A story for your grandchildren

It starts easily enough
A chat on the balcony
An exchange of numbers
One of you asks the other out for a meal.

But it's lunch break at work
And it's hardly food you're hungry for.
You bag it, you hurry to one of your homes
Chinese take-out cools in the flat summer afternoon.

Things are crazy from there.
You are hard-pressed to find a place
Where you haven't pulled over by the road
To steal a kiss, a fumble, an entire blowjob.

Then you misunderstand.
A conjuring's at hand; and you,
Forever sick from love, hungry
For curlicues of an ordinary life, miss the trick.

Your careless arrangement grows ugly things now.
Beautiful, ugly things. Lies like muslin
Anger like a rain, a building up like a journey
A tearing down like a broken garden

There're oceans now, and people.
And a splash of a cold, a shock of heat
As you forget the exact degree
Of the warmth of each other's breath.

Your desire builds futile bridges over choppy seas.
And your yearning plumbs tunnels in blue depths
You label stars and find a way to use them
To be markers on your way.

Morning comes.
Stars disappear, your pathway a joke of light
A tree sways and the breeze brings sadness
And an email. "How are you?"

A winding missive of memory.
A reiteration of remembrance
You'll always be the one, it says
I'll never be the same without you

I will never be happy.
The email promises; it continues: we had it perfect
And I'll always treasure it
It'll be the story I tell my grandchildren.

27 Aug 2015. 

Hidimbi by the River

Bhimasena: lover,  keeper of secrets, healer.
How burdensome your love for
The lotus-blue Panchali
To whom the Saugandhika
and it's quest were just another sorcery
Of dark eyes.

My skin lightens,  Bhimasena, draining
Itself of jet,  along with the memory of you
The seed grows,  Bhimasena,  and I grow big
Enough to envelope the forest in my womb
In an incestuous hope that you will enter it.

The forest, it grows dark,  Bhimasena
Dark as our love was when you chose
To walk away,  dutiful son,  loving brother
Absent father. Bhimasena

(Inspired by Bhima: Lone Warrior, the English of Randamoozham by MT Vasudevan Nair)

Questions for jealousy

Irrational jealousy,
When did you become me?
Long ago when I had a man
On the left palm of my hand
I told him to go play.

When he came back, because he knew he could
I couldn't smell any kisses, neither numbers, nor wood.
And it was okay then. And we could talk
A lot like friends, more like lovers,
Once we'd both gotten over the shock

Of finding things this normal, no questions asked.
And I liked to hear the odd story, of sex that wasn't as great as ours.
I asked him about love, and whether they had better breasts,
All he said was a faithful no. Truth or kind lies, he left me to guess.
I never knew, then, nor did I care

To investigate the run of adult play
I knew love was to be shared, not locked up and hidden away.
So now that you have me, jealousy, you bitch, all I ask of you
As you viciously smoke me like a cigarette,
If not shared love, what must I feel instead.

Day

A million babies, all trying to get out of my skin.
Million, thousands, I do not really know.
As many babies as there are pores, straining and struggling
To get out of my skin.

So I kneel on the floor and offer my tears up
To an  all-consuming sun. May it never be night, I say
And attempt to bind it with the promise
Of a million pregnancies, under my skin.

For when the night comes and everything is cold
In the summer's darkness, the stabs under my skin
As many stabs as there are pores, escape and rise
Wisps, ghosts, smoke rings of pain.

And locked in my room, bound with handcuffs
Of compulsion to be an adult, I lie rigid, hot,
On the left of the bed, watching
A simulation, a feeble dance of all that hurts.

And yet I cannot see. I do not see.
All I see is a cloak of muslin
that the wisps and ghosts and smoke rings make
And the muslin turns heavy, dark, velvet.

The sun! The sun! I cry as the velvet
Morphs again and turns to lead, with laces, a vest.
I close my eyes, I wait for the inevitable. Hands crossed, laced
A thousand suns explode behind the orange of my eyes.

From my diary

It's the sun that worries me, seduces me with its heat

Like you do with your promises that we can do anything.

I believe you just as I believe summer will come 

And kill the crocuses I have planted for you.

My knees are stretched taut, the skin on them shiny

As I sit with my legs tucked under me

Looking for rain in the wind-herded clouds.

I watch a green arm of the Meenachil

That flows so close to where my summer memories stay

And it reminds me that I have made promises to you

That I may never keep. 

I am that sung-about woman who takes

As if it is her right.

Men will give me anything, I need only ask;

Including their hearts, which I'd rather not take.

I wasn't called butter fingers for nothing, growing up.

Strange things that have happened this week.

A.K.A

Unsolicited advice to aspiring poets.

1 Do you use the word 'yonder' in daily conversation? Even once? No? Then don't use it in your poems. Which takes us to point #2

2. Don't try and find a word that rhymes with it. You'll only come up with 'wonder', unless you want to use 'blunder', 'thunder', 'torn asunder'. I thought not.

3. Don't rhyme if you have to cut, colour, spit and polish the idea in the line to fit the rhyming word in.

4. Show, don't tell. Please
'Still rocks.'
'Electric electricity' (!!). Yes
'Silent vacuum'

5. Use "deafening silence" only if the silence is deafening. Don't use it for a quiet night. Or a pleasant enough poem.

6. Shards, angst, the depths of your shattered soul -- all very nice. But if you are still writing this when you are 23 and are not sitting in a padded cell or, at the very least, getting therapy, then stop. Grow up. There's a reason it's called adolescent angst.

7. Use a semi-colon. It speaks volumes. Also of your work.

8. Keep it simple. Even the complicated stuff.

9. Read Jeet Thayil.

10. Read, edit, read, edit, read, edit. Take at least a week to make it right. You may love your first draft but slowly you will come to realise that there is much more that can be done, some more that can be taken away.


And in the 'weird things keep happening to me' department.

Is anyone else getting email that is from "buddisttrains"? What the hell is that? I've got something from them twice this week.

Suddenly, there's almost no money in my bank.

I can't find a piece that I had done on Thayil for Daily News and Analysis. He has been my favourite living Indian poet for a while now.

Update
Is it just me? Or is that word verification thingamejig throwing up real words that are misspelt these days? In the last four days I have - poleez, jinzeng, tranter (not a real word but sounds like one) and djigkle.  Yes, I think about these things.