The Paint-box Man

There’s a man who lives inside
A branded paint-box.
And although the paint brush is too high
For him to reach the top,
Every morning just before
The sun peeps out his head,
He prises up the lid and goes
Softly with each tread.

Paint-box man,
Why do you paint the world so blue
Take your colours back with you
Into –
Your paint-box man,
Why do you paint the sky so high,
Your colours cannot cry
But we can.
Paint-box man.

His strokes are real tiny
But really really fast.
And although he knows only too well
That his paint just will not last.
He will run over his white canvas
With his blue and red and black
And touch up the twilight
But by dawn he will be back.

Paint-box man,
Why do you paint the world so blue
Take your colours back with you
Into –
Your paint-box man,
Why do you paint the sky so high,
Your colours cannot cry
But we can.
Paint-box man.

His paint-box is filled to the brim
With all the colours that he needs.
And when he thinks he is running out
He fills it up with all our greed.
His colours are beautiful –
But in places empty, say
When he paints the outside with all the colours that he has
Why inside he paints us grey…

Paint-box man,
Why do you paint the world so blue
Take your colours back with you
Into –
Your paint-box man,
Why do you paint the sky so high,
Your colours cannot cry
But we can.
Paint-box man.

behind the paintbrush

Ashok peeped over the top of his copy of the Times. The man in the opposite seat had drifted off to sleep. His snores came out in intervals, coinciding with the rhythm of the train. His moustaches quivered with each breath, a silver mass of frost on the branch of a bare tree in the wind. Ashok smiled and folded his newspaper. Then, slipping out a small black notebook, he opened it to an empty page and hid behind it with a miniscule wood pencil. His strokes were light, quick and clever and the empty page soon changed form and the yellowing white of the page transformed into a man, a fat old man, snoring with his mouth half open and his head tilted up against the headrest, who has just dropped off to sleep on a moving train.
There was humour in the lines of the drawing and Ashok could feel it. The problem was, people never saw his pictures the way he did. Every one of Ashok’s paintings was perfect in his eyes. Every hint of expression on each of his subjects’ faces was there for all the world to see, his compositions were clever, the colours just right and yet…he never seemed to make it big.
The carriage gave a sudden heavy jolt and the man woke up, yawning. He shook his head to clear it and, staring hard at Ashok and his glance, eased out of his seat and went off for a smoke. Ashok sighed and banged the notebook down on the seat beside him. He’d just have to finish the sketch without a model. He glanced around the car.
The girl in the window seat was laughing at him. Ashok stared defiantly at her, wondering whether he should have let his mother iron out the wrinkles in his shirt when she’d offered to instead of shooing her out of his room as usual.
“You were drawing that man,” she grinned. “I saw you.”
Ashok rolled his eyes. “Clever observation.” He pointed out, keeping the sarcasm in his voice as low as his irritation permitted.
“Sorry,” she started again. “I guess that was a stupid thing to begin with. You knew that better than I did.”
He nodded abruptly and turned back to his paper, hoping she’d take the hint.
She didn’t. “Do you draw for a living or is it just a hobby? Can I see what you drew just now?” She held out her palm for the notebook.
The way she talked was a little annoying. Ashok handed her the notebook and hoped that’d keep her quiet for sometime. “I’m an artist…”
She flipped open the notebooks and flipped through the pages and smiled. Ashok didn’t understand whether it was a smile of appreciation or one of contempt. Knowing people, it was probably the latter. She looked longer at the last picture – the one he’d been drawing – and then handed it back.
He pocketed it and waited for an observation. None were forthcoming, however, and he told himself that he was glad and escaped behind his newspaper again. He was not, however, to be let off that easy.
“Can I tell you something - ” She started again, hesitantly. “…about yourself?”
Ashok grunted from behind his precarious shelter. The girl looked at the sports page of the newspaper for a long time, as if she was looking through it at the reader’s face, a strange look in her liquid grey eyes.
“You hide behind your paintbrush…”
The train rattled to a stop as Ashok lowered the morning paper but the girl had already reached the door. She hesitated at the step and then looked back at him.
“Just…be the paintbrush. Be the painting. It’s not about the subjects. It’s about you.”

"That day will come."

“That day will come.”
When the green fields sigh with their white cotton burden
And the stars turn again and once more to carry on
When the sun blazes forth bristling with the glare of scorched summers
And the winter dews settle for yet another round.
The wind circles and sets course for yet another circle
The lost girl looks upwards to the stormy skies
Her black braids swinging in the passion of the moment
Asking again for the freedom,
Asking again for the answer,
Asking again for the memories
That reply with conviction,
“That day will come.”

Does she remember that clash of thunder
And the old cold hearth where the ghosts were burnt alive?
In a towering column of smoke and mist swirling together
Blending and battling – as if they were one.
Fire and ice and that dry wet winter
That forgotten heap of everything dear.
And everything else that didn’t matter
Lost forever. To an empty soul.

“That day will come.”
When the grasses shine yellow in the sunshine.
And the stars sink down into a red-gold dawn.
When the sun yields to the grey-blue line of rainclouds
And the cart road is overrun by a mass of green life.
The wind sighs and gives way to the stillness before the storm
The ghost girl looks upwards into the smiling sunshine,
Her black braids swinging in the passion of the moment
Asking again and yet again for the freedom,
Asking again and yet again for the answer,
Asking again and yet again for the memories
That reply …. with conviction….
“That day will come.”