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.