Imagine a blue world.

One grey day in the future
Little Jim ran to his ma
Saying, “tell me the story
Of the dust from the stars.”
“Liquid it was – ” she said,
“Smoke that was pure.
Prussian oceans
Blue skies – strong and sure.

“The earth was all water
On dust – now my words,
Only they remember –
Imagine a blue world.

“Then somehow someone
Fell in love with grey.
Forgot what blue meant
And we went astray.
We sold what was given
And we killed the rain
And in place of the oceans
Scattered ashes of pain.

“Once the earth was all water
On dust – now my words
Will have to remember –
Imagine a blue world.”

Little Jim, he cried back
To the ghosts of the past.
And we stand here listening –
Do we hear him? Will this last?
Do we still love the blue
Much more than the grey?
‘Cause that grey day in the future
Is not so far away.

The water is dying
To dust – and our words
Are all that is left
To save our blue world.

A Fable of Fools, Part 1.

This is a story of five people
On the highest branch of a palmyra palm
(Who were obviously lighter than normal)
On a five foot diameter island
In the middle of the Pacific.
One was a plumber
Who didn’t have any work to do
And got bored.
Another was a racehorse rider
Who had lost his memory
And kept asking people the time at first
When no one had a watch.
The third was an intellectual
Who got tired of replying
That time was only relative
And worked out from the position of the sun
That it was around three o’ clock in the morning
But he couldn’t figure out
What time it was back home
Because he didn’t know a lot of geography.
The forth was a piper
Whose pipe had got soaked in seawater
And the C sounded on the D#
But all else was fine.
And the fifth was me.
And I was only experimenting –
Counting the number of seconds
Till one of us got mad
Not counting the racehorse rider
Who was mad already
As also the intellectual
Because my grammar isn’t very good.
I think it was the plumber
Who asked for a cigarette
And I had one on me
Although it was soggy.
And the intellectual laughed at us both,
Asking where the match would come from.
I stared at him and said
It didn’t matter because the plumber didn’t want to smoke.
He just wanted to hold the cigarette
Between his lips like he always did.
And the intellectual echoed, “like he always did.”
And sighed.

Fantasy

Do you close your eyes
To a dying storm
In rolling green wildgrass
Beneath shades of grey
And smoke mountains beyond
The glittering endless sea
From a magic window
On a spiraling tower
Of a fairy castle
Between the high rocks
Where tears have fallen
Of some long lost dreams
Sometimes at night
When the wind is still
You can hear the dragons
Beyond the northern wall
And remember their gold
And their frightening eyes
And the rumble of their wings
Under the midday sun
A day in a year
A trumpet sounds
To the clatter of steel
In the courtyard below
And out in the harbour
The sails are unfurled
And the coat of arms
Dazzles in the sun
On a high mast
Where the seagulls swoop
To stare and then
They fly away
And by noon
The ships are gone
And handkerchiefs lost
From tired fingers
Now and then at dawn
You wake to hear
Your horse neigh loud
From the stables below
And you grab your sword
And ride bareback out
Without thinking
Where to go
The mountains call
And the green shadow pines
The old lost path
Up the forested slope
Where if you’re still
You might just spy
An elven head
By a whispering brook
You remember once
You never went back
One starry evening
Against a moss covered trunk
And the unicorns
Came out to bask
In the silvery light
From the crescent moon
And the toadstools glowed
Phosphorescent and love
Before you just fell asleep
A ring of dancing lights
On Fairy’s Nook
A treasured dream
Beneath a granite dolmen
On a carpet of grass.
There’d been a time
When the wicked queen
From over the mountains
Had sent a horde
Of swarming evils
To take over the land
And the fairies had disappeared
For a long long time.
You remember the steel
Clashing overhead
And the arrow whizzing
Through the stinking air
The woods on fire
And for a moment there
You didn’t care
But for the lust of blood
The dying cries
Wouldn’t leave your dreams
For years and years
And time went on
The fairies returned
And the forest grew
Again anew
Out of the ashes of war.
Beyond the magic wood
Up the path and on
To a soft wild meadow
Where the wind is strong.
It slaps against you.
Outside and inside.
Like flute music
From a shepherd’s song
The eagles soar
And from down below
It’s still so high up
That you can see
All your world
And much much more
To the shady horizons
Of your eternity.
Here you wait
For the thundering rains
To flatten the grass
And obscure the sky
Blending black and white
With a touch of blue
Blue for freedom
That lasts awhile.

Dust.

This is the old hall where we sang our old prayers
In timid quartets, our fingers smudged with ink.
And the old wind blew through the creaking shutters
Singing along in a tune we once knew.
The rows of empty seats where we imagined our fantasies
And velvet curtains where the walls were damp
The grand old organ we didn’t dare to touch
And the ghost of the past hiding between the pipes.
Old was new and our worlds were coloured dim
With glistening fantasies of a history read and heard
The colours of antiquity – much of it imagined
Where the dust had gathered from the passing storms.
The windows have been thrown open
Since then, by some unseen hand of betrayed eternity
And the wind, in some gory daze of triumph
Barges in unheeded – where it was once barred.
And flusters the dust – some misplaced remnant
Forgotten and complacent, left behind by time.
The shutters aren’t there to creak to the song
Of the wind anymore, or our forgotten tune.
But there is the dust forever and on…
The dust of yesterday. The dust of memories
Layers of new merging into the old
Silent songs of overlapping destinies.

Dreams.

There’s a path behind the sunflowers
That leads down a steep little slope
Winding around jagged pieces of rock
That belong, beneath each of which
Brazen weeds lift their heads to the treetops
More real than the sky-reaching dreams.
Of some ordinary haphazard commonness
Making more sense than ideals
They seem so real to me now.
When I never noticed them before.
There’s some sort of law about upward turned gazes
Which lower as the ages lengthen
Not because ideals are lost
But because they are renewed.
Less beautiful than before, to be sure.
But so much more real, so much more endearing.
And if truth is beauty, more beautiful
Than dreams can ever be.

a bushy tree?

i hate my mouse. it gets stuck at the wrong times.

In between.

"where i will always return"

this was supposed to go with the post below but it wasn't uploading so here it is now...

yesterday lost

I found heaven in a painted matchbox once.
Because someone told me it had been painted by someone I’d loved.
I didn’t even remember but that didn’t matter.
I thought it was right that I should treasure it even though I didn’t really care.
It didn’t slide out easily because the paint was thick.
Green and purple, I always knew it wasn’t really any good.
I could see the unsteady hands in every uneven stroke.
But sometimes when you’re pretending you forget the pretense.
And everything becomes as real as you pretended it was.
So I cried when I lost it one day in the rain.
Funny how many stories end with a hole in a pocket.

I found heaven in an old broken piano.
They told me it could never be fixed.
Something rotten about the wood on the inside.
I think I liked it that way because I never complained.
I used to finger the carved cherries on the stout little legs.
And make up little stories about the one that had broken off.
It didn’t make a difference that all the notes sounded the same.
A stiff footfall on a wooden staircase.
They managed to fix it in the end. And I forgot what it had meant.
Like an easter egg which had lost its own inside.

I found heaven in the line of thunderclouds over the southern horizon.
The grey line over the other grey line – but it meant so much more.
And the way they sped nearer – the vastness of existence.
And the first sudden sound of raindrops on the hardened tiles overhead.
The smell of wet earth, how it always came down to that.
And the upturned leaves, bent over in the wind.
The wild exhilaration of nature invading our boundaries.
But summer skies are bluer when the rain has passed.
And spring is only spring when it comes after winter.
I guess I’ll find heaven again when the year turns round.
A different sort of heaven, but that’s always how it is.

I found heaven in a little wild tune.
That came to me with no reasons and no origins.
I whistled it all day, and hummed it when I was tired.
I tried picking it up on the piano, but it didn’t sound the same.
It came with no obligations… and it went without the same.
Only the sides had reversed. And it didn’t come back any more.
I tried many times to remember, but you know how it is.With a tune that doesn’t come back.
It didn’t even hurt when I gave up.

first light

and god said, "let there be light."

grey

God,
I saw you the other day out by the jute mills.
The sun was in your eyes as you looked up at the sky.
You lifted a grime covered hand against the intolerable gold
Seeping through the swirling grey line of smoke from the iron-clad chimneys.
And watched the light filter through your fingers, red-gold and tainted.
Sparkling honey-dew and sulphur sprinkled across your bronze skin.
Change is good. But nothing really matters.
Change is inevitable. But no one really cares.
Something precious, like the pride of creation.
And that of the creator… when industry smiles.
I thought perhaps you still find beauty in pain –
Because nothing is more beautiful than hell distorted.
Symphonies of splintered glass where you waited
For the blue… and found the grey.
You looked back but didn’t see me standing by the clearing
Where the old tree once stood a long time ago.
It had no name… like me and you.
But you’re still trying to lose yours.
Grey is beautiful, too, if you turn your eyes from the dazzle of colour.
That’s where I lost myself because I didn’t understand.

weird.

…and then I was tagged.

Which means:

1) write down 6 weirdo factors about meself.
2) Tag 6 more people and thus keep the chain going!

What fun!

Here goes:

1) I think too much. Which isn’t always a good thing. The “look before you leap” sort of
thing. Like the bananas on the table. Well, not quite all that much but somewhat.
Someone asks me a very simple question. “Where do you live?” Instead of answering
It straight out or even speaking my thoughts aloud I start a chain of reasoning.
The question is where I live.
If I am to frame my answer such that he understands, I’ll have to know how much he
knows about the place I live.
He will obviously know about so and so place. So I will tell him about that.
On second thoughts, he might not… but he’ll know about such and such place.
So that’s what I’ll answer.
And because I’m not a computer I need some time to reason all this out. So I buy time
by repeating the question as if I haven’t heard.
Its worse when it’s a question in a
geography exam. Reading topography maps. I always end up thinking too much. A
simple question like the slope of the land. There’s a single hill in the south and the rest
of the southern part of the map is flat…lower than the north. So I write that. But the
correct answer would be the simple one. Slopes from south to north.

2)I write my personal diary in such a way that other people will understand what I’m
talking about.

3)I live to show off. Most of the time. That is, like everybody else I’ve got this horde of
different personalities inside me, each for a different person or a different mood. The most prominent among them likes to show off a lot… she’s the one who lives to show off. So I live to show off. Most of the time. But I also show off that I don’t actually show off so no one understands… if you understand what I mean. Or maybe I just think I like to show off. See, I’m doing it again.

4)I sound crazy and… stupid when I’m in the mood and perfectly irritatingly practical
when I’m not.
I’m in the mood now, as you can probably make out. And I’m weird in a very
methodical way.

5)I live in fantasy fiction. Narnia, Madeline L’engle, Peter Pan, Lord of the Rings… the
finding a new world kind. Do you know that feeling you get when you dream of flying?
I get that when I read these. Is that weird? Or just plain romantic?

6)I am a “dangerous substance for glass objects”. In the last three weeks I broke:

a) A bottle
b) Two glasses
c) A bowl filled with curd
d) The glass door of a bookcase.
e) A glass photoframe.
f) A bangle.

6 isn’t a very big number…. I think I could probably go on forever. People like thinking they’re weird.

Here’s my list of the six people I’m tagging:

1) googly (they don’t come any weirder than that)
2) rupsha
3) jahnavi
4) apurva
5) priyasha
6) snigdha (even though she has only one post in her blog… may this be a reason to post another)

Weird is only a word. And all words are relative. I think you’ll find that one out after you go through their^^ posts.

death of a world

Sitting against the dried hard bark of the banyan… the leaves were still green then. And the stiff stillness of midday that coloured the white lilies dull red in our eyes because we were hot from running and we would have run more if we could.
“Imagine…” And that’s how it started. You told me to write them down. My fantasies of colour and emotion that I couldn’t quite make you understand.
So I did. But I wanted more. And my fantasy grew from two pages to ten… the nouns became larger and the adjectives increased… but I couldn’t stop because I had a book to fill.
And the story became a novel.
And I’d created a world. A child’s world… the handwriting loops of indecisive decoration and the characters those well-rounded figures from a child’s bedside story – the fat bald man, the pigtailed little girl in candyfloss pink and the dog who seemed to understand everything you said.
And the days were too short and the plot so detailed…. then once, or twice, the sequence led around a fairy garden only to double back and loose itself in a fisherman’s knot that wouldn’t let go. And neither would I.
Did I tire of those knots? I didn’t let it show. Instead of erasing the entire path I’d ease them out, little by little, leaving behind a trail of growing complications that I’d take in my stride.
And my handwriting became formed and my sentences shorter and more intelligible and my ideas more ambitious than ever before.
And eventually, like a musician with a new instrument, I let go of the last….
I forgot my world… and started another. And another. Till I couldn’t keep track of them all.
And you asked me why I didn’t show you what I’d written of the old story any more and I said because I can’t.
You told me once to put down the world I’d created. That’s what I like doing. Putting down my worlds… so that instead of being forgotten and lost in some unused corner of my memories that has clouded over with cobwebs and dust because I never visit it anymore, they would be forgotten and lost – old diaries scribbled over in an unsure hesitant handwriting – in some unused corner of my cupboards that would be clouded over with cobwebs and dust because I never visited it anymore.
Because that’s what I do. Create worlds. Story? I never bargained for a story. Neither did you.
But at some point of my own story I tired of the candyfloss and the red bulging eyes… the bold staccato of reds, yellows, blues and greens and yearned for cyclamen, hazel, azure and emerald. Because at some point that’s what everyone does.
So I gave up the red world and the yellow world and the pigtailed girl in candyfloss pink stood behind a cast iron boundary fence and sulked at me as I walked away…towards more knots.
And my world died. Because I didn’t want it anymore.
And a little girl sitting under a banyan, looking happily up at you, saying, “imagine a blue world…” was lost to the storms of complexities.

going bananas

There were four bananas on the tabletop.

And one of them was the one for me.

So how do I choose between four bananas?
Maybe I should take the one closest to the edge of the table.
Maybe I should take the one furthest away from my reach.
Maybe I should take the one with the least number of black spots.
Maybe I should take the one that wasn't really remarkable in any possible way.

Should I just close my eyes and pick one and leave it all to chance?
Should I just do what every one else does and take the one nearest to me?
Should I try to be different and take one of the others?
Or do most people try to be different and take one of the others and I'd really be different if I didn't try to be different and pick the one closest to me after all...?

Is this really as easy as everyone makes out?
My whole life might depend on which banana I pick as an after dinner snack.
Maybe this decision will affect all other decisions I make in my life.
And therefore I am, right now, at a crossroads. Four paths of life. And at the door of each is a single banana, each a miniscule bit different from the rest.

Maybe the banana second from the right has a deadly poisonous worm inside it from the deepest jungles of Africa and if I choose that I'll die instantly and go to heaven.

Maybe the next banana has a blessing laid upon it from God or whoever it is lays those blessings that whosoever eats this banana becomes the happiest rich guy in the world.

Maybe one has a curse saying I'll fail all the next seven exams I give in a row and pass the eighth one with flying colours.

Maybe the last banana is just an ordinary banana that won't change my life in any stupid way.

Maybe one banana would suit me and one wouldn't.
Maybe the one to the right would be too grainy for me.
Maybe the second from the left would be too sweet.
Maybe the first from the left would be just right but I would never know because I'd have eaten the third from the left which wasn't right at all.
Or maybe all of them would suit me equally well.

How can you tell with bananas? They're all wrapped up inside skins where you can't see them.
You can't even sample one and then leave it and try the other. Because once you choose, you've chosen and you're banana sticks with you for better or for worse.

I gave up. And I walked away from the table. Maybe I'd come back later and choose my banana.
Or maybe I'd let other people take away the bananas till there was only one left and that would be the one for me and it wouldn't be my fault if my banana didn't suit me because I had no other choice.

The trouble with careers is, you can't do that.

a wish

Little Martha sat by the window and stared out at the sky.
She didn’t see the pink-white clouds, or the birds flying high.
She didn’t see the colours of the sun, the trees of every kind,
Or even the young moon, faint and slight: Martha, you see, was blind.
But as she waited for another black
Dark empty day to pass,
Growling angry rain clouds came
And hid the brilliant sun – oh so fast!
And little drops, tiny drops of sweet kind rain came down
Touching ever so gently her soft warm cheek and her frilly laced gown
The windowpane was raised up and the curtains drawn back too
And the rain, finding an open door, gleefully flew into
Martha’s spick and span little room
And settled on every space
And gleamed silvery on her mirror and
Light brown on her face.
And then, in a sudden miracle little Martha smiled
Because you see little Martha had suddenly realized
That no one, not even God up there was where she was right now.
And no one, no one in the world knew exactly how
It felt to be her – it felt to feel
Something you could not see
Something that came in its own sweet time
The delightful absolute glee
Of feeling something as a surprise-
Before you knew it was there
And giving you entire attention
To what you felt only – the soft breath of air
Or the soft touch of rain
Again and again and again…
And Martha by the window in the rain and the wind
Martha in her rain-washed room
Martha in her utter delight
Wished that very soon
It would rain again and the rain would catch her by the windowsill
And she wouldn’t forget the way to feel the way she just now did.

thinking of yesterday

Like a frozen ripple of unused humour in the red-gold slashes of darkening twilight and a circling masterpiece of dank cold autumn crocuses shivering in the summer heat for newfound realities of hungry illusions dissected and thundering simplicity in prussian and again and again and again…
I never meant what I said…
I never said what I meant…
It was just lost in a single breath of stifling stillness to the bruised midday infinity.

"Rosemary for Remembrance"

“Rosemary for remembrance”
…she said – and held up a sprig.
“Rosemary for remembrance” and we sailed the skies
And gathered the splashes of colour off spring.
We painted the bare grey sea
And pushed down the midday sun…
Then, smiling, we said goodbye…

“Rosemary for remembrance”
And I kept the sprig…for eternities of seconds…
Watching the wood sprites play around it
Bathing it with dew and kissing it softly…
The leaves soft brushstrokes of green…
Green for a new day.

“Rosemary for remembrance”
…and the sprig wilted fast.
The wood sprites grew cruel and cold
And left it to its fate.
Dry colours of death…brown and ochre
Because death is remembrance…
And life is oblivion…
And it’s all a screaming chaos of opposites.

“Rosemary for remembrance”…
Rosemary for life…rosemary for death.
Rosemary for eternity and rosemary for oblivion.
Rosemary for a laugh…
A laugh that I couldn’t discern from a cry…
“Rosemary…”

Question

I asked God yesterday
To tell me about death
And I’d tell him about life.
Tell me about freedom
And I’d tell him about bondage.
Tell me about blue
And I’d tell him about grey
Tell me about reality
And I’d tell him about illusions.
Tell me about eternity.
And I’d tell him about a second…
He smiled and he shook his head.
Stupid, he said,
They are all one.
If you know about life,
You’ll know about death.
There is no knowing one without knowing the other.
Opposites are nothing but two edges of a stretch
That’s within your grasp.
If one edge is near,
Pull the rest in.
You’ve known all along.

twisted

A pen
An instrument
Of expression.
When words,
When your voice
Fails.
And the dry tears,
The silent cry,
The colourless blush
Or the blank laughter
Is unnoticed –
And twisted language
Is twisted further
Into twisted tales
Of relentless thought.

WORDS

God put a pen in my hand.
He put paper in front of me.
He breathed consciousness into me
So that I might live
To create.
And the first letter I wrote
Said, “God doesn’t exist.”
So he stepped back and said,
“So let it be.”
And he went.
Always there
When I need him most.
Never there when I want to see him to be able to believe in him.