Clueless 20s

As I sit here eating my midnight bread

And wondering what life might be like five years down the line,

I am clueless.

I can’t even make a proper fluffy pancake, or write a properly punctuated article yet, and I am supposed to be shaping my life right now? I mean whatever decisions I take, they are going to decide almost how my life is going to be like when I am older. 

But I guess my incongruity is pretty much vivid before me at this moment as I decided to write this instead of studying for my final exams. I am going to be a graduate. Hah. That really does not mean anything. That is not even going to get me a decent job. It would only mean that I have read a pile of books, essays, and pages, some I have hated and some I have loved. But Comparative Literature, my discipline, gave me a lot of things, and one of them is a different perspective in life and new lenses to look through and see this world of ours. How snobbish we are, claiming this world as "ours", whereas we are just a little part of it and might just disappear in time.

I should go back to study instead of typing this. Really.

For her.

She walked down the lane
with sorrow dripping from her hair
that flew against the wind like
a rebel child of broken love and
she grew older with each passing moment
as her face became accumulation of mismatched fabric patches
of uncountable days that she lived in the truest sense
of a life she fathomed to be real and absurd together
and felt it like the desert earth feels each drop of first rain of seasons.

I don't know what I was thinking

I wanted to love you like the beautiful paintbrush

That I stole from my mother in my young days

Of colours and weirdest thoughts;

And the brush had a little crack at the end,    

And it became my favourite thing,

Even at times when the lines and colours

Betrayed my imagination and I spilled everything around

Like a completely disoriented mad woman.

There’s a rupture in my reality.

I saw it first when the brush died;

The pests of the old house ate the bristles, I guess.

And then there were deaths and lies and smiles

That I forgot in time.

Then came you, and I thought I could love

You who come with the messiness of the palette

In the middle of a painting on a lazy afternoon.

But I have forgotten how it felt to hold my brush,

And now I’ve forgotten how it felt to hold you!

Well I don’t know how to love,

‘Cause I don’t know what love is.

But today is the first rainy day

Punctuating the end of our winter.

Won’t you wait till spring, before you leave?

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.