for the weak at heart
You want to run to hide from all
you never wanted this;
it echoes in the weak tempest –
the tea and your heart twists.Around, a dry coppery tang
circles a bloody silver spoon.
You wish it would never stop
but the crystals melt, too soon.The black in your heart settles to base
the brown has dissolved every drop
of tears, of smiles
of broken pearls on a string,
it sours and stains almost all.Laughs the bitter cynic and the naïve alike:
‘how could I ask for more?’
Was it the spoon the tea or the scarlet cup –
which was it that cut me raw?And so I throw the question forth
the blame on whom to lay.
The world my life or my wounded heart
which one to be cut away.patterns
There are patterns to things. Like eating grass and grass by the wayside. Like cuckoo and cuckoo. Patterns. There was a pattern to my dreams recently too, but I didnt write it down in time, and now the memory of it is gone forever. But patterns remain. And patterns assert themselves over and over again in our lives. Patterns take the form of routine and monotony, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. They can be reassuring, and give a semblance of control over one’s life.
Patterns though, are hard to break, and that’s when we get headaches. Headaches are patterns about to be broken. When you’ve broken a pattern, the pattern dissolves and headaches disappear. They persist only because it is a human condition that we resist attempts to break patterns, and also a phenomenological condition that patterns themselves resist breaking.
Patterns are afraid of being broken.
tall dreams
i might never scale up this tree.
over time, it just grows
ever taller, ever
out of reach.the boys and girls inside us
Aren’t many things in life this way?
People, sharing a space in time, for a brief while. You and a friend meet, then your friend leaves to meet others, and you wander off. You see them pleasantly gathering, and this leaves your field of vision as you go where your feet takes you. And your feet takes you away…and then they carry you back; you peer to see if your friend is still there, but he has left. ‘Where have they gone?’ you wonder.
But you realise that in that space and time, the moment you both shared is no more, and time moves on, and the clouds carry on drifting, and traffic continues its buzz and hum in the red and green rhythm of motion. The space remains but everything is fleeting as time carries people away; people continue meeting friends, and gatherings upon gatherings replace the gathering you saw…
You stand there wistfully, but the world has moved on.
So you move on.
When I was a little girl and my mother took me to school on the occasions I was late, I felt such a deep impregnable sense of sadness, standing within the school compounds as I watched my mother walk away. It was a feeling very hard to bear, I felt so vulnerable and alone, with my mother leaving but I – staying. I didn’t feel this way when I boarded the school van, only when I missed it and my mum had to take me to school herself. I knew I would still see her at home in the evening but, still, when I stood within the compounds of school and she remained on the covered walkway to wave me goodbye, I remember feeling miserable at her departure. I would walk a bit, stop, then look back and long towards her diminishing figure.
And when I came home, I felt relieved and happy to see her waiting as I alighted from the school van. And she would take the weight off my shoulders and comment on my untidy hair.
Some things never change, and we are all little girls and boys inside, aren’t we?
the girl and her suitcase of words
inside her shell (pix from Wallcoo) She kicked off her tiny white shoes and crept inside her pretty conchshell for a good read. It was a book of inner thoughts she penciled whenever a free moment found her.
They didn’t seem to find her much any more, so she went searching. The seagulls asked, ‘why haven’t you come lately?’
And all that was sad and beautiful tumbled out in murmuring answer from her suitcase, succumbing to the soft waves echoing faraway shores, rushing for the blue lady’s liquid embrace.
She watched, as words etched itself on a page, the invisible pen wielded by quiet thoughts strengthened by froth and spray.
She watched, as the seagulls flew over her cradle and her chapel.
on not clicking with colleagues
being unable to talk crap must be considered one of the worst ways to die in civilised societies. add to that being unable to just talk.
be sincere
to fear to be sincere because of a phantom reciprocal insincerity must be one of the silliest things to fear.
autumn
the leaf drifts slowly
i open my palm to receive it
it opens my skin.the orange temple
I put on my red earrings, shoved my feet into black Nikes, and left for work.
**********
They skipped along for attention in that bit of atmosphere beneath my earlobes; those glass beads along the rhodium hoop partnering my footfalls. If you squinted and peered within the multi-faceted beads, the trinkets would have laughed and played with the young light of morning, giving you glimpses of a rose-tinted street lined with trees and neat doll houses, along which the bus gently purred.
“God has not promised
skies always blue,
flower-strewn pathways
all our lives through;
God has not promised
sun without rain,
joy without sorrow,
peace without pain.”My feet waited patiently on the dark blue of the bus floor, my workbag and file balanced on my lap. The beads grew solemn and moved more gravely as the rose-tinted reflections of my quiet neighbourhood gave way to the hard gray of construction and underground tunneling. Like a metallic caterpillar, the traffic crawled, till the feet deposited me at the makeshift bus stop, with the hands assigning between themselves who would hold the bag and the file. My feet hiked towards the stolid orange temple as they had for the past two and a half months, every footfall appealing the blue sky which was denied me in my daily confinement, and returned to me only the following day, in that fraction of time constant.
“God has not promised
we shall not know
toil and temptation,
trouble and woe;
He has not told us
we shall not bear
many a burden,
many a care.”The hours trudged, slid and shied around me, as I tossed about in the kerfuffle of work and human relations. Like a pendulum, that single marble bead swung from its silvery grip pierced through flesh, and it seemed to bleed a tiredness that pooled atop my shoulders, drawing them inwards in a curvature my spirit resisted. My feet folded themselves beneath my body, and the red earrings chimed a stoical rhythm each time my eyes flitted to the inspirational poem placed on my desk.
“But God has promised
strength for the day,
rest for the labourer,
light for the way,
grace for the trials,
help from above,
unfailing sympathy,
undying love.”Sometimes at work, I would pick Andes up and he afforded me a measure of cheer, knowing I have cared well for him. Andes, the cactus with the tiny pink flower atop his prickles. At home, my guinea pig had passed on on Wednesday morning. He was barely a year old, a cute long-haired variety with a shock of brown fur on his head. He had a face of a teddy bear, and had been given a clean bill of health by the vet. I had not taken any photo of him, and he had left.
I walked home at the outset of the weekend, my exhaustion eased in the night air. Two pairs of eyes followed me, and I smiled, at two cats curled up on neighbouring steps. In dappled ash and ginger they sat, as I wondered if they were sibling felines, and if they would flee if I sat beside them. I did not, their languid poses astride a flight of steps were plenty comforting enough.
**********
The girl in the Nikes tramped around purposefully, and her earrings anchored her in the femininity she shut out as much as she could while at work. And in the weekend, the red earrings lay quietly inside the doll house, ignorant of silent tears that crept out of her windows when no one was around.
(September 3rd, 2006)
cold comfort
i think this is all a tragic irony.
when the sky rips itself open and flings itself onto earth, i feel so alive. i feel like the sky has flung itself, axis and planets notwithstanding, all at me. and i feel less alone when this happens because how does one feel alone when you have a sforzando of a million raindrops accompanying you, and crying the tears you cannot find inside you? i love the haunting grey skey and the tumultuous snow of day. i love the angry red sky and the black ashen flakes of night. i love how conflicted i am, i love how steadfast my course runs, and you realise i say i love it because there is no use in hating it, because there is only wistfulness.
why have you gone? i’m not through with you, come back, come back.
rip yourself open again for me, again and again.
