if i could say words
  the way i meant them
i would have no need to speak

  but if my words meant nothing
you would not be here listening

come to me

on nights when
the glass yawns empty-mouthed
and life batters you with weary fists

on nights when
you feel trapped
without purpose, without meaning,
an insignificant twinkle

before the streets rush up at you
come to me at once
let me share your silence

on nights when
none of this happens
curled up between a book and a drink

before the rooster shrieks
come to me again
let me share your pleasure

Cat things!

So, I created a new blog with random strips featuring the two cat things, updated whenever I feel like drawing a new one. It looks like this idea won't go away very soon, and I may as well stop filling this blog with dozens of pictures.

Link here: http://cat-things-lalala.blogspot.com/

Song Lyrics?

I wander through the city's heat
past lazy trams and cliffs of glass
I wonder why you left these streets
left me here to live in the past

Come back to me, and let me
paint your fingers red and gold
They're Chinese colours of luck
They're wordless colours of love

The cold Hong Kong rain turns to mud
all the memories we thought were art
The ugly red cabs are its blood
I stand at the docks, at its heart

Come back to me, and let me
paint your fingers red and gold
They're Chinese colours of luck
They're wordless colours of love

The sea wind brings me Hong Kong
dust and salt and fish and oil
It blows on your face too right now
It's a fine day for your ship to sail.



Suggest song name plis.

A passage from American Gods by Neil Gaiman

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting.
That is the tale; the rest is detail.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look - here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best as he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers - many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d mistake one for another, after a minute’s close inspection), but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people — but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

And the simple truth is this: There was a girl and her uncle sold her.

Yes this is intended to make people go pick up the book. Or anything else Gaiman, actually. And think.

Sonata

http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=84wiSBP42Fw

I came across a short film by Ryan McDougal on youtube, and I could not resist setting words to it.

i walk the streets under the moon
to let the darkness conceal
my confusion. i stop by
your window again, and i
gaze in at your pure beauty
and your warmth. you torment
my soul in the agony of
the meek who never inherit
even the dust in my palm. you're
a golden bird on a silver branch
inches away from my fingertips
i'm afraid to stretch out and
hold you in my hand i'm afraid
you'll fly away and i'll never
see you again. footsteps crunch
past beyond my vision and i wonder
what it would feel like with
you by my side. i wish
i had something more to offer
than this timid little rose but
its red is the red in my veins
calling out my love my pains
all the things i should say
but cannot. time trickles by
shadows melt beneath streetlamps
and yet i wait. should i take
this chance should i leap
can i fly... i turn to walk away
but i cannot run from you.
now it's my hand on your doorknob
and your song on my lips.

back again on the streets
hair plastered to our scalps
it's a rainy evening this time
with you it's always easy
easy laughs an easy silence
as we splash through the puddles
hand in hand
like we've been doing this forever
in fact maybe we have
drenched in lovesongs and mud
you can splatter me now with the
fragrance of newly-washed earth
because I tickled your ribs but then
you're laughing anyway
we stop for hot chai somewhere
and rag the vendor under his umbrella
then the neon lights up the lanes
the stormclouds look sullen now
tired now quieter softer perhaps
the madcap dash in the rain is done
we move on through the crowd
looking for some trees some dark
letting the drizzle wash away
all the spaces that fell between us

Keepsakes

I met her on the corner of the parking lot.
She looked like a beautiful bellydancer with
one of those exotic foreign names like
Entiesca or Meraille or Serane or Betsy,
you know what I mean.
Trippy high heels and long red dress
high collar and long hem
with a flash of riding boot peeking through.
She had a cigar in her lips
a sneer in her body
a bruise on the thigh I never saw.
When she saw me, she laughed
then she threw her ring to me.
I'm going to die someday, she said
and baby you'll never see me again
so I want you to have a keepsake.
I turned the ring over in my palm
a cheap gaudy bauble a dime a dozen;
what am I to do with this, I demanded.
She laughed again louder boreder
kid, toss it to another passerby
continue the spiral
flush it down the drain
wear it on your finger
all the same to me.
Seems like there ain't much in life
that's not the same as that ring.
She left me staring at her butt
swinging down the cracked old sidewalk
heels tapping out the years sadly.
She was right; I never did see her again
maybe she died maybe she cried
maybe she found another ring
for the old one's buried beneath a rosebush
guess she was right about that one too.

Finding Peace

I’ve found peace many a time;

peace on cold lonely mountains,
peace within ancient monasteries,
peace in green-shrouded backwaters,
peace by my window at midnight,
peace always alone and serene.

But I found peace most intense
while sitting on a black stone bench
with white graffiti scrawled over it
by the harbor, above the docks.
It was not the calm of silence,
but of delicate sounds
of cars in the distance,
of wind on sails and water,
and of the stars tiptoeing out;
the calm of no one speaking.
The skyline fell away on either side
as far as my eyes could follow.
Magnificent spires framed the bay,
bright lights sparkling in the distance as
the sky bled orange blurry clouds to
drip into the bowl of the ocean’s horizon.
The peace sifted through the humid air
to settle as golden dust on my shoulders.
I breathed out, and snuggled into the arms
and the smile of the one next to me.

Mirror Inversions

She came back from the shops and the sunshine, and stared into her silvered mirror at the expression on her face. What she saw must have startled her, for the glass slipped from her hands and broke, and she fell through the cracks herself. Things look the same on the other side, only inverted, she reassured herself. But what she found was a twisted likeness of her world, a Picasso painting. This was a strange and fascinating realm where the things that she used to mock as feverish hallucinations had fled to seek refuge, and thrived in their new homeland. Fairies sprinkled pixie dust on young men yearning to fly. Dwarfs lurked in the shadows beneath garden toadstools. Men in capes leaped off dizzy skyscrapers to do battle with warped, larger-than-life arch-villains. A leprechaun rushed past beneath a painted sky seeking his pot of gold. The air was crisp, the ocean clear, the butterflies free of fear. Magic, having been sacrificed to science in her own world, hummed and throbbed in the veins of the mirror-world. She stood in the midst of it all, and sensed magic tugging at her soul, compelling her to heed its decree and stay to obey. She felt her resolve weakening, her self dissolving until she would become a joyous wraith in this sacred land, leaving a mere reflection beyond the glass on the other side. She dragged herself away with a heroic effort, forcing herself to be reborn in her own land. Smoke fumes wafted through the windows, and her unshaven neighbour slouched past on the sidewalk below. Magic must be brought back, she mused. Then she noticed the shattered shards at her feet, and the duality of magic and science struck her – two empires enthroned in their separate worlds of wonder, perfect inversions of the choices mankind has to make. Images of one in the other would never come closer than the thickness of the broken mirror.

spring-cleaning

the religious ones say
armageddon is coming
judgement day is near
all prostrate yourselves
before the might of
the One
(or many)
for the world is surely
coming to an end

the scientists say
global warming is near
climate change is at hand
mend your ways
clean your bays
quit the race
you greedy little fatcats
else the world is surely
coming to an end

the crafty ones
(and the alarmists)
say what we all know
mankind cannot be trusted
nukular bombs will wipe out
the last squabbling remnants
and the world is surely
coming to an end

the parents the journalists
point to the rising crimes
the rising insane violence
and warn us all
how long before 8%
becomes 100% murders
at this rate?
these are statistics speaking
so it must be true
that the world is surely
coming to an end

me, I think we need to
wipe the slate and
start all over again
anyway
in fact I suspect even
everyone else agrees
that's why we're all so eager
to come up with something
anything at all
that says the world is surely
coming to an end

one more night

I used to know
how to be alone
once upon a time
now there is the night
invading my ignorance

outside these stained windows
the cars rush past
the high heels clatter
the patter of the rain
falls on monochrome bylanes

inside it's just like
any other graveyard
no voices no tears only a past
empty pen refills
a burnt-out radio plug
butts in the ashtray
a ghost at the table

there are people out there
somewhere
lost in this big city
too many people
in too many rooms
with too much silence

on such nights - most nights -
all I want to do
is crawl into bed
pull the sheet over my head
close my eyes
and sleep
forever

waiting
to be born
again

because when you're young
it remains necessary
to ignore
the endings
and allow one more night
to creep past

Waiting

Did you notice the jagged
song-fragments I scattered
across your lonely lawn, waiting
for you to brush the misty dew from
their soft lips and for love's first kiss
from your melancholy guitar strings?

Did you glimpse the scraps
of paper of lines of black shadows
I strung into a tribal bead necklace
and left lying on your windowsill, waiting
for you to swirl colour and for the slash
of your brush to pump blood through its veins?

Did you smell the fragrance
of the ink I smeared over pregnant
pages and taste the letters, waiting
for you to rearrange them into words
that chant themselves into a spell and for
the sandstorm you will raise on blank paper?

Did you sense the art I smuggled into your dreams, waiting
for your touch to breathe warmth into its faraway glitterglitter?

I Want

I want to pluck poetry from the humid air,
from the invisible radiowaves around me
and translate it into the language of
black ink on white paper.
I want to distill the essence of dreams
and recrystallise it into poetry
so sweet it melts in my mouth.
I want to bait my line with emotions
and swing it out hoping to get a bite
and reel in poetry from the still green ponds.
I want to retrieve poetry from the soft fluff
curled up inside children's pillows,
drenched in their magic stories,
hallowed by their smiles.
I want to worship the Sun-god
in an elaborate naked pagan ceremony
and channel his warmth into soft sunlit poetry.
I want to receive messages from vast alien intellects
and take them down on a battered rusty typewriter
so I can distribute photocopies to the masses
for them to marvel at, and call poetry.

The Shippy Tag

okay so something must be reallyreally wrong with me for doing a tag, but something'swrong i guess and i'm doing this tag anyway. nothankyouverymuch shippy.

Life Ten Years Ago :
life when i was seven? bloodyhell i don't even remember a single thing about being seven. except the fact that i was in class 1. and i refused to speak bengali, because i'd moved to calcutta (ohyes what a sweet name it had then) from hyderabad when i was four, and i had this sillylittlebabyidea that if i changed as little as possible, then everything would go back to the way it was. because the entire structure of my life changed. no, really. at four, i might have adapted easier to life on a spaceship. anyway so i hated bengali, and was antisocial and unfriendly and a general painintheass. oh, and i read my first adventure series book then. ohyesyes i loved my fantasy world, life was so much more fun inside my head than outside it! and they were building extensions to the buildings in my colony, and there was this huge sandheap hidden away in a corner, and ohsomany sweetafternoons spent scrabbling around looking for tinyshells (yes the sand came all the way from the sea, who would have thought it?) and the first lie i remember telling, something about homework to my teacher. and that set the example for all future lies, since i got caught at once. and punished, oh the shame! (this was WAY before it became the cool thing to do, yousee). also the hatingness of sports and dolls and roses.

Life Five Years Ago:
when i was twelve? hmph. waiting for thirteen, i guess. the best thing then was my cycle. my ohsobeautiful brown tall ladybird bicycle, with the hugeshiny wheels and the handy basket and the elegant crossbar. and the "daredevils club", with rishi and rahul. the 'stunts' - the standingon backbar, ridingwithouthandlebars, doubleteaming, speedracing (whichisuckedat, notsurprisingly) and the pretendingtobe che guevara (in a very motorcycle sense, i assure you). and the rides out of the colony flouting my parents' regulations, somanytimes (ha, take that, dear guardians!) and then someone stole my bike. ohtheagony. the special people: rahul. he taught me so much about life. about growingup. about beingmyself. and namita arrived, then. i was supposed to 'get friendly with her and set her up' for rahul. i lost a friend, made a friend, and changed the course of my life for good or bad. and rishi, myfirstcrush and next year myfirstboyfriend. what else was new about twelve? ah yes, my social flowering. or maybe i should say flourishing. i suddenly found myself popular. heady feeling, that.

Life Tomorrow:
i'm supposed to wake up early. and go to the beach with my family. bloodyhell. i don't even want to swim. i don't even want to wear a swimsuit. i suppose i'll take my calculus book to the beach (yes i know i should really getalife). and then come back and do the tonsandtons of homework for monday. i haven't even started the scrapbook i'm supposed to present on monday. ohshit whatelse did i forget?!

Five Locations I Would Like to Run Away To:
anywhere but school, actually. reallyreally?
1) sikkimsikkimsikkim. i love sikkim. the mountains the streams the rocks the sky the houses the people the language the prayerflags the momos. i'd run away there and never come back.
2) scandinavia. go stand on top of a craggy dark cliff and strum a guitar and do blackmetalshrieks at the fullmoon. and scareoff all the wolves, yes. poor things.
3) seeing as i'm in hongkong, i'd like to run away to calcutta. doesn't help that it doesn'texistanymore technically because it's kolkata. but seriously, i want my life back! (i really do a bad job of adapting don't i?) and i want my friends back. and my language back (don'tsmirkokay?). and my billboards and rubbishbins and dirtystreets back.
4) sudan. no, really. hopefully i'll get a bullet through my brain before i have the chance to moan about the desert heat or the lack of food. and i can die unnoticed, since thousands of people aredyingthere anyway.
5) the hongkong central library. the only place on this list that's realistic. hence, the only place that keeps me sane. literally and literaturely.

Five Bad Habits I Have:
1) laziness
2) procrastination
3) whiningness
4) absentmindedness
5) thickheaded-lackoftactness
and manyothers actually, but i refuse to elaborate on any of them. blogger's privilege.

Five Things I Will Never Wear:
1) pink
2) floweryshitstuff
3) pink
4) noserings. or fingerrings for that matter.
5) oh, and did i mention pink?

Five Biggest Joys at This Moment:
i don't really want to count my joys; i don't want to be reminded of how embarrassinglyfew there are. so my single biggest joy is that i'm writing this stupidtag and not some presentation on the impact of rent controls in new york. no really. that is my other option. and i'm smiling for the This Will Destroy You EP i'm listening to right now - seriously, go do yourself a favour and get hold of it. or ask me for it. reallyreally. and i'm happy about the fact that i played bass today. and the camp permission form lying on my desk, and the randomcampstuff vomited on my bed. and the new guitarpick I got today, it's this cool white skullshaped thing. maybe i should start a pick collection.
notice how three of my five joys have to do with music?

Something to Achieve By Next Year:
university. or atleast some idea of whatiwanttodo.
some reasonable level of guitarskills. i mean, whatthefuck? i'm in a band and i can barely play. so much for great musicians.
i want to really know calculus. reallyreally.
socialskills? maybe. maaaaaybe.

Something that Impacted Me Last Year:
this one's easy.
Abir.
you changed everything. every single thing. my darlingstupid fuzzball. you made me more... me. and even if things change between us, it won't ever be how it was before. because now i have a silent voice in my notsosilent head.

What I Will Miss About 2007 :
erm, physics class? yes i do miss that, i kinda wish i hadn't rushed through every physics course the school had to offer already, bleh.
shonelle. why'd you go off to australia and leave me in the lurch, you numbskull? justlikethat.
my singing. my voice has gone off to australia and left me too. byebye.

Five Things I Want To Do Before I Die:
1) wackenwackenwacken. i will, yesyesyes. i will.
2) sex. i don't want to die a virgin, nono.
3) bungee jump. i want to fly, desperately. that way even if i accidentally die before my carefullyplanned jump-off-a-cliff, i'll still get to fly. sort of.
4) slap abir so hard i leave brightred marks on your cheek. and slap the other one too, just for good measure. and maybe soakyourballsinice as well. no maybenot. that would be worse than pointless.
5) drive a lamborghini gallardo. reallyreallyfast. till i reach escape velocity...

oh, and also kill shippy for tagging me with this. that randomrant better have made you happynow, anyway. or else.
and since he's the only person that probably cares to do one, i tag my uneksia to do this sillytag.

A Haiku for Modern Times

Death. Despair.
...................Darwin?

Survival of the fittest!

Good luck to you all.

50-Word Story

Those Eyes

.

.

That girl in the asylum used to have such pretty eyes. Once they were a warm brown, adorned with liquid kohl and the loveliest smoky eyelashes, flashing fire and joy. Men would have killed for those eyes.

.

Now she has the dead gaze you know, ever since she was raped.

...and this is where we must part ways, in the escherian impossibilities of my littlegirly dreams. because you cannot survive in these tangled webs of emotion and impulse, always tinged with infinite sadnesses, boundless joys and purest hopes, always swinging between moods faster than you can blink. here the little red figures shall flash their smiles and weave their way across my fields, and flawed heroes shall brandish their gleaming elven-swords and plunge blindly into disasters lurking in these surreal landscapes. you see, my darling, this is no place for you. here, where the fireflies wink in the moonshine, lies my domain. the purple-gold paint splashes do not welcome strangers, even familiar ones. here I alone am the dark queen and the noble hero and the bumbling sidekick, all within myself, and I do not leave even a minor character for your presence. yet… you are not outside my dreams, not in the least. you remain the silent spectator, the voice in my head. and always there is the awareness in the back of my mind, of you, the secret pleasure I will awake to in the sunlight slanting through the shutters...

The Bubble

The slender, eager hand caressed the rainbow-coloured bubble, slowly forming itself out of shades too bewildering to comprehend.
“It is time,” suddenly rasped the shadow behind her. “Time to cast the final spell, time to let go.”
The bubble stretched and shimmered slowly on her outstretched palm, drawing her into its swirling mazes of light, away from the darkness and secrecy of the ruins around her.
“You know what you hold so tenderly, don’t you?” the black figure mocked. “A surface so thin you can’t even begin to imagine, and beneath it… nothing. Just a handful of air is all you have.”
She shuddered, and the bubble trembled in response. Swiftly she turned back to the flames, and began to chant a song over it, a strange haunting cry with no words, only a piercing voice that invested in the bubble all the pent-up emotion, all the words there will be never be time for, all the promises that will never be made to be broken. The other one watched over her shoulder expressionlessly, silently.
The diagrams on the floor, the frescoes on the walls, even the ancient moss-clad stones themselves spoke of a ritual the ruin had long lain dreaming of, and now that the moment had finally arrived, wanted to hold on to and prolong with all the anxiety of a miscalculation.
The cry rose to a sharp keening wail, and in the smoke above the fire there arose mysterious images, like the flickers of dreams half-seen in the waking hours of the dawn. The hooded figure leaned forward now, watching eagerly. The visions twisted, solidified and finally took form. The bubble seemed to be imbued with all the sacredness of the last survivor of a long-forgotten race.
“There, ‘tis almost done… now let go.”
She crossed the glowing ashes and carried the silvery, quivering bubble to a wall, and a word from the shadow threw the entire wall open, and the night sky, in all its star-strewn magnificence, rushed in to engulf them. She held her arms aloft to the sky, and gasped at a sudden sensation of gigantic wings, brushing past her and disappearing. When she opened her eyes again, the bubble had vanished.
An anguished, terrifying howl rent the night breeze, but not from her throat.
She turned amazed, as the cloaked one sank to the ground.


“And in his leaving, shall he come back to me…” emerges a whisper of content.

My Rain

I cut away your raincoat and exposed you.
So I give to you my umbrella and my shivers.

Now I can walk away from your outstretched hand.