In the Begining

in the beginning, there was nothing but a tiny little glowworm of a thought inching around the darkness.

scrabbling fingers, fumbling for a pen in the dark.

a flicker and scratch of a match, the smell of flickering light.

a slight glow, warming cold fingers, puddles of dripping wax, oozing into shapes. a scratchy start, word crossed out and rethought, a glowworm frantically flashing around, to escape being pinned down.

a fleeting glimpse of a person in the candlelight; a yellowed shadow.
people and places begin to whisper around and stale the air with their crowded smell.
befuddlement, crowded thoughts and noisy lonely people and horses and carriages and shiny trains with automated voices that say everything wrong. the remenants of a day dredge themselves onto paper.
lonely worlds echo into the words and lonely smiles seep into the ink.
the candle melts away and white neon light burns into everything, searing it and tainting the carriages and yellowed faces.
and the glowworm inches away
to be captured
by someone else, another day.
when neon lights blind the skies
and inspiration turns into a tubelight on a metallic wall. 

Filth

It bubbles.

It gushes.

It stinks.

It degenerates.

It is just as human as any of us… the drainpipe.

It bubbles with stench, with black water…

It gushes with life: not vigour, but the sheer disgust of existence.

With the black water that flows through it, it gets blackened too.

Whenever it has resisted,

Has choked with tangles of dark hair,

Has coughed up little spurts of black blood,

Whenever it has tried retching the filth away,

Acid has been poured to ‘clear’ her breast, to burn it.

I remember its predecessors:

The first, and the one that came after and the next one too.

All had gradually given way to crumble and decay.

This one was painted bright sporty green.

It became bottle green, brown, dirty black ad pitch.

Its outer cover is hard and corrugated…

Proceeding gradually towards brittleness, bitterness.

But its inner layers are soft, tender:

Many have peeled off, few are still left...

It has a continuous chain of malignant tumours,

It is a reluctant human bomb that inevitably kills itself.

Its vitals are dead.

inspire me

A fence, beyond it: a boy

He sits, and thinks, and smiles.

That smile, beyond it must be a thought.

He never told them about his thoughts —

Their shapes, their sizes or their colours.

Each day, while work and worry waltzed wildly,

He thought and a smile danced about his lips.

Is it a unicorn inside his head? Silvery white,

Sparkling amongst emerald blades,

Racing perhaps with an eagle’s shadow

Or drinking from a sapphire stream.

Maybe someday he’ll grab a pen,

Some pages; then grab his thoughts

By the scruff of their necks and

Put them behind bars of another kind.

He will bind the free unicorn, the free eagle

With chains of ink and links of lined paper,

Grant them the immortality of printed words

For us; we shall take a peep inside his head.

Maybe so. Maybe not. But what thoughts cross

His head now, when that naive smile appears?

From what wonderland do they come

Parcelled in silk, tied neat with a ribbon?

A fence, beyond it: a boy.

He sits—but the smile is gone.

Will you help me look for my unicorn?

I will. And so we sat down together, and

Thought.

circles when not made

let the hand hold still
the endless quivering by blows
and other endless mighty things,
which shake a leaf to the mud ground.

please, will the air rotate
where is a breeze, or the north wind
and the air rotate, or whatever
it does to relieve itself.

i am an only daughter,
i do not want to be disowned.

2010. is it october already?

So this is another year. we will write this year, and let every one know. this is what people do in the night. write, and design crazy blogs. let's keep it simple this time, and when the first years start ploughing, we will add more things.

POSTSCRIPT, 2009

The Bogey Men

- Sridala Swami

The One in the Photograph
That you could use up
someone’s life
by sucking it out
through the lens.
They may live forever
on your film,
which might be just as well
because soon you’ll need
something to remember them by.
The One on the Page
Who absorbs with the ink
every characteristic of your loved one
until a point when both
are equally corporeal.
This is where you should stop
recording a life
if you want it to continue.
The One Who Walks Always Beside You
You can do nothing about.