A blink and it's gone.
In memoriam...

What did I do?
I caught myself a little bit of rain and wind.
I locked a half-dream in an imaginary bottle on an imaginary night.
I grabbed a broken conversation and memorized every word.
In the blood and rejections of my world

A blink and it's gone.
A dot of what could have been.
A doomed permutation.
A lost combination.
But then and now and henceforth always
A blip on a cold screen.
A blip.

The Sinking Ship

I forget all comas and semi colons. Can I write without any punctuation? Will you be able to discern a question from a statement? A plea from an accusation?
But you are too caught in the rules of this world.....
Grammar... Of life....

These are the bitter seas... and we are off course...far away from all our dreams.
Books and songs..old records and photographs....they all said that the old dreams were the good ones.
But ours are like the long gone shore now. We left it behind a long time ago.
I can imagine a faint wisp of smoke across the sky from the home I left. Is someone warming themselves by the fire?
Not...
The house was burnt down.
Imagine. Dream.

These are bitter seas really and we are the sum total of each other's disappointments. Nothing less and nothing more.
I was good with numbers. But I forgot mathematics somewhere along the road with you.. all the one's merged into the two's and three's. Nothing remained then. Nothing but an amorphous lump of a childhood lesson. I thought we would spin numbers around....
In that old dream I saw, two become a spectacular singularity. But how was I to know that you would fragment me into a million tiny pieces? I could sit awhile perhaps with this idea of a fractured self and life...Million is too big a number no? Perhaps I am just about a hundred pieces strong?
Practical. Real. Essentially you.
Mutilated mathematics.

These are bitter seas and I am looking for metaphors and analogies for us.
You are the one with words. Not me. Never me.
I wanted to drift off and hide somewhere in the Faraway Tree with you.
A small house on blue-green whirls of fantasy.
Think. Imagine.
Moon-face and Dame Wash-a-lot would have been our neighbors.
The elves would have come for tea...White Rabbit and Mr Baggins too...
We could have gone sailing on stray clouds...or skinny dipping in that pool deep in the forest..
Magic.

But these are bitter seas.
I could have been a drunken sailor fighting it.
You came and said it's a sinking ship...

"Of Mice and Men"

(another day in the life of a jobless)

Its not white and furry. And its most definitely not cute.
Its brown and scuttling. And I most definitely do not like it.
I do not like mice.
I do not like this mouse.

It doesn't like me either for that matter.
No peaceful co-existence this.

The electricity went off for a bit in the morning. A cup of tea, I thought.
Sugar, milk, water, tea....I am all ready. And then it danced away merrily on the shelf on top of my head. I shrieked to an empty house.
The morning cup of tea..lost and given up.
Darn.
I think of the animal lady in some now-forgotten childhood story. Pigeons on her arms, mice on her shoulders, rabbits clinging to her legs and a whole army of other cute animals around her. Now, if I catch this mouse by its tail and swing it to and fro, will it curl itself up into an elongated ball and try to regain control of its tail?
It peeked out of a black shoe a while back. That shoe was M's concession to being a part of the corporate world for a bit. Now it gathers dust. Not that I care, but did the mouse peek into the corporate mind and dust trapped in that shoe? In that world (of high heels, perfumed clouds and poker straight hair..and yes I do generalize) they would have shrieked with much more style and elegance.
Darn this life.
I clapped to shoo it away. It jumped and scuttled back into temporary invisibility.

An hour goes by. Nothing.
No furtive dash across the room.
No squeak.
Funny....
Is it alright?
Twiddle thumbs a little bit.
Roll my eyes around.
Talk to M...rather type away furiously through the chat window and grab all the space before he returns from tangerine oranges of an imagined Italian summer to a bright Smirnoff-ian green apple vodka..
Walk up to the mirror...face looks alright. No signs of...

Ha! and its back.

I look at the mouse and it looks right back at me.
No. No game of who-stares-without-blinking...this is pure power play. Needless to say who wins and who comes quietly back to sit on the bed and do a little more of "twiddle your thumbs".
I am morose.
I can hear a snigger from that dark corner by the washing machine.
Darn this life.

And the "men" bit of all this?
The "mice" bit of this appears to make the everyday life of the "men" bit seem (and I quote) "mundane, in a nice sort of way".
Fancy that.
Without this mouse perhaps I would be inconsequential.Nothing.
Darn this life.

Between mice which give meaning and men who find the meaning, I, apparently, am turning into a comic book character.

Fractured Mundane

To what end are we here?
Living and loving together….
Endless threads of ourselves intertwining everyday.
Twisting. Turning.
Knotting. Opening. Re-knotting.

Scattered through people and cities….and the world? This world spins on maniacally on an axis I know not who controls.
From dizzy spells I’ll disassemble and dissolve into a million fragments someday.

In that distant winter afternoon you brought me to the ruins of this fort…and today I sat still as you left me sitting on that same broken bit of its rampart….the last defense of a lost history.
I watched your retreating back for a minute and then willed you to look back just once.
Look back at this girl here…hair disheveled in the wind…..a book half open in her hands..
Still and quiet she sits.
Look back at me and think this…she looks beautiful in this small space of a glance.
I willed you to think.
I could do only that.

We sat wrapped up in a shawl together through one song.
An odd three minutes. But I never heard the song. I won’t remember it.
A world just two people big.
Its enough isn’t it?
There are no incurable romantics here.
But I could say it’s the universe and you.

You tickle me as I read.
I don’t mind it at all. You are here then with me.
The more I know you, the more I fall through dreams of wishes.
I spin words out from a mundane vacuum and throw them out for you to hold on to…
You claw through air. Empty air.
I am thinking of you in your voice. I can hear you in my head.

I forgot a little bit of you today.
You forgot a little of me.
A thread snapped somewhere today. But I found a lovely blue spool of thread in you today.
A fractured mundane…
But run your fingers through the blue that stitched it together.

Dust and a Fullstop

I am an empty vessel today...
No.
If...
If I were an empty vessel today, you would be gone...you would be nothing but a faint trail of dust and love...I would have lost my words and my half dead dreams.
I would've have pulled the plug and drained us away. Far off and away. Think..us, mingling with dirt and other lives..rejected and refused.
Obscure. No longer known or recognized.
Not wanted. Not needed.

Morbid in a life that is young.
Morose in a world that is old and aging.

Don't tell me to think of blue skies and sunflowers...
Don't buy me sunflowers.
Yellow is not happy and young. Grey is not dismal and old.
Its all in your head. In my head.
I'll blink and you'll be gone.
Transient. Temporary.
I'll blink and you'll remember...

Remember that you promised me a home of grey walls. If I leave the walls all bare and naked- no pictures, no photographs, no souvenirs- will my world be less lived?
Will you cut me a window where the tree stands? I'll watch you leave...look up and I'll wave you goodbye.

I'll spin myself a life of long slow ellipses. You can sit by your corner and watch me walk and stumble across it. You can see me escape one and fall into the other. See me be.
But will you stay that long?
Or no...Just another name....

I wish I were that shiny red button on Little Red Riding Hood's cloak...a fairytale life...Someone dreamed me up somewhere into a symmetrically perfect existence.
Why couldn't that have been you?
But you never dream of me....

You don't dream of me..you don't hear me..you don't see me. I am where the world ends for you. But where people are, where the sounds and smells and stories of other lives and times come, there I cease.
I shrink a little..everyday...into anger..into despair.

What is the difference between indifference and blindness?

She...a figment of my mind, my imagination... but more a fragment of your past...threading her way always into today. My today. Your today.... inspiring you, making you smile and laugh. Live.
And me?
Shadow....shrinking

Your music has dust...but sing me that song again..the one you wrote for me..
It was for me wasn't it?
There are no tender sweet words between us...but just for this one time will you sing the song again and hold my hand?
Your fingers lie limp in my hand...a few seconds and then I will pull myself away from that hold. Nothing will trap you then..

Its a cold world.
Bleak.
But grey is not old and dismal.
Grey november.
Cold and grey.
You sit by a cold fire...your stories all told...
And shadows shrink a little more..
I empty myself a little more..
Another fistful of nothing...
Dust and a fullstop.

stupid stupid poem

Booooooo!!!!!!
Did I scare you?
Huu huu huu!!!!
Come now, don't feel blue
Run and wash your face in the loo
Then we'll go to the zoo.
What? You don't know what to do?
What's wrong with you?
Still no clue?
Well then, I'll fix u a smile with glue
And sit awhile here with you...

Absence of Silence.

Spin. Spin. Spin....
Spin a little now...in a dance or a song you sing alone...
Spin a little tomorrow....in hope, in love and in despair...
Spin in chaos and look for quiet through eyes that have long lost their bearing..

Spin.
Dream.
Live.
Spin.
Pause...pause a while. Just one small moment?
Catch your breath and let the world whirl on and on with its heartbreaking insanity.For you, there is time enough for more of living. Come out and sit...
Watch the world through your urban window. Catch it in your fantasies..wrap it in colors you like...do what you want..go where you want to..
This is your one small moment of silence...your delusion..
Go run...run and chase it down if you must...this moment of silence...
Don't tell me about your moment of silence...there are none really. The only absolute absence of sound can come in the absence of life...
You breathe.
Blood rushes through your body. Every vein thumps a dark red.
Your heart beats.
Life makes a sound. Every second..seventy five beats a minute...
And silence? Insist on it still if you want to....

We live in sounds and voices....Remember in smells, colors, fleeting images and permanent pictures...Why must you then think of a moment of silence?
Antithesis....
That ferris wheel? Remember? Some fair a long time ago. You screamed till you were hoarse and rode yourself into a dizzying spell of wonder and nausea...that's it. Life.
A crowd of faces and sensations. What good will it do to you to deny it?

You could push me into a soundproof room with bare walls..No sounds there right?
I will walk from one end of the room to the other..Footsteps. Sound.
I will scratch my head and think of what to do..how do I get out? Sound.
I will knock on the door. Sound.
I will imagine the passage of time. Tick tock. Tick tock. Sound.
I will give up and sit on the floor. Sound.
I will fidget. An itch on the forehead. Sound.
I will let the mind wander.
Silence? Finally?
No wait...where?
My thoughts are noise.
My mind is sound.....

The world is never still.....
You stop at twenty thousand hertz. Life doesn't.