Beasts of Burden

The Last Burden: it returns to us in hysteria, in moments of loss. But, are the things we lose out on, really our losses? Sometimes, isn’t it so gratifying to lick our wounds, to let go of the illusion of what is rightfully ours?

The unit is like a family which begets beasts in the guise of two-legged humans –Homo Sapiens – to spawn more and more and more, until what remains is merely the void. The careworn fetishes, hugs, goodbyes. It is all packaged in the confinements of a larger-than-life dream, which we can never live out. “Ma”, the first word I uttered. How much does the word mean to me? Unfathomable, better left so.

Ageing plays the ever-truant school kid: the cause of everything mortal. No, the word is “time”. Our philosophers introduced us to the temporal nature of everything earthly. Everything physical has a life; they snuff it once they’ve served their time. Someone once said, even your dreams peter out. Ha! Snuff out on it, life’s a full circle, can sleep it through.

Our Nubile Universe

The hazel shades of dreams infused with delirium ...

A world marred with the savageness of expectations and the triumphs of vainglory, does one really care whether they live or breathe. The silences of our relationships are like shards of glass strewn on a carpeted floor. You step on them without seeing them and, before you know it, crimson trickles ...

Our universe, a mobile plasma, is a Dark Lady enticing our virility (or the lack of it). It shelters the realms of possibility, making its mark felt in our everyday lives, irrespective of whether we're aware or not. Like, the memory of sleep is as dormant as the act in itself. In fact, when someone utters the spoken word, does that person know that someone in the world, somewhere, is speaking the same words, although that might be in a different language?

We live in the microcosm of an associative nostalgia where everything that's uttered has either already been spoken aloud, or is being simultaneously spoken by someone we don't know in another destination, or is scheduled to be spoken in the future, and who knows? The latter might be in an identical context too. In fact, as homo sapiens of a sophisticated environmental outfit, aren't we drugged by this entire doll's house of the universe?


PS: Please excuse my lapses, for my intention was not to hurt any faith or belief or proven scientific theories.

Error & Trial

And then there were these semblances of purity … a limpid belief transcended by countless sojourns into the void of feeling - the feelings, shelled in carefully woven crusts of familiarity. Why do we have to put up with all this when we could do with merely blanching out the numbness?

When there's too much pain to enshroud you, never give in. What we can do instead is, fight back like a braveheart. I am independence. We are all alive threatening our very existences without the delineation of sanity. Work’s never free of play, play’s never free of work – funny! The whispers in the dark, of the rustle of the leaves awaiting your eyes to dissolve into a solemn dream.

Homer lives in the verses of his epic, like we live in the interwoven significances of our yesterdays. Once feeling goes, love goes too. How convincing is that?

Passovers in Time

Last night the stars revealed their nakedness; you took flight to the Lost City
When the boy next door sat drunk on his rooftop, bewailing a love lost.

Sometimes, I see you enter the monochrome realm of a sundry pasts that shelve the love notes, promises and surreptitious togethernesses ...
Do you still care for them? If yes, then why don't you just do something, instead of sitting tight in some godforsaken island? If no, then why have you kept the remnants of those reminiscences that are too obsolete to matter anymore?

Let's not pretend, shall we? We far too busybodied to gnarl at ourselves. I think we've left that all behind! Timelessness has its appeal as does the lust for anonymity, and once we shell our skins with the mantle of familiarity, the rest is smooth sailing. Life in a society comes with its taxes and we are paying every bit of that mammoth interest.

Tommorrow's a work, the chores of which yell completion. Do you live a life like mine? Is it the surpluses that matter? Not so long ago it was believed that all is attainable, that you could, contrarily, "transcend". That's the word. Our events are created, tried and then stamped "approved". The events are dead, long live events.

Some things lose themselves. The moon loses itself in its phases. I've come to sleep through my losses, which spawn a lulled mind. The Buddha medidates quietly at midnight in a faraway forest ...

Hushed

Living on the edge, minding your answers and making the best of today. Why is the world rooted in the diktats of condition? A life departs quietly somewhere in the dead of the night, yet no one hears the hush. Tomorrows are like shadows waiting to be claimed, asserted and given in to. With friends and known faces, is it still a skill to socialize in sobriety? When they confiscate our world, what remains are a few hopes, crushed dreams and shattered truths.

Whenever I’m disturbed in my thought-flow, what right do I have to demand them back? Life, or something similar to it, condescends to stop and gape at my emptiness. The kids playing outside rumble on about home-works and “tasks”. How could I let them go – those reveries, silly nothings? Departures. Pauses. Sometimes, the tether’s too small for domesticity!

This one’s for the lonely dweller. I’ve responded to your challenges in feats of mimicry, yet returned to you every time! Torn between the tussle of fabrication and reality, was I wrong to have waited …? Don’t know, if I ask you how you love me, what your answer should be. Mystery breeds the anonymous, when creation becomes the last resort. I’m hungry for the words to seduce me to your swoon. Until the time that happens and words cease to matter anymore … Life will dish out the best for you, even when you live abandoned like Crusoe.

EDEN (from the recesses) ...

The rain sleeps on
In the terraces of our oblivion.
Cradled by the half-moon
Sailing past the midnight skies,
Rustled by the leaves of memory,
As you sleep on -

As I look at you, in slumber,
Your feet rapping in every beat,
The prelude to an end.
Your call -
Echoed through the tresses
Of a dark night's ballad,
True to its meter,
Prays for an eternity of deja vu.

Savoured by the briefest of memories,
Alive to the calls of a world
Rendered infinite by the trappings of vanity.

The mirror wherein I see myself,
Is someone I'm not.
Is it you
Sailing the high seas past windy nights?

You've been there - in history,
In the recesses of chronology
As I stand divided in the Forest of Choice,
Waiting for you to deliver
The soul that ever was
Secured in translation.

Transferences

Time changes with the breath of a conch, like the bath a blade of grass takes on dew … The things that leave you never to return, words spoken never to be uttered again. The whispers stealing into my ears from amid a thousand noises. How do you manage to make it so far from the silent skies? Friends from a far off place calling ... Where have you gone in the loneliness?

Life in a Matrix

There are a couple of addresses for this one: the old Calcutta chromosome vs. the New Age destination. Enraptured in the savoir-faire of the sequentially encapsulated changelings, I stepped out of my freshly spun aura of a life of discriminating comparisons. What seemed to be the worst was indeed a flux of the imbeciles drooling on a pond of self-centeredness. Work’s a thing of the past, the performance part of it being “product oriented”.

Why am I writing all this, when I should be scribbling a couplet of poetic verse more fluently than some mere outsourcing shit? Good question. Ha! Life in a Matrix has been an enriching experience, teaching me the tougher things of life the hard way. This is where I learned that in order to be successful, all you need to do is be aware of your worst potentials, and keep practicing. The test lies in delivering modesty till kingdom come.

All in all, the New Age transition from the Old World of cushioned reveries was a sabbatical from the cloistered professionalism. When there’s a loophole, there’s the exacting administrator at your service! Ahem, ahem … However, life’s good, bad and ugly and there are bad days – the good being an exception. Then it comes to you in dreams: the deadlines and the frowns …! Work from home, telephone calls in the middle of the Pujo – it’s a full circle of chasing ambitions.

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