Something best forgotten.

There was a time

When butter made me smile.

Its scent lingered,

Faintly on my fingers,

As I plodded through the day.

But then I found you

More fragrant than butter,

More fragrant than flowers.

Such power

That I staggered.

But I did not fall.

No, I never fell.

Or is it a lie I tell?

To put myself to sleep,

And to stem the tears that I weep.

Laughter costs us nothing,

You said.

But tears are dearly paid for,

I know.

These tears have taken

My grief far away

To a place where they will not bother me ever again.

Or so I thought.

For I am pregnant with grief

–and each one that leaves

Is replaced again.

I am no Heracles

Fighting the Hydra.

For these griefs are my own, my children.

I am angry with you because you do not love me like how I love you. You spend time with me when you want to with no care for my time. And though I am friend to you, I don’t know where I stand in your life. I feel a tightness around my chest (my heart is silent).

I like the taste and smell of butter. Now there is no pleasure in it. I can find none, none at all.

I am more than a friend and less than a lover. When you ask me to do something I feel pleased. I feel pleased because it is you.

I feel a thrill run down my spine when you call my name. And I always run the last few steps to your house.

Something is scraping my head.

Is it a claw?

No, that is false.

Is it a rake?

That cannot be

–it is in the garden.

Is it a spoon?

No, it has not left the plate.

It is pain.

The monster that

Cannot talk,

Cannot sing

And cannot rejoice

In the sun.

It tells me

I was never happy.

I am ready to believe

That is true.

I must go now,

It is come again.

I get angry with you sometimes, but I am always angry at myself. People are fond of saying “loving the impossible”. They forget that love is imagined beyond the possible which is the world as it already is. I have loved in vain, maybe even foolishly, but I have not loved impossibly. My anger comes from this tenuous and fragile hope.

When you stand on the beach, where the surf breaks on the shore, the tide pulls the sand away from under your feet and you feel like you stand upon a branch though you can see the ground all around you.

That is how fragile my hope is. But my love, why, my love is like standing at the edge of the sea breathing in all its beauty, majesty and force through my nose, my eyes, my skin, my tongue and my ears. The roar of the sea echoes the roar of my heart. The pull of the water is the strength of my love. The salt of the sea-spray is a mark of how ordinary my love is.

The bank that went broke

It can be the party or a party

As long as my tumbler is full;

Yet I feel that my tumbler is full

Too often

That I scarcely laugh any longer.

The creaking of the door

Keeps me awake at night

And I dream of escaping

On a turquoise flying carpet,

But even in my dreams, carpets cannot fly.

The grace that I was born with

Has been spent in full.

And I do not know who

Can loan me some more

So I may laugh again.

3rd February 2014

Now the hurt courses the streams in my body; it moves from my heart to my eyes they are dry and hurt, to my nose it is red I am sure and pinched as well, to my lips they pull into a frown my face tightens and I feel like tearing my skin off. There is an itch right underneath all of it. My skin grows hot and I feel flushed all over. There is a sinking in my heart followed by a painful clutching. My mind hears a din and I feel my face going sour. I feel old older than I ought too. And so colourless in comparison to her, to her! I must smile even though it hurts. Then I go upstairs and I am well again. In a manner of speaking.

Graphic Novel

I am in a course titled 'Visual Narrative Design' in which our aim is to produce a graphic novel. These were the three proposals I made. After so long I feel excited about drawing. I had almost forgotten the pleasure of writing and reading and drawing.

Anyway, here they are:

People I have slept with

When I was young I fell in love with the idea of love. I thought I was loved too little, then I thought I was loved a lot and then; that is really now, I think I have not loved enough. But what has fuelled my quest for love has really been its elusive nature which casts an aura of mystery around it making it difficult to describe. Every time I think this is it, this is love, I go on to discover that I am only further down the road to finding out what love is than before. This novel will begin with my confusion over lust, desire and love. I still have no answer but like the philosophical view of truth and truth-likeness I want to show how I have never been unloved or unloving; just closer to or further from love.

Baba

My friend recently lost her father. There exists an odd brotherhood of people who have lost their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. Odd because death brought them together and a brotherhood because their grief has no twin in people whose parents are whole and alive if not happy. Naturally I extended to her an invitation to this fellowship. Experiencing her grief brought back memories of my recently dead father and as I heard her stories I recalled the shadow of thoughts I had around the time he died. Of all of them there is one I wish to guide me through the rest of my life which was the hope that he had in his lifetime been the happiest he could have been (and which secretly I know to be his childhood) and having been happy could then stop living.

Money and I

Money fascinated me from an early age and it is only recently that I have pierced the mask of money and seen its true nature which is exchange. Money and exchange are one and the same. But before I arrived at this conclusion I had correctly, yet wrongly, identified how money got things done, got you to places and seemed to move the world around its little finger. In a sense this is a transition from a childish perception of money to an economic perspective. However, unlike the economic analysis of exchange I shall adopt an anthropological state of mind to examine the relation of money to me, a human.

It became clear he was not coming

Reflections are often mistaken for that which is reflected.

Color blindness affects one in three males. Raise your hand if you see purple flowers.



Contentment

I thought wisdom lay in my optimism, but only the forgetful are happy. It is the wise who are content to live each day as it comes neither uplifting nor diminishing those around them. I cannot believe that happiness lies serving all of mankind. It is a perversion this “godliness”, this incessant desire to tame and protect all that can and all that will harm man. What of those plants and animals who die living through the course of that particular form of being. If you truly see we are immortal, consuming and being consumed by each other living forever as the wind, the star and the little peel of orange.

How is anyone to say that collective happiness is the most excellent form of eudemonia?

How can anyone presume that this will bring to fruition any form of equality?

All these are only means to approach equality and they may be farther or closer to equality than each other but by no means are they equality. Our instincts are not yet dead, our wisdom not yet expunged to see that these are truthlikeness and not the truth itself. To be in the midst of life and see that it is not the world and I but that the world and I are just two aspects of the same thing, two planes of a singular object is the art of living. Cry not, laugh not, pain not and you will see a vivid beauty the likes of which you can rarely see otherwise. To understand that the source of these comforts and discomforts is us, ourself and therefore cease to entertain them thereafter is the greatest gift one can give to oneself. This is wisdom, I have come to see and now I must let go. Imagine then what we might do by not doing anything. What beings we might be? I can see it. I can feel it. I will go there now.

Slowly.

Ever so slowly.

Far Away

What do I do?

He went on stuffing his face. I hit him. He brushed off all the crumbs on him and turned to me and said, “You already know what you are going to do.”

He takes my hands. And then folds them.

After this he leaves.

Even in my fantasies I am not brave. I cannot be happy in make-believe. I want to. I want to. Can you see how much I crave? Every day I crave. There is a hole in my heart and no end to craving. There is hope only in contentment. Contentment is what I want.

To be content; that is my dream, not happiness.

I am done with it. Content is to know that this, right now, is someone’s perfection an even if not so – it matters not.

The Gita tells us to realize that we are god. Think about it. If you take into account how much you can truly and do affect the world you would not deny that you are a god. Every particles of our being tells us that we are special and every construct in our head with the voice of society, whatever that is, tells us we are not. Get rid of that voice and you will not need a revolution. You are free from everything but your mind. It clings to itself that is me that is I for safety. Hold it and teach it to let go and see. Feel. Hear. Taste. Smell. And then sleep. Everlasting sleep.