poesy
In hesitant hands gathering grace
I am not in your deepest thought
In the scars of your deepest sting
In unreflective love, overwrought
But promises may not mean a thing
I am not in the sun that shines
Or stars that glow in the eve
I am not there in your fondest lines
Softly said when you take your leave
I am just here, anywhere
If I could know that those I see
Are not looking blindly through
An illusion I know as me.

Sand and Surf

Rise tonight like a surge's swell
Fall tonight like waves on the shore
Pause awhile, before you bid farewell
Bid farewell, to return once more

Whisper like the sighing shells
Scream like those breakers at sea
And like the hungry tide turning on
Return again to crash into me

Strange like the ocean's end
Distant like the land of dreams
Watching as ripples blend
On the silent sleepy streams

From where she was, Em could see her part of the world beneath her feet...dark silhouettes of buildings under a deep reddish black sky. The world seemed to be reduced to just four colors, the rust of the sky, the charcoal of land, the flashing white of the screaming trains and the glistening yellow from a street light. Em took one last lingering bite from the Bournville bar and slid her hands back into the sock puppet she had made years back for warmth. It was 11:15 yet and she could still hear faint traces of laughter wafting from her house. With preoccupied gestures, her fingers twisted the puppet's face and watched it move from tight lipped stare to a toothless grin.

Its just a night like any other for me but for Em, it means midnight culinary experiments, working around the kitchen with stealthy movements, hoping against hope that her handiwork doesn't turn into some great calamity. So when the girl descended down the stairs, careful not to wake anyone, she must have whispered a silent prayer to the saints to watch over the poor unfortunate souls who would be threatened to take what she cooked tonight. And...what? Oh, Em read this last line and emphatically disagrees. She is asking me to let her write this herself. I always mess up facts, she says. Fine, I pass the reed to Em.

" My mind is a little too preoccupied to form prayers tonight. I have to chop ginger, grind chillies, stop myself from tasting the tangy lemon drops, take dollops of curd and turn on some music for the silence is getting too loud. The recipe says 350 grams of gram flour and I say 200 would do to perfection. The recipe says stir one cup curd...with the flour and water. So I take my time to pour in the water little by little into the bowl as the flour and curd dissolve into each other. I twirl the paste with a spoon and lightly pirouette around the kitchen on the beat of a drum. But that splatters the batter on my wrist so I think I ought to sit on that cold slab there and calmly finish mixing.

Turmeric power, ginger-chili and salt to taste go into the thick rich paste. Keeping a weather eye open for any trouble, I take the steamer out. Its got all these appendages that you need to latch in place and baking dishes that you need to grease before you can change the song. Instrumental rock is just an earworm tonight so I let Yann Tiersen create his magic. Bm...D...one tsp of soda bicarb...A...G...one tsp oil...and lemon juice. And now that the concoction is made, recipe tells me to pour it into the greased pan and dream happy dreams till the steaming is done"

This is a daft post...seems more like a dental care ad, if you know what I mean[ Toothpaste for the tooth pest to avoid losing your teeth when you need them most] But its been rusting in my folder and I did promise last year about this.

postscript- There is a typo in the image but by now I am convinced that it is most human to make one. Besides, I am giving you the chance to forgive and be divine.

Between the Pages.

Telescopic view into your ever eluding mindscape. You move in and out of focus, frozen in frames, farther than you seem, closer than ever. Would my angry muse talk to me again I shall paint you in colors that don't peter, ink you in words that seep deep within my skin, sculpt you anew with careful hands. But my inspiration speaks not to me…and the aching silence hisses the literature of dystopia.

Build me an applecart of perfect order. Place one unquiet memory over another, one hurt over one heal, one you and one me over the silent inscribed presence of all those who came before and left after, till an intricate pattern frees us of the double bind that binds us.