Winter stories

Winter is crawling into my bones
Feasting coldly on my marrow,
Waking the past, the sorrows tucked within…    
My tresses gone, my skin harsher
Than my broken voice now.
The leaves fall in a serene brace of unsounded endings
As the trees frame the olden boulevards in a ghostly manner;
I wake up into weary grey mornings of dead fauvists
Or sometimes facing blue windows fading into the night;
My feet cold, my bed smelling of stale coffee n’ liquor
And your somber absence, an empty space, within and without.
You said you’d love me to my filthiest core;
Well, my scent has vanished in ashes of years-
Years of illicit fucking, crying and drunk wanderings
At neon-lit wastelands of crammed up third world cities
And decaying bridges between lucid dreams and needs for a fix.
And heaps of those years had left me
With something borrowed but fused in me;
I have lost all my abstract limbs, but the everlasting murkiness;
A shadow clinging on my back; a shadow of a strange past-
A past of twisted sorrows which I hid in my bones.
Would you still give me the warmth that you promised?
The warmth that you bear in the palms of your hands
And the cracks of your lips turned bitter
By the dead yellow cigarette butts;
The warmth born of cold, in your pausing breath,
A cold my insides have long been diseased by…
The voiceless mouth of a void in time
Kisses the memories mislaid in the dark of my hair;
I see you now on a distant ship suspended near the northern sky,
While life seeps away slowly, facilely
From the corners of my quieter eyes.

You.

You my love

A faceless man

Standing with your smoke

And madness

And a box of magic

Across time and space

In every lifetime

Of my soul

Over thousands of years

Through thousands of bodies

Changing facades

Crumbling inside

And I - live and die

Time and again

Waking up

With half-forgotten dreams

Of a faceless man

A rugged being

With his timeless spirit

And captivating words

Haunting my aging heart

At every forlorn dawn

That rises in the sky

At the end of ever shifting

Strangest hallucinations

While voices sleep in stupor

And eyes come round

From a faraway trance

To grasp within

A mundane reality

That never quite got over

The silence of the hearts.

He died on a Saturday, nameless

It was one of those sunny mornings that turn into an annoyingly gloomy and rainy one as you step outside for work. I was running for the train. Rush hour. Merciless bustling crowd. Jabbing, pushing, skipping my way through the swarm of fierce people I ran for the train, holding on to my bag, my resolve and remains of the fleeting sanity. The train whistled. The green Mucalinda^[1]  of my stealthy hope started to move out of my reach slowly. Run run run. I jumped over a corpse. At first my clueless mind, chasing the Mucalinda, didn’t realize it was a corpse. I jumped past it and hopped on the train. I was triumphant, one step closer to my destiny - my destiny to be examined, to be approved by the institution and get recognition for my acquired knowledge. I was on my way there, to succeed, to establish myself, in their world. They say you have to do it, they say it’s important, they say it validates you worth if you have any. But it validates whatever you want if you have money and power. But there are people like me, like us, around the world, on every street, every lane, in every bunch of matchbox apartments, every reeking ghetto, with no substantial amount of money or no money at all and of course no power; like bunch of asthma patients in an industrial complex, waiting in endless quest, living lives of machines without any inkling of the meaning of existence, at the bottom of the panopticon, trampled, and kept alive by a facade of hopes...hopes of reaching the apex of the panopticon, or somewhere near it. Hope of a betterment promised by the big bosses, like the promises them deodorant companies make to people. So I jumped over a corpse of some unknown old beggar, lying in the middle of public disgust and deliberate ignorance, cold and nameless, on platform number 3. As I stood at the door of the moving train my eyes fell directly on his face, wrinkled and twitched in frozen time, but serene... and utterly dead! My nerves became aware of an unfamiliar odour, a fleshy odour. A late sensation. Nauseating, inflaming revelation. An unexpected moment of being. The stench was in the air, and though I moved away on my Mucalinda, it stayed with me, somewhere in my head. A crow’s feather, sent by the wind fell at ease near my feet, and twirled away outside again on the wings of the wind. Moloch^[2]. Moloch entered my mind, "Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows" came to devour my belligerent mind. I shivered in the wind; it had all the power to blow me away. But I clutched on to my Mucalinda. I had to go somewhere, anywhere but not to my destiny – the one that I had set out for. My destiny was no more. My destiny had ceased to bear a meaning; it had gone down Moloch’s stomach by then, I have had shoved it, to save my slipping mind - the only thing left of my own.

**Notes:

1. Mucalinda: A snake like being who protected Buddha from earthly elements after his enlightenment.

2. Moloch: An ancient god. Moloch had associations with a particular kind of propitiatory child sacrifice by parents. In Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" (1955), Moloch is used as a metaphor for capitalism and industrial civilization. Both senses of Moloch are valid here, choose as you may like.

The name is Nuwanda

I'm going to change my name into Nuwanda someday, seriously.
And yes, I can't get over the Dead Poets Society.

I think I am a product of the frustration of a non-revolution. Yes, I tell you this, there has never been a proper revolution in "India". Not even a small war. Pre-colonial India (Lands around river Indus is more of a proper term though) was much more interesting. I want a war. Damn it. People have become very stupid and shallow these days, and few of them need to die hence. I would very much like to execute God Bless America in India before it's too late.

I miss getting drunk. I am becoming older and less fun simultaneously. I have this huge burden to be free from uncountable things and it had turned me into a grumpy owl. But owls are anyway grumpy, I guess. So about being high, I think the better way to put it is that I can't get drunk anymore. It just does not happen.

I sometimes really doubt that I exist. It feels like a very bad recurring dream, every single day.

Well, then again what is reality?

Still Raffish and Ragged

Just half an hour or so and the calls will start coming. I hope I am overestimating. No, I won’t be sad if no one calls. I’ll be perfectly alright, rooting for my comforting blues. I’ll be rather happy about it, perhaps in my own twisted way, but still. Well, I desperately want my phone to die away right now, so I won’t have to go through all those wishes with a smiling face. I wish everyone was as insensitive as my mother when she treats me at the perfectly wrong time in the worst way possible for a very trivial reason. Hating everyone blatantly would be really easy then. But I don’t like to hate. Trust me, they make me do it, it’s not my fault that I can’t tick like other clocks. There are people in my house, relatives. I don’t want them here, at all. I don’t know why I feel so tremendously sad on this very hour each year. This very hour, this hour before it turns 12 and it is 24th of June, before it is my godforsaken birthday.
I want to buy a house in southern France, take up a different identity and start over. I want to travel with just enough money to get me through the month and work at random places. I want to write something that would stunt the world. I want to change a lot of things in the world, a lot of people in the world, I want to break the ages old walls we are born and brought up within. I want to take Noir photographs that look like products of an astounding mind. I want to be beautiful to myself, completely. I want to meet somebody who would love me for who I am and not smother me with an overwhelming smell of stereotypical romance. I want to lose my virginity before I am old and all the anxiousness and fantasy about love making is gone from my semi-numb weird heart. It has been twenty years. Twenty freaking years. And all I have done is NOTHING. Absolutely Nothing. There's nothing I am really good at, there's nothing I excel in. Whatawaste. Ohwhatafuckingwaste.
I don’t want to whine like this. I don’t want to do anything. Especially I don’t want to turn 21. I don’t want to turn 21 like this – sitting in front of my goddamn pc, feeling claustrophobic, hating the whole world, going over and over my life till now and brooding about it. I don’t want a cake, hugs, flowers, cards, wishes, nothing! I want an escape. From all of this. From my very existence – the one here, right now, in this very moment, from everything surrounding me including all the pain, all those judgements, responsibilities, complaints, confusions, misunderstandings and fake loves.

A Lucid Dream

And I’m falling down

Into the feral sea

Where the waves dance

And march in a slow parade,

A carnival of grins,

Of the joker and of you n’ me,

Trying to break out

From the same old crowd,

Saving some bleeding tulips…

And how we will feast

On the salt and the ships;

With my heart against a wall

And a head full of webs

With countless fireflies stuck in it.