Where the Road Ends

There where the road ends you’ll find the stray notes that were let go of from your favourite song – notes that could have been, sure would have been part of your song but were let go of and it is impossible to say if the song became your song because these stray notes were let go of or if the song would have been the same song that is yours, with these stray notes in it ah well that isn’t something that need any thought at the moment neither now nor later even after seventy-three years of growing a beard inside little pots on the terrace garden of Sweden where live the last man and woman to ever live on this planet or t could just be this village where everyone wears red slippers and try to blame others for everything or anything that goes wrong in their lives – to blame others for something that causes even the slightest inconvenience to them despite all apologies they like to spew venom and so despicable they are you almost always end up wondering why and how in the whole world did you end up meeting them at all even after drinking seventeen glasses of sweetened soda your mouth feels bitter at a very thought about them and when you cannot stand even the thought of them you choose to fall asleep and dream a world where they do not exist and behind the curtains of sleep everything is peaceful – without them, without them

Libraries

Libraries full of volumes bound in leather and weather of the days of spring that are here now spinning wheels on the sharp ends of pins and nibs of countries in the other side of the sun whose wings are tired of flapping like leaves on a branch that aren’t reachable for the goats that graze clearing trails of grass left behind by chewing cows of yesterday’s in the mirror image of a ceiling star-sprinkled with little sugar bits scattered on top of a donut dipped in chocolate cream and sauce running away from the police of the locality and the sheriff of the city who plays the guitar in her free time after all the horses have been ridden after all the culprits have been pushed behind the bars after all the crimes have been stopped after every available justice is established in the near-vicinity of here and near despite thunder and lightning and serial lights made from boiled rice flavoured with Mexican chillies and fried onions after the air-coolers have been turned off when the wind is cold reminding one and all and the giraffes of a lonely island of the Saturday evening that begins and ends with happiness almost all the time but for no other time without exceptions and to confuse someone by using multiple negatives not particularly mathematically to disprove the proof of the non-existence of an invalid proof of rejection or in other words non-acceptance of a casual remark not offering an irrelevant solution to a non-existent problem, not

Blankets: Chosen or Stolen

Evening on the back of a receipt a carefree young man, on his skateboard January forgot, remember: December dreams are as much mine to believe in the absence of it in any tranquil moment. I walk up to my window and open it silently. I wish my birthday was just another day and then there are these evenings that see you with a glow on your face. I don’t care, they’re all so lame – who learnt about the things and sensations they would have, painting goodbyes looking at sunflowers because your legs are long when endlessness is the end and close both, and a moment is a wink is a blink and it is proven that we won’t get it, but asking for it never hurts: about her and her new friends and all or till horizons stand and hope they would understand that would question to understand a day here and you reinvented you some time at every side only to go missing from the jars of pickles inside refrigerators of pale pink walls and bright blue doors hiding freezing time and memory and old-age is here already where the world has moved past the due date of syringes and injection vials marking the beginning of electric fans on wooden tables with many coats of varnish and green paint of grass and leaves with parallel or reticulate venation origins in their roots fibrous or tap, tap, tap-dance tapping into the hidden potential difference and deference to idols and statues on huge tall pedestals washing their hands at basins in city centers at the junctions of four roads or more

Sleep well. Dream.

Sleep well, dream under fluorescent lights. Scream. Cry. Write. Write. Write. Where was I? Oh, right, screaming. This past year, I've developed a very particular way of dealing with this uncontrollable urge. It's not so much of a plan as an understanding. A burning need, of sorts. I wait for it to pass by the time I turn to the television. Gossip Girl comes to visit at 8: 00 PM, but I love so much that I've now begun to watch her doing it all over again. I'm always quick to see when she is about to do everything she did in the last week once again. Tonight, is the one - year anniversary of her passing. How can that be? Wasn't it just last week? I guess not. Where does the time go? I feel like I should take a picture of her so I can keep track of how long it's been. I'm going to add that to my mental list of things to do. There's a list for everything, isn't there? I'll be 42 in a couple of days. When did that happen? It seems like I just turned 30. I wonder what I'll do for my birthday? I guess I'll do what I do any other day of the year - go shopping. Only, this time I'll do it in a shirt that actually fits! My birthdays are a little bittersweet. No matter what happens, I have to remember the first day I joined the world. Like yesterday, it'll always be a reminder of that day. I'm also reminded of the wonderful people I've met since April 23rd. I'm one lucky person! My alarm went off at 6 AM. I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't. I finally got out of bed at 6: 45 AM. In my defense, I've been running on like four hours of sleep for the past two weeks, and I feel like all the energy is leaving me right now. Also, I thought I had a gym membership at my apartment building, and it turns out that I didn't, so my last pair of running shoes is still sitting in the corner of my apartment. I found them in my closet a couple days ago, and it's a miracle they survived as long as they did, because apparently, I'm not the only one who's gone rogue on this corner of the apartment. Oh well.

The slides and the swings

Sliding down oscillating down the slide doing the dance of a shadow feather of one Bach and Seagull blue feather is only an illusion something I do not want to think about now, now who was that deaf musician and then there was a blind poet – oh yeah, there had been a blind scientist elephant too that had a trunk full of oxygen and a tree tomato papaya fruit full of seeds thrown into the wind scattered all around the ground in the backyard eating little coconuts drinking sweet water coconut two Oxygens and one Hydrogen after every congratulation that has been in the order of all the magistrates and landlords who aren’t greedy like unicorns or the mermaids who swim delicious in cool streams of consciousness like the joyous prose of Ireland in the yard of Scotland playing detectives hide and seek with chocolate chips and lemon juice salt and sweet before the births of dreams and demons in the middle of a street of grand justice and entrances made with every possible pomp and show ivory ornaments and walking sticks studded teeth of Siberian tigers cold like the Russian ice of Dostoevsky but not the Leo of tortoise that carries on its back the shell the world carbon fossil fuel and so much black and white before the gray shadows laugh out loud who owns a notebook with twenty-three empty sheets and the other forty-seven sheets filled with two hundred and seventy-three poems about love and lust and breasts and panting nights of hard work on soft beds of longing and passionate fruits hanging low in yet another olive branch of forgetfulness

Red or green or yellow or blue

Red or green or yellow or blue, illusions all in all, mean nothing today when the senses have gone on a holiday to worlds far away beyond the world of the spiders, beyond the world of the fireflies, beyond the world of the honeybees, beyond, beyond, beyond almost all the other worlds and this world too sitting at little desks one foot tall perhaps half a foot more having had two mugs of tea that was plain hot water tea leaves and spices hot on the tongue with two ginger biscuits butter cookies quickies quick fixes in the balcony or the veranda on the bypass road high-jacking vehicles with six wheels or more overhead bridges flyovers ha what a joke it is to talk about steam engines, electric trains and metro lines on Valentine’s day in shades of pink, red, green and blue, not to forget the yellow too – like lemon and violets and broccoli and plums – cherry red peaches in the colour of – of course, peach beseech justice and a voice of one’s one who’s afraid of the wolf from the story of little red riding hood state of Virginia wolves with extra feminist ‘O’s O, oh, oh, oh – ho, ho, ho of the Claus de Santa ze French grandpa who brings gifts on the day of Noel and not the Feliz ha, ha, ha only the totalitarian tomatoes are Spanish – Española oh forgive me our father Borges who lives in heaven perhaps a huge, large, monster of a library somewhere up above beyond the reach of the creepers of chillies and the beanstalks with secret whispers and the murmurs

At my door

At my door after the very soon of a little while ago comes running along the creepers and climbers that speak good things about the coracles floating on lake surfaces carrying a backpack full of books and a fountainpen that leaks at the neck of oxygen cylinders growing near trees hanging fruit apples and cherries that are not orange with erasers and double-black pencils sharpened like a needle feeding on minutes and hours of the age of youth or of innocence little lumps of incense burning smoke running like snakes shaking the rattles at their tails wagging tails and barking dogs eating little square biscuits sweetened with brown-sugar crystals and butter and a few spices too pound and powdered added to the dough even though it’s not the Friday of a ripe July yet just because it is the seventh month waving its indigo flag in the northern wind smelling like vanilla pods in a pale shade of green checked towels squares of red and pink alternating like Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays knocking on the doors of the houses of butchers with no ventilation or windows and balloons filled with breath of diamond dioxide spinning wheels and windmills of the gods of a new empire or a system of belief in laboratories of chemistry or physical science showing no signs of weakness or dissatisfaction for sliding glass doors that move in thin metal railings destiny fate at the rate of movement of the gates flying men with superpowers on this side of the battlefield eating fried chicken and roasted earrings crunchy munchy punched in the nose along the bridge that connects the tip of a nose with the edge of the upper lip with or without a moustache toothbrush of fairly thick yet soft hair

Thinking

Thinking about thinking is an exercise in absolute stupidity beyond compare or so they think when they do not want to think about thinking or things otherwise or about those who think – about thinking or things otherwise – like bunches of grapes and table fans in the middle of a line of juicers arranges on a table like a procession of electric soldiers who whirr when the right buttons are pushed or when the dials are turned and when one turns the dials beyond what is necessary or what the authorities prescribe then they end up getting a connection to someone or to someone else making a weird bond of misunderstanding, yet full of possibilities and they say the numbers or wrong or the digits are wrong but they never question or blame the digits fingers that dialed the numbers beyond what was necessary or what was prescribed and many a love story and many a story of hatred blood and murder have come out of such situations and that is only an exaggeration as you would have rightly guessed, something that would happen in a weird postmodern story about postmortems in vineyards and the billing counters of places that sell burgers or in the cells of closed windows and grill-gates that do not roast chicken or lamb but only snails and the pace at which news travels from one mouth to an ear climbing on top of mountains huffing and puffing falling down the mountain slopes valleys and rock-bottoms of  shades of copper for a day of the apple and the juices associated with things such, the nectar of nothingness that is the need of the hour apart from absolutely unnecessary alliterations that an-a-word and another-a-word and a-so-on

The Seven Chambered Room

Me-stakes done well or medium-rare for the classy red-wine glassy not for the glass-eyed. Lamb stew: The stuff your grandmother liked to make. Be sure to start with something underdone to give it a little more time. Cooking lamb in fat keeps it tender and the meat falling off the bone. Salt the meat and let it rest a little while. This time you may want to cook it further to retain the flavor. Lamb is a bland meat, so brown it generously on all sides. A hole-in-one: Pimento cheese. Made the old-fashioned way: grated cheddar, yellow mustard, pimento, and Tabasco. The job took him two hours, but that’s because he couldn’t help but start playing harmonica along with the song. D said he plans to try to stop before he notices his neighbors are gone, but he may have to work on his presentation skills to do so. “I don’t know how to play the harmonica so I’m just going to wing it and see how I do,” he said. The city said all their investigators are required to be proficient with the instruments and have at least one year of experience performing regularly. "If we have to have a financial officer that's not proficient, we're going to tell them that that's a necessity, we need to know that they can do it in the event they have to do it," H said. That said, the investigation could take up to a month to complete. The allegations, which you can read in the police report, have already been forwarded to the county prosecutor's office. The incident was reported to police on the fifteenth of the last month. Police are currently investigating. The mother of the teen who made the report told the paper and blade runner that she had talked with the victim and that her son and the alleged attacker had agreed to settle their differences privately. A 17-year-old midtown teen is being sought by police after he allegedly pushed a 13-year-old to the ground at a mall and then made facial slurs at him. The incident occurred Monday evening at the most popular mall in the newest town.

Apple Pie

Imaginary apple pie is very argumentative and hence irrational with measured portions of sugar and oil and flour and flowers and garlands and sheets of paper in reams beaming happiness riding motorbikes of the day after tomorrow on silver-screen madness lofty claims tall glasses unable to see very far farther into the future father of the nation of tomorrow’s visions and missions in missionary and to chew the cud like a moocow of the little Joys of James and his madness sending ships and criminals on long voyages bn voyage sirens police patrol ambulance and cop-cars mop-tops rock-stars hey dude don’t shake it bad you mad boy bra-berries grow on trees in fields forever and ever clover man with spades, hi, how, how you do a bow is all you need to breed and make bread and jam and lamb for a better tomorrow to learn from our me-stakes done well or medium rare for the classy red-wine glassy not for the glass-eyed Denise with a heart of glass and teeth of floss and the inheritance of a clause Mr. Santa in an Indian novel is a secret affair just before Christmas inside chimneys that fall down into the houses of little children and even for the sake of an argument there aren’t children who aren’t otherwise and the case, along with the chapter and your zipper-fly closes there quite unlike your mouth busy spouting instructions chewing the gum or the cud you moocow that comes walking down the street jingling jangling bells of the morning following you playing either a plain tambourine or a green one with lemon pips or people who carry lemon pips calling themselves pippers playing green jamborees

Belling the Cat

Being a cat is probably the next easiest thing but belling the cat I’ve heard them say, is the toughest thing to do even for a toy cat or a boy cat but a coy cat, again, I’ve heard them say, is a technical impossibility to let the river of honey mix with the river of ink and charcoal to make dark non-chocolate sweets and that is only a bad understanding of concepts that are meant to be understood conceptually like the idea of a pin-hole camera that makes pictures of the world through holes made only with pins and sharp tips of pens or compass needles showing directions establishing the dichotomy of the idea or the philosophy of which way to go the north or the south or the wrong or the right or the left or the east or the best provide good and bad making memories of monocle molecules with story shades of squares and comic books exaggerating movement and expression in mugs of black coffee hot, hot, hot drunk in one go a pistol shot in a mug a mug-shot expresso oh my bod of the beach of the sunny sands with flat tummies and six packs of beer searching for honey looking at the peaches and heads that talk walking on the beaches hoping to catch cats or to cat catches with gloves and frisbee in the afternoon sunshine after starry nights of outstanding clarity in million megapixels and spots of light pinheads and pinwheels so many pins on this cushion here in this story where there is nothing else to push-on the fall

The Rainbow Road

The tiniest of the tiny living things could be seen walking on the rainbow road carrying thermos flasks in hand regulating temperature of the sun and hence the day with the flick of their fingers or their wrists making their wrist watches fall slipping time everyone is delayed in getting to where they should get to at least by seven seconds trimming their beards in the nick of time missing trains by the breadth of a hair breathing so not dyeing and dying but for dyers and makers of lead missiles that cast shadows on the ground it is a good sunny day with warm sunshine at arm’s length farewell to little baby shoes never used being the shortest story to move all the sharks the horny scrawny men played with perhaps incorrectly attributed to the smokers of cigar drinkers of whiskey growers of beards wearers of sweaters makers of friends in pubs and so on they walk searching for the perfect word drunk on textual pleasure willing to get to any corner of the world to experience the kinkiest textual fantasy to evolve and reach the state of an organism with utmost enlightenment like the Buddha who walked barefoot till he reached the tree of the Bodhi to get much-o light without paying anything for the electricity for free, for free, for free and it is not something that is promised to everyone, heave brown wooden crosses included and torn robes to wear when you fall carrying the responsibilities of the world on your broad shoulders sixty-seven inches broad

Then to fall asleep again

Then to fall asleep again with weird dreams have been keeping me up most nights, but I still really can't get my head around it all and so it's left me feeling exhausted and inattentive to the day for the thought of being so busy is still playing on the periphery of my thoughts and at this point in the month I need it to start sooner rather than later, later than last night, whilst she was in bed, I got out the paint, brushes, samples and our new template and I may not have had a clear idea of how I wanted it to look, but I wanted to do something creative with the first little one's photos I just grabbed my supplies and ran and I used my two inch square acrylic block stamps to stamp the word baby on the squares of white chenille to make a baby blanket, start with a fourteen inch square piece of chenille and cut three rectangles from each square (I did 4 of each, so I have enough for the blanket for this babe and a couple more if I make one for the future) and then using the little bug embossing folder, place the colored corner pieces in the square and finally, cut the border pieces and assemble while all my writing was done on cardstock paper and I do have a scrap piece of cardstock paper that was inexpensive and had some of my note writing on it, so I was able to use that to write the messages on the back and then cut those out before cutting out the stamps I laid out the pieces so that I could see how the stamp placement was going to work out I wrote the sentiment on both pieces of the cardstock and then let him take over with the inking

Burns like fire

Burns like fire, kills like ice and moves like a daydream flies like a nightmare kills like a question fights like a newsreel speaks like a paragraph forgets like a mug of lukewarm coffee leaves like a palm tree scurries like a bunny funny like an airplane rushes like a rocket gushes like an airstream spins like sprint falls like autumn dries like summer wet like a rainy day hard like a tables sharp like a rhinestone poor like a diamond clean like a towel thin like a Hattori Honzo blade cold like a window questions like a mountain valley tiles like a pile of debris tall like a tennis ball round like a Rubik’s cube square like a half-eaten plate of boiled rice and vegetables green like a beetroot root like a cabbage aged like a fresh can of beer bear like a ring wrung like a ball of yarn yawn like a hippo oulipo to measure the words you write stopping something breaking a pattern unexpectedly hiding behind the gray of a sweatshirt with a hoodie that covers almost all of the face change when a ray of light is reflected on a floor of glass slippery like grass class like Whitman hitmen like carpenters dentists like molars premolars like to chew and to blue like an old cloud proud like an eagle fly like a kite or a vulture cultured like a large nuclear family of bacteria and fungi on petri dish glass plates in microbiology labs with cold rooms Eskimo igloos that smell like penicillin and penguins that have been searching for seahorses all their lives for something or something else

Twenty-four of them, once again

Twenty-four of them, once again after the twenty-three of them left after building the cities destroying a few cloud castles building towers and countries of question marks that merely are bent exclamations, oh, wow, ah and the like with many double you words that begin with you and you and mean to ask something, really, like apple seeds in grapefruit jam that nobody likes spreading marmalade and butter on hot toasts that smell like coffee and Sundays sin-days Saturday nights drunken debauchery waking u[ in unexpected beds behind screen curtains walking in shame walk of shame unable to open eyes wide the world is too bright and judging, judging by the looks that cats believe they get on their ways home however the world is just being the world the way it has always been judging or otherwise telling stories eating sugar refusing to admit having done some things that they may or may not have done on tables of roulette on swings and clubs, casinos and on the backs of hippopotamus that yawn to swallow the whole world you and you and I included not worrying about who, who indeed would feed them grass after the end of  Thursday after the sin-day Sunday like today or was it yesterday when you were born again – you and you like them who call themselves you and you in second person, twice in second person and three times in the person of three and the first person is just imaginary and the power of the first person to the first person, they say, is real in some way (or the other)

The Happy Shadow

The happy shadow and the end of the universe seen from the other side of the world upside down with telescopes and binoculars broken lenses of infinite convexity curvature that curves around all of everything encapsulating light, shadows, images and everything showing everything the upside down of the upside down because the curvature is so curvy and the mountain paths that spring around the mountain tracing circles like the skin of a tangerine peeled carefully without breaking it or the sourness of it sore fingers and sweet spicy fingertips nails sharpened enamel for hammers to hit on to fit into a world of amazing clarity of things the way they are and of things to come scanning time with rays of unknown origin or identity the X factor of the generation X that loves to sport a moustache and beard on their eyebrows hiding their eyes prohibited vision seeing what is wanted of them to be seen, to be seen as someone else who doesn’t really care about what they see or how they are seen when they talk all the time about their friends who moved away went away passed away on wet mornings of gentle drizzle of water so thick like droplets of honey inside a forest full of trees and sweetest song tunes and words murmuring the breeze and the bees with one’s eyes closed easily mistaken for a seaside all the roar like that of a lion of waves drawing parabolas with the movements of their heads quadratic equations with unknowns in the degree of two or is it the misunderstood order of the polynomial, misunderstood all over again?

Knock, knock

Knock, knock – who’s there – you – you who – how does it matter to you – woo hoo – what do you care – dark cat – how does it matter to you – ha you wish and so on go conversations about knocking on doors late in the night where the clouds are drinking hot chocolate cocoa in one eared mugs of jealousy and ill-will marking the beginning of a brand-new war bending the rules and light diffracting little rivulets of smoke mainly miniature mushroom worlds growing muddy under the speeding footsteps hurrying going off somewhere to never return to the bones of Napier to count and to calculate the distance between Saturn and Titan wondering wonderful tasty peanuts roasted fried shaken with salt not stirred or is it the other way around making zero-zero-seven or just seven bonds with new friends who love adventure and curvy women always ready to go to the beach with them in fancy cars to drink margaritas with the master and to look at the master and the margarita back and forth and forward and in reverse is only a gear that Bulgakov didn’t care about neither in Russian nor in translation in English or Korean capability of capacity building is what the countries are worrying about having built all their dams and forests and private heavens and hells, havens for jelly and teddy bears bored bitter with ninety-seven percent dark chocolate excellently spread sheets excelling in oversized underwear double excel opening a new book to work on or a new sheet to place all the soft feather pillows for K-girl to rest her head on, for she has had a long day of lifting weights and her breasts and boom-boom buttocks – dear diary, far away vision so pleasant so cool so sweaty so grass a crass course to learn things quickly within seventeen days before the passing of yet another summer filled with wild boars and boats with oars that have taken an oath never to lie or to never be the other thing that no other thing really wants to be – really, really

Lions

The lions they don’t burn no more – yes, not anymore and there isn’t much sand in the desert and vipers have wiped away every trace of footstep and biblical allusions related to the pricks and needles of cactus plants prickly heat powder shower cascades separating countries cooler from the countries hot pretending to sail on seas of sweetened soda carbon dioxide pop-pop-pop of the corn outside cinema halls unraveling the climaxes on social and climatic change leading to revolutions and rotations around suns and lovers of DHL who could have or should have won the Nobel prize for peace or literature or at least a piece of it from ground-breaking path-breaking poetry and I won it the year before for adultery and measuring cups conical graphic interface facing the sunrise perhaps yeast helping fermentation of batter and rising bread inside ovens spreading the sweet scent of baking bread breaking fast braking front wheels making the riders fall broken forks and spoons at the garden of spooning paths or sporks inside paper bags stars and galaxies that fight among themselves the smallest possible circle or a line of zero length something that began and ended right there a zero radius circle single points of contact obligations rules clauses to abide by factual representation of imaginary data is the most dangerously thrilling adventure of small-scale advertisements fifteen centimeters and six inches making a leg-end, legendary foot walking feet with a single footstep that start the journey of a million miles from China walking along the longest greatest wall or was it someone Japanese Zen master and Zen there were none, men little Indians Mrs. Christie!

Tides

Tides do change their sides on this side of the sea that refuses to be the sea or a part of it the tide tiding like every other tide has always tided before inside deep hats of magicians inside which live rabbits and pigeons as their friends do inside shirt-sleeves long sleeves coats and hangers Gogol’s overcoat over a striped shirt holding inside it shadows and sweat and a beating heart and warmth of a cozy pack of cards inside courtrooms with wig-wearing magistrates looking at the world with tight faces and everyone who sees faces such mistakenly begins to believe that the person with that tight face knows many secrets that they don’t and they hide from them away from their prying eyes birthday parties celebrations cakes candles bags of chips balloons paper platers streamers confetti crocodiles swimming in fresh-water rivers and pool-tables pools forest fire reflecting forest fire on the clouds of the evening sky with edges aflame telling stories of forgotten heroes scars on face electric nobody drinking coffee conducting an orchestra notes played with  surgical precision scalpels sharp pins and mirrors for teeth soft bristles brushes toothpaste with clove and pink stripes at times green plugged in trees after the blueness of the thunder that blasts the foundation of a history made seventy-three years ago before the seventieth year was born on the streets of cosmopolitan cities with dust-jackets to protect them from the pollution of the mind and their fresh-water bodies in which swim goldfish and the whole world feels like an aquarium when filled with suitable awestruck audience with wide eyes and wider grins

Cats

Cats, kingly cats and cats queenly like bees, then there are soldier cats wielding bats shooting arrows at concentric circle marks forty-seven feet away from where they stand held on tripods and lenses of camera wink at the sun and if they are convex, converging rays of light like the focusing of all good ideas in one dream that comes and goes like a bad imitation of a good deed hanging loose from the belt of a fighter immortalized as a constellation in the new moon night sky drinking the beauty of the moon that isn’t with a long straw from bottles going full throttle on bikes with four wheels on mud tracks leaving tracks and broken hearts in stereo systems that play jazz music in lazy pubs of innocence of the mornings of spring summer wound tight till the alarms go off quaking ducks follow hens and roosters after the laying of eggs in their nests beneath bamboo baskets kept upside down flying rockets to the end of the world turning off switches of stoves inside kitchens of restaurants – tables and chairs plywood fly-wood would wood fly cry bye good bye it’s a lie why oh why in the narration of a story so poetic that everyone mistakes it for a song fearing the attack of furry foxes pandas and polar bears almost furry like furious negotiations across the river floating fishing nets and rods of plastic fiber changing gears to get to the moon before the marching soldiers get there walking slow and steady, almost always ready

In & out

In and out, in and out, in and out of the world in and out of you and me, in and out of everything in the middle of in and out of everything that is red in colour when it is mistaken for blood or the shadow of it on pillows filled with breath and cotton or the foam of the seas with histories of a billion trillion years ever since the world began with water that has hiding in it salt from a million years ago inside a shaker with many holes on top – shake, shake, shake – dance like a dream spicing up sandwiches and curries in bowls making them salty faulty quality of revolver bullets magnum point six eight close range bang-bang and a thud but stories like that end with someone walking up so bored so boring with droplets of sweat on foreheads caps hiding balding heads a string of pearl around the neck slow tightening noose loosened up to avoid choking or death of a salesman when Miller is asleep with empty bottles of beer rolling on the floor the cot is drunk and the bed is unstable and the legs all four of them are shaky and the night creaks whenever someone falls or whenever someone falls asleep moving in their sleep moving in their dreams going from here to there, coming from there to here blinking lights of the rainy night sky starry like Vincent’s with thick brush-strokes that go in circles making wild impressions on a tender young mind busy climbing up trees longing to go back to being monkeys and oh that isn’t even the beginning of the story and things have already begun to end and there is no one who would listen to such complaints of hot cups of tea in and out, in and out, in and out

Lotion

Tough holds, lotion to the rescue grease lubricating moving parts gears and steel arms nuts and bolts pulleys moving, moving, moving, going somewhere coming, coming all the time back from the future tomorrow or the day after keeping in mind all of every moment that was yesterday left-handed listicles and guitars strings strung upside down with beads in a row and then the feathers of tie-and-dye dreams on walls mushrooms and kaleidoscope patterns broken bits of glass and diamonds bits of lightning and paper mirrors glasses equilateral triangle sixty degrees one too many times a day tired fists and wrists rolls of paper smell of the white of egg in the wet, wet, wet sea or the pregnant clouds and then the faint smell of dead fish in the desert thick hard dry crust of cake like rust ferrous oxide washed with kerosene or some say butter helps too when you are walking away from the seventy-third word of the last poem read in reverse and how they wish that it were a palindrome but it ends with an announcement that it is an anagram in kilogram and metric tons going skating on roller wheels and blades held clutched in place by the clip of the safety razor smelling fresh aftershave of the deep blue sea pepper and herbs of the forest where it rains lightbulbs and oil pastel stubs of radiant radium numerals on the face of a clock glowing in the night like the eyes of a cat in surrounding darkness inside a deflated football that struggles to breathe in between goal-posts with slippery outer skin leather slimy wet in falling rain of this summer that could have been spring had they cared to look carefully but then, but then

Of you and I

Of you and I - oh well, that reeks of us that song and all those words we refused to sing – do you remember that evening when we walked on road dividers wondering which way to go which way to lean on and which way to fall after a long bus-ride of stolen kisses and giggles and all those reasons invented like the harmonica or a walk around the park or a coffee oh the coffee that began and ended it all don’t you remember the walls and bridges and how wonderful the world was – jealousy and insecurity and alcohol and poems and parody poems of frogs and leaves of lotus the waxy surface and the droplets of water or wait was it a lily-pad that the frog jumped on imagining blue skies on blackboards of classrooms talking about heartbreaks stolen souls cages of iron houses of songbirds wanting to sing alone – lonely tunes of purple and pink fairies – yet afraid of the words with which they should sing their songs to the world bespectacled jeeps and luxury cars silver earrings and missed phone calls hanging on a thin string over our heads the shape of tomorrow or a hole in the shape of the whole wide world universes spiraling cross-sections of galaxies cheese butter and jam spread sandwiches one sweet and one salty with ketchup round slices of tomato lettuce cucumber capsicum and golden cheese that melts in between lines of poems that we refused to write on paper but inscribed on barks of trees with little chisels along with our names that no one knows us by and with a sigh of relief we let the moon rise and shine when we were both alone and together at forty-two different ends of the world all at the same time thinking about and talking to each other

Every Move

Your every move is also their move when you sit to think about it carefully munching on cookies dipped in cold milk on the morning of a bad weather day gloomy skies and dark clouds when birds have all gone back to their houses hiding inside their nests: thin-pin chargers plugged in, charging and recharging every battery cell owe bank inside large mugs of energy drinks flying kites and high-energy photons god particles, particular reincarnation of god, particularly god who needs to be thought about after the peeking into of the affairs of the lightning of some other world or some other part of a world that is so far away from wherever the birds are looking at electric wires carefully observing electric current that flows through them across points of potential poetic difference from places of high poetic concentration and rhymes and alliterations to the other ends of low poetic capability where books are Clarke’s tables, railway timetables, lottery ticket books, instruction manuals, dry how-to books dry like a bone, dry like a telephone one-way speech, hello, hello, are you there, can you hear me – cross talk – one end of half a conversation about falling cats and the best efforts to save them when you are balancing yourself on the ledge holding the windowsill with the tips of her fingers with painted nails that had scratched the face of someone or someone else the night before making coffee in dreams of silk, satin, chocolate and flowers tied with shining ribbons bought on shops on the sides of highways – why would there be shops on the highway selling gift-wrap and ribbons – a question for Rapunzel to answer on some other day that is not today

A telephone that pretends to be a typewriter

A telephone that pretends to be a typewriter. But mostly he wanted a personal PC so that he could do word processing on it. How do I know he was serious about this? Because the minute he got his wish, he immediately turned it on, took his pen and paper into the hall, and began typing a letter. And this time the letter was being sent out to all the different computers of every level that the school had on staff. And so that went on for several weeks. Then one day the school secretary walked into his classroom and I'm sure that it was a mass of scribbles on the whiteboard. His teacher called me down and I walk down there and we take a look. It's not anything shocking but there is one day where she has written down "B is for Bob" for "Bob is for Billy". I have never seen that written on the whiteboard and neither has my son. So I look and all it says is Bob is for Bob. That one is easy enough to figure out and I start to move on to the next question but then I look at my son and say "Bob is for Bob" and then proceed to call the dog by his name. To me, he was always "Bob". Just recently, we got two new family members, a little girl cat named "Kitty" and a little boy dog named "Dog". He was so excited when we got them and immediately picked them up and loved on them, showing them all of his toys, laying on them and rubbing them against him. The first couple of days, he had "Bob" in the living room (now "Kitty" is in there) and "Dog" was in the bedroom and that was where we had them.

Pink and Pale Green

Cotton candy in pink and pale green smelling like roses or pineapples that could be seen wafting through the wind. I have a vivid memory of the little clowns swinging from the strings and twisting around and turning into more clowns, and then back to the first clowns until they were a whole unbroken string of clowns. The whole time I thought this one was different, but it wasn't. It was just more clowns. What a strange memory that is. Another memory that comes to mind is of going to my uncle's house and the carpet in the living room. You were supposed to eat all of your food, play with the ball my uncle would get you and hang out with him. I didn't see him for months. But when I did, he wasn't mad. We were going to have a party together. He wasn't mad anymore. He was happy that he was going to have a good time with me. We went to different middle schools. You moved into the forest and we lost touch. We reconnected at 18 and you came to visit me. I took you to the park near my house and we played catch. You were sitting on my couch and we started talking. It was incredible. You were like a ray of light in my life, and you opened my eyes to a whole new world. I was not alone, and I could tell you everything and not feel bad about it. I haven’t been the same since we met. I love you.

I wake up

I wake up to the music of sound laughing out loud playing cricket playing songs by The Beatles playing with words playing the fool playing footsie with left foot playing party pooper not letting them have fun playing mind games playing truant playing the silent thinking kind playing the part sitting on a table resting hands on a chair four legs at a time singing songs humming tunes in harmony making the breeze sound like the bees making one say things like is it the breeze or is it the bees or are they the bees or is it just the breeze it’s getting cold I’d freeze is it the breeze or is it bees are they the bees peas peace knees niece horse mare neighs in the dictionary one after the other no commas or periods in between three to five days a month how painful how lucky to not have to go through it all month after month, month after month a comma to avoid a red line wriggly worm in the middle of the ocean where swim sharks and whales in blue and white sharp teeth shaving blades razor wheeze racer and I wake up smelling like a banana flower smelling like a rose and a violet and a lotus and a ripe banana all at the same time smelling like her smelling like you smelling like everything that I should have been some time or at some other time in life once upon a long time ago or once upon a some time ago baking a cake with soda and sauce

A paper kite and a kite with wings

A paper kite and a kite with wings fly together across the sky one with a string at its tail and the other with just a tail that rudders the boat of the bird this way and that when speeding clouds cross the path with much haste and anger caused by spicy mushrooms that make rockets out of little lives that refuse to fly and in the screams of everything that flies could be heard the silent murmurs of little secrets soft and tender like cotton candy in pink and pale green smelling like roses or pineapples that could be seen and heard from the other end of the world but could be smelled only when noses are minded and are pulled away from their presence deep inside someone else’s business crying like a siren in the sea asleep on top of giant snakes that live in submerged caves of Thursday morning prayers after a hearty breakfast of eggs on toast and careless coffee brewing inside little plastic bags of peppermint minting money going after treasures with hand-pulled little carts of infancy refusing to drink milk or to grow up like a bean stalk hiding in it an ocean of oil almost always invisible till it is squeezed tight in between the tips of a thumb and an index finger after the dialing of four hundred and seventy-three numbers on the dial pad of a telephone that pretends to be a typewriter for numbers once every Sunday evening and on scared moments of Wednesday late evenings it pretends to be a calculator instead, oh wow!

A back-up plan

When uncertainty is the most certain thing in a world where worlds are woven in spinning wheels from long streams if plastic wires that flow like rivers in reverse from the sea to mountaintops booing gravity and the magnets that hang North-South poles while white bears are busy hunting fish in the river that runs in reverse beneath thick sheets of ice casting shadows on super-computers that are busy computing the distance between the star that was born the very day that time was born and the other star which was born the day before the day that time was born carbon copy duplicates whirring fans cooling down thinking computer brains and gears that are mere blurs inside black tin sheet boxes meant to protect the fine circuitry of the electronic brain computer machines diode and transistor valves thin aluminum line nerves conducting an orchestra and little bits of electric shock down the spine of a machine that refuses to believe that the end of the world is near right next to the other day asleep along the margins of the horizon when the rays of sun change colour from purple to something else a nameless colour or become something else altogether – like a writer who is in a constant state of hurry to finish a novel or a story that grows on without an end and everyone at the zoo is surprised to see a writer who is a mere transformation of the colour purple of a sunset on the evening of the longest day of the year almost towards the end and their nostrils flare up wide in wonder as do their eyes and mouths

The Blue Bus

Blue nights paint the whole world blue; blue nights paint everything in the whole world blue the leaves are blue the tree is blue the wind is blue the rain is blue the sea is blue water is blue laughter is blue heart is blue love is blue jealousy is blue stories are blue poems are blue ships are blue parrots are blue words are blue breaths are blue length is blue time is blue yellow is blue rainbow is blue grass is blue ice is blue firs is blue birthdays are blue dreams are blue rats are blue tigers are blue elephants are blue houses are blue roofs are blue horses are blue hooves are blue horns are blue harps are blue singers are blue strings are blue light is blue darkness is blue salt is blue sugar is blue hunger is blue ecstasy is blue pain is blue happiness is blue chairs are blue tables are blue doors are blue songs are blue tunes are blue clouds are blue apples are blue pineapples are blue ropes are blue the road is blue the path is blue truth is blue lies are blue lice are blue crickets are blue marigolds are blue roses are blue violets are blue rose is blue red is blue thoughts are blue kings are blue pawns are blue ships are blue trains are blue bus is blue and so they say it’s the blue bus and the blue night paints the whole world blue and on a blue night everything is blue, blue, blue

No Space

Terrestrial no space nothing in space till we see every speck of dust that flies around floating not to worry about trivialities now like if flying is floating or if the vice versa viz., if floating is flying and so on buried in the gardens where flower and fruit plants grow ripe with nectar and juice respectively and in space empty space of nothingness grow plants and any space where a plant has grown ceases to be empty anymore and you throw the ball up twenty-one times and catch it and when it you do it once again it is problematic without an answer a situation where it is hard very hard to find an answer or a resolution to after falling asleep on the very first day of every new year as soon as it is born with new diary journals and hopes and fake promises planting dreams in little pots on top of tables with small cases pen holders and inkpots and paper-clips and staplers with cellophane tape and two-sided duct tapes that pretend to fix ducks when they are swimming in lakes believing they are water-proof and bulletproof wearing jackets that protect them from rain – the rains regular – splash, splash droplets of water, and from rains of bullets – bang, bang, shoot, shoot too when sparrows cry thinking, believing they are mackerels flying in the sky and once when it had rained fish in some other part of the world the sparrows felt very sorry for all those fellow beings that must have forgotten to fly and it is a great story to tell your friends on days when the only reason for your existence is to fill up empty glasses with fruit juice or beer or wine but never whiskey

Books

Books climb up walls from the floor to the ceiling of the room breathing pages of spider stories and shadows of waterfalls climbing up mountains from the ground where rivers move away from where the waterfall has anchored itself to the ground with roots that grow away from the sky deep into earth hands stretched out reaching for the heart of all the planets: Saturn and Uranus and the heart of Saturday night where Mr. T waits and sings his songs after speaking and breathing his words in a raspy voice almost a froggy croak groggy eyed waking out of bed for the morning in a room that smells of a new coat of paint like nail enamel and tips or new markers breaking guitar strings that spring winding up clocks making hands move, moving time forward, moving morning to noon to evening to night and then soon it’s the next day – morning again to noon again to evening again to night again and then new songs begin after three minutes and seventy-three seconds of inactivity of speeding rockets rushing flying towards bull’s eyes with eggs of chicken that refused to hatch – the eggs, not the chicken and language, order of words – all funny, meaning something else meant to mean something with all the best intentions made clear to everyone when see-through plastic-skinned bags make it clear to everyone who wishes to read the book from cover to cover, reading, chewing, assimilating every word written loud and clear, clearly visible or otherwise, unwritten, yet loud and clear, almost invisible and what would tricycle riding geese do when they buy a new book at the bookstore at the end of the street around the corner?

Home Alone

Alone home, home alone waiting for whiplash and little tops that spin around the axis of planets that go round and round on their own going around a star – wonderful balloons rise up with ribbons for tails Helium for wings that split to become Hydrogen in cylinders that opens out to become and be just a rectangle the height of the side of a rectangle and the length the perimeter of the circle that once was that has opened into a straight like and two circles for eyes open wide in wonder ah wonder oh wonder spilling the beans out of the bags as they walk along away from the Sunday on straight to a Thursday the forty-seventh for good luck and reactance of conductor in a nested loop of an electrical circuit diagram drawn with the medium thick felt-tip of the black pen that took a shower in the rain that rained raisins and fish on unsuspecting lackluster cats that laugh for no reason reading jokes from little pocket-sized books form libraries at the far ends of towns where are trees that grow juice balloons when gulls fly screaming loudly mimicking guitar and horn sounds with their mouths chewing on chocolates and jelly-bears and jelly-elephants with long trunks longer than speeding trains sowing seeds of trains to grow train trees that are trained to grow more trains and steam engines that go coo-coo-coo to stop at stations right after level-crossings smoking cigarettes standing next to shrubs of cacti feeling afraid of needles and thorns getting ready to sew buttons on pink fairy gowns 

Lightning

Lightning is not a dog that barks to announce the arrival of rain but thunder could be mistaken for one or a lightning could be mistaken for a cat in its shining brightness and its suddenness of appearance from the corners of dark rooms or skies jumping unannounced leaving scratches on faces and thin red marks oozing blood a hole in the ozone layer around the sun around which revolve twenty-seven thousand planets growing peas in pods in tall green plants some say beans some say plants that have been there – eating roasted peanuts all the time earning silver and coins in gold and diamond high pressure carbon and a million, million years some say a billion years wearing full-sleeved shirts drying swinging with the pendulum of a grandfather wall clock going hickory-dickory after the mouse has climbed up it only to hurry running down when the clock strikes seventy-three times by mistake when it should have been eighty-nine instead and she waits patiently for the next sixteen strikes but silence is all she gets and she suspects her own years and worries that she has lost her ability to hear and she shakes her head vigorously as if she is trying to shake off all her bad memories and every bad thought that resides inside her head but the clock goes quiet after seventy-three and in the sullen silence that fills the room a furry cat jumps out of nowhere with the swiftness of a lightning or that of the fox that jumped, jumped and jumped up, up and up many times in vain to taste the grapes that hung high so high in the middle of the sunny vineyard

Asleep

Fast asleep dreaming slow about running fast going with the flow flying low wearing the morning glow of a new day on the calendar hanging on the wall showing the days that follow one another sweeping time away with a broom wearing spectacles for short-sight sieving good days from bad filling up pages of diary journals muttering a silent prayer for the foxes that have lost their ways blue Jays on the other side waiting to cross the road on skins of zebra looking at the lights that are red waiting for a yellow and then the green of a parrot that repeats everything it hears, repeating words of songs and poems spoken word just before sunrise and slices of bread eaten with steaming cups of coffee for early breakfast or very late dinner of the night before that moves on slowly on buses that travel intergalactic highways built with bricks of radium and iridium of fountainpen nibs that write numerous poems and stories about themselves looking back at the times that once were when there was nothing else other than time inside the little satchels that giraffes carried around their necks with their heads in clouds winking blinking at their friends when they walk past them quickly getting from point A to point B reading newspapers listening to the news on radio – news, news, news stories carried around from point B to point A by the wind wandering aimlessly riding bicycles when their feet are tired like the elephants that wear striped suits and coats of Spanish denim and corduroy

Play Time

Time to play in the fields when the sun shines brighter than the moon oh days of summer hiding stars super stars nova supernova birth of new galaxies and many a mind inside many an idea in faraway galaxies universes parallel and perpendicular with shadows of the slogans and cheers of leaders who dances by the sides of playing grounds and confusion and rejection in the states of dry lands and cattle in a state of depressed jubilation when there is nothing else that one can do but make a choice to be happy instead and that is a story that one wishes to tell everyone else in the middle of dancing wavering flames cooking the meat of a conversation that rotates on a rod held in place with two arms of iron or silver on both sides of the fire rotating, rotating showing the other side of truth and the coin and the justice on the other side of the story with a shoe on one foot that belonged to someone else a long time ago before the birth of Cinderella and Jacques D who climbed up the long tresses ha, ha, hair of Rapunzel who had her head held in position on a chalice near the window all the time drying her hair wearing a mask with the face of a laughing someone or the laughing face of someone else trying to show some meaning in the mere existence of the smile or herself and to prove to the world that she indeed was, is, has been and will always be worthy of the shadow and perhaps a few more too when the time is right for she thinks she is better than all or everyone that she has known in her life all along riding bicycles chewing on bright green crystals of Ferrous Sulphate with their breaths smelling like iron, spinach and pomegranate juice either directly or indirectly

Milkshake Truths

Truths of and about milkshakes of bananas or strawberry when one shakes up the truth behind the answer to the question about why bananae isn’t a good word and why it isn’t seen in any dictionary after words like fountain pen and talcum powder immediately following words like urgency and hurry in haste watching films about lovers who elope in long trains of thought drinking bottles of water under big banyan trees the house of monkeys and birds that clear your mind off things that you do not want to think about sitting on a chair sharpening an eraser tipped pencil in a notebook that goes on long walks in the evening wearing short ankle-length cotton socks and shoes measuring distance in feet three times which make wooden desks and chairs in rooms where windmills make music and generate power that light up bulbs making radios speak and sing their favourite songs in their favourite times of day where almost all of everyone is asleep in the middle of a sunny day in a sunny place wearing a red shirt with little ink-stains of blue and green that wish that they were something else and at times that they were stains in some other colour, colours of the rainbow in the world of crows or peacocks singing cuckoo songs in the ovoid shapes of eggs and Easter bunnies that hide behind washed clothes hanging on clotheslines drying in the sun of the summer midday spinning strings from clouds weaving fabric thin as steam for her shirts and skirts in pale pink and white

Nostalgia

No reason nostalgia after the early evening rain in the yellow of gold of sodium vapour homesickness with pickles in glass jars, tin lids preferred being plastic with her heart and house inside the jar and at times inside a shoe or a pumpkin or the shoe of a walking pumpkin the relatives and friends and the kith and kin  of a hosepipe and a pump that pumps water when a button is pushed pushing gushing out water to the fields of gold cold nostalgia playing yellow in your mind mellow don’t know a van that was made fun of in its prime writing songs playing harmonica and the guitar on harmless metaphysical planes of fiction pointing to itself a forefinger that is the fourth finger pointing forth and then to the back of a being boy playing a saxophone in a band dancing to bluesy tunes toothache and a rotten tooth forgotten daughters of the overwhelming night in towns of radioactivity with circuits of diodes and transistors in a head that grows a fake plastic tree free of any water and life dim wit Neolithic age of bronze and brassiere chemise selling pills and concoctions bubbling on three stones cauldrons with names of witches on them waving their wands at the sea willing them ordering them to wave back at least send one or two at them beaches peaches growing on branches swaying sandy beaches clocks mistaken for wineglasses having sex having lost the places they need to be held at or by and the missing discs have slipped away and no one mentions the surgery of a story till the finest first knot that was ever cast after the dice were thrown three sixes and a half in a row sixing the cherry six and the city all around under the careful vigilance of Batman who stands on top of the tallest tower in town casting bat shadows signals upside down and it’s only Spiderman who seems to read the signals right tight on these lips that are sealed to hold in the secrets about holes that are holed in with zippers at their edges opening one grain of metal at a time

Lamp Shades

A new day has come and it and has fixed lamp shades the shape of flowers around the sun and the stars that cast shadows the shapes of flowers and petals in metals and glass and thick sheets of polyurethane foam fluttering with the breeze which is just a fat fancy name for wandering wind wielding its willow that weeps in a game of cricket with six wickets and wicked witches of cloudy winter horses and their nephews that neigh with their nieces who wear little hairbands with flowers of forgotten fragrance in plastic – why doesn’t plastic have any smell is a question for a morning alone of a distant sunrise of purple orange and blue in multiple shades, especially the plastic of the plastic flowers – on tables and glass bottles jars in which sleep and rest – little money-plants grow with bright green leaves the shape of spades of a pack of cards of a Jack who plays on the deck of a ship that can never sink – there is Rose (is a rose is a rose is a rose) and the man of all trades, Jack of hearts drawing naked women with sticks of charcoal like the French women in the cabins of a ship after a game of Ludo and slithering snakes climbing ladders in the back seats of cars fast and furious and sweaty misty back glass panes through which come in light reflect on the rearview mirror appear to be closer than it really is through shadows and shades of lamps that taste bitter better like large nuts of areca in the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean with pineapples Pina Colada and cubes of ice crushed fine in a large spherical glass jar with an umbrella protecting everything below from the sun and the clouds and rain

Blue Night

 Blue night, blue night of the pigeons hunting scorpions when she has run around all the empty streets of the desert village or as the little man with the walking stick likes to say, when she has run around all the deserted streets of the empty village – doing what doing what – is what the telephone and the most recent voice on the most recent telephone call had wanted to know – what did she run around the deserted streets of the empty village for (and from this one should know, that who could possibly be writing this passage – perhaps the little man with walking sticks that resemble words [quite unlike what longhaired singers believe in – Tim or Jim or Kim]) – and the most learned or the ones with the most knowing looks who live in the village with silver-gray locks of hair always know or pretend to know the answers to questions like this – especially for questions such as this about rain – they say, she has been running around searching for rain on an asymptote of a hyperbolic curve running along axes with access to all the secret buried hidden deep inside the minds of machines that seem to have learnt that seem to have learnt all or more than all of everything by repeatedly listening to things and in the end, as the scientists confirm, have learnt to think too – or so they think – or so think the machines too: the learned people and the learned machines and the learned cows and cattle that are all happy because where there is rain there would be soft juicy green grass and their minds are programmed to feel happy about things such and that is a cliché of a blessing in disguise or a let’s-try-it-differently disguise in a blessing selling hit puffs and tea infused with lemon juice that children love to drink on hit nights after a long run of running along the asymptotes of a horse-shaped curve in the sky studded with stars that blink, blink, blink

Sleep Little Birds

A large bag with a hazy shade of an inside which holds in its palm two different things: sleep and little birds yet to fly but the bag flies on its own of its own will and wish and bill to kill the drill bit whirrs of the world’s largest dreamland economy soaring up, up and away breaking ceilings of glass and hardwood and the sky too eggshells with chocolate coatings cream-filled with carbon copies of speeding cars moving away from the windows of starting up electric motors seven hundred and thirty-seven megawatts power in the eyes of the beholder wearing spectacles thick frames of horn and cattle beef sandwich walking with bells around their necks, sprinklers little, two number one for salt and the other for pepper sprinkling sneezes and fear and face masks painted with surgical precision three layers of overcoat of Gogol and thirty-one layers of paint microscopic and soft like pillows of fur and feather fighting in the hands of children in bedrooms of afternoons of nothing else or nothing much to do with ants of half-eaten lollipop candies red and yellow guava flavor pure juice in which the stallion is the best track and the most played on radio and Russian fans say Ween are as good as if not better than The Beatles and hence should be celebrated more, more, more for their originality with coffee and beer that is frothier than the rest of the world that drinks sake the way they do when the sun never sets in speeding magnetic rail bullet trains and handmade comic books of never-ending curiousity and the beauty imagining Buddha and Christ as roommates peals of laughter and the word peal doesn’t fit better anywhere else at all if not here and that is a good sign – a sign better than the sigh or the sight of a thumbs up from a traffic constable from the other side of the road busy trying unsuccessfully as can one see, to solve a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in her lunch break

Fountains

Fountains and colorful kites spurting out confetti and hard tunes heavier melodies like bad dreams dipped in thick chocolate sauce and wonderful anklets of gold and bronze making music with every footstep of garlic and bread growing taller with every passing minute inside clock-dials of sand and spice and everything nice borrowed from a beach or a coastal land seashore sand banned from being under the footsteps of peacocks and other dances who wear green and blue shining shimmering toothpaste of stripes red and white and an album named elephant covered in red white and black probable siblings portable authenticity of facts in song lyrics abacus counting beads of sweat in Chinese or Mandarin women go marching carrying baskets on their heads to paddy fields and someone else throws a full truck measure of tennis balls discussing David Markson with Wittgenstein whose mistress wears talcum powder in fluorescent shades of pink and green and blue shining bright in the middle of the night after drinking bottles of photons in the day weakening the sun reducing to a mere handful of banana-peel yellow and the jealousy of Andy Warhol’s novel a novel in reels of audio tape conversations obscenity normal scenery of nature with a rising sun and a couple of mountains and clouds and flying birds in the assumed nothingness of sky left either uncoloured or in an almost invisible shade of gray blue conversations of rock stars and poets who do not conform neither do they confirm if they’re going to be there at the little girl’s party on the seventeenth night of the seventh month from today with promises of iced malt drinks and chocolate chip cookies and quickies in the deepest interiors of decorated rooms with lace curtains swaying gently in the wind

Seven

A period at least seven years long as soon as the end of the previous next year has been achieved to no end on terraces where shine rains on tabletops and desks with huge pencil sharpeners meant to sharpen pencils larger than the tables and pacemaker machines with sliding windows pushing away from where someone or someone else stands looking through looking glass and then is the time to remember Alice who fell down the rabbit-hole looking at books yet to be read full of familiar fashionable stories of fallen angels and obtuse angles greater that the angle that is just right nine times ten – n multiplied by n plus one where n is ten minus one or to put it bluntly making it easy for crows to understand, nine where n doesn’t mind being nine angels fly away from shoe stands untying the laces uniting directions making weird names like north of western east and so on laughable jokes that are mere facts that could be found in dictionaries and computer screens scanning raster roasting nuts in a pan on low flame smelling nutty but butter in brown mixed with peanuts spread on slices of burnt toast for Sunday mornings asleep next to tall glasses of coffee or juice listening to punched holes on cardboard sheets through which pass rainbows in seventy-three colours till the towels all fade away like kings whose songs are not remembered anymore munching on biscuits of light green pistachio smelling like concave lenses, tasting like a pleasant surprise of planned unexpectedness while words that are meant to be slippery grow rough edges tighten their grips on wrists that miss little watches that are seen on tall towers instead

Binding

Calico and twine thin plastic wire ductile challenging malleability when she sits chewing her pencil moving on from there to then from space to time chewing on the yesterday that was after chewing on wires flattening them making two dimensions from three flattening pods of vanilla and cups of ice-cream under speeding trucks on a highway neglecting traffic lights power-cuts feeling quite powerless under rain clouds that refuse to weep even on a lonely Friday empty evening running cats never a tail in between their legs cuff-links replace buttons little pieces of sheep mutton for a glutton almost always hungry thirsty for wines of tomorrow that are now asleep inside little berries of grapes that hang on creepers that drink sunlight in gallons converting heat to sugar taste sweet and hot even for a robot repeating words and numbers and formulae solving quadratic equations singing blues tunes with acoustic guitars fearing fireflies mosquitoes eating biscuits drinking blood smoking leaves of pages from the most favourite book in the library kept hidden in the next shelf after the infinitely sane shelf of autobiography promising honesty and all truth with memories of torn clothes of yesterday with metal wires turned twisted into almost-a-triangle hanger with a semi-circular hook on top for foxes to count their blessings and moments of good luck when their stories were written with camel footprints published in caravans of the vast expanse of never-ending desert sand opening the doors in Spain where sing scrawny singers sing their poems rock music powdered nostrils of perception

They

Candles and flames dance with sheep of the green lands of farms where playing card jokers play their flutes drums and with their walking sticks when cranes fly with one leg stretched out like a fishing rod keeping jumping fish in their thoughts thinking about dolphins that they have never seen but only heard or read about in the thick volumes books borrowed from the libraries of midnight that have their doors open right next to the twinkling stars in the sky where bark dogs drinking coffee in palm-sized porcelain bowls that roll and make sounds 733 Hz frequency vibrating with tuning forks held in the hands of piano-playing domesticated cats of Turkey prone to making many a mistake of catching a rat in the middle of a desert in the middle of the night of black sand snake like ripples on the sand with rattles howling wind and bowling archers who have forgotten their bows and vows and cows but the bulls have been pulling their carts carrying pails of water to the tops of the hills watching films in their hand-held white screens protecting the clouds and silver nitrate not from cool breeze winds just before it starts to rain a rain of six pence and seven fence driving a Benz down the roads where would have run Cinderella had she been alive in the middle of these strange times where everyone wears a glass shoe and princes wear their crows on their face and almost every face is invisible while strands of gray hair appear reappear and disappear in the shifting changing light of this early evening filled to the brim with thick hot soup for the thick at heart

Basic Geometry

Bisecting the point that bisects the line of flight of a witch flying on a blue plastic broom saying she is used to flying on vacuum cleaners, power turned on – buttons pushed down whirring through clouds of gray and blue wishing to be wearing a long robe in green clearly indicating rain that is yet to be also at the same time the rain that was that had flown on the ground like a river after falling black like rivulets of ink from a pen that they associate with a fountain and a nib in gold with a split edge writing zero point seven millimeters thickness stories and lines of songs that promise to stay forever with magic ink that is invisible to the malicious eye bad intentions box of choices for you to choose from after throwing away garlands of rose and leaves of the banyan wound around their legs and the trunk of an elephant thick long tusk reflecting on the calm surface of water inside every deep well while spiders are busy weaving cobwebs riding bicycles in drawn circles of evolution in the sky blue shades of dark gray after Picasso said something mean about Gertrude Stein’s ink-stained fingers busy scribbling little meaningless passages in the notebook she keeps in her pocket inside formalin words floating in a jar dead or alive with meanings about objects food rooms and imaginary numbers that talk not about you or me or them but all that they talk about all the time are about one’s own self, first-person singular in one letter – no letter more, nothing less and definitely not a penny more not a pound less

Them

 Throwing a large box of coins in the air hoping that the coins would fly or would get stuck in the clouds so as to effect a rain of coins whenever it rains next is what he thinks about sipping on his coffee on a top of a mountain sitting with a desk in front of him on which is his notebook in which he scribbles his poems in musical notations of so re mi fa so la to do doing his daily practice of scale measures – measure for measure a pound of flesh and blood and red, and bread – a loaf pound of bread with a heavy block of cheese seasoned with salt and little droplets pearls of lemon juice rocking the cradle in which the child baby is fast asleep dreaming about sheep that graze on grasslands green in every direction – from the north to the east and then from the south to the west wearing a bush-shirt in peacock blue copper sulphate crystals stripes of azure blue-sky like bunches of purple grapes filled with wines of tomorrow waiting to come out and house themselves in large seven-liter bottles of green glass walls that reflect the moans and sighs of the wine that’s asleep inside dreaming of sunshine and the cold falling water from cascades of milk and honey and silver juice stories about the rain that falls inside the forests, rain-forests and all the trees in them with branches that let little birds build their nests to lay and hatch their eggs in an endless cycle in which every tomorrow follow every today and every yesterday

Us

Little trains wrapped in polythene chocolate wrappers of green and gold of the innocence of the almost infancy of once upon a long time ago running with dinosaurs and the Gutenberg press much later that disappeared with a sudden quickness of smoke that turns everything into ash and wisps of smoke inside drinking straw magnifying glasses magnifying vision with the hope of a bigger world and wider world view for a heart of gold growing old sipping on the rim of a cup green tea and honey to be a bee or not to be one or two or many a queen in a hive high five in the language of words praying for world peace carrying with it little twigs of olive in its beak from plains to mountain peaks little brown nipples pebbles rolling caressing translucent fabric silk and rayon on cool soft beds jiggling shaking giggling ice tipped glaciers sinking airships of a year ago from an age long ago in history of clouded reality with misty mornings and fog on which little girls with blue eyes or brown jump rope inside wells full of water from the new rain growing trees and algae on rock beds of deeper dark depths of her mind particularly of her kind wearing wings under their armpits the length and breadth of a deep blue sea deep sea (green tea) water blue just like you and me and the sea so deep, sea so blue just like me, just like you

Hard Asleep

Smoke a cigarette or two

To cut down on sinkin’ and thinkin’

Memories make breathing difficult

And they wrinkle your skin

To walk up and down the streets

Eyes pointlessly open, wanderin’

And I haven’t taken my eyes off my feet

Lost, with petty troubles angular absurdity 

Every scene glows, but I’m the blinking kind 

Dwelling, waiting in all the warmth 

Scribbled here and there that’s all for? 

Me, one or two or many too? 

Ever forever hating the haulting lights 

To see circling moths: it’s your world 

That you choose – reading poetry I swam

The four lettered I, all four of us

The world here is sweet

Sweetest are our dreams

They’re here to stay and would fill 

Their sleepy darkness till the songs end

Summer Rain

And then the breeze takes it all back: everything from the beginning till now, till the very end and you try to let it all go, you try, you try and you try and if you fail, try the moon, one last 13th time

 

I need to confess: when there should really be a knock at the door that separates truth from lies a stray breath runs around, round and round and round, all around and no one knocks

 

That, yes that – they make living sound very easy that way and you move on and on and on and when there is nothing on that blessed every other day of the year I want to say something really rude

 

Now could be the happiest moment in this present state: things the way they are now, with nothing else but stories of how the child inside is killed everywhere

 

A night of no poems once in some time comes a time to feel the darkness and to let the black smoke out of the chimneys of his heart that are invisible now 

 

There was nothing else if not a song, a sweet song celebrating the sweetest smoke with flutes and songs about birthdays

 

And in the end, summer rain settles the dust

x

Rain

 Rain rains like rain when rain is the name and the action at the same time: and rain dissolves and disappears in rain – and it is only in rain that rain dissolves itself, it must be said when clouds are plain busy wandering around the skies

There when it rains there is no new rain like there is no old rain too – when it rains, it’s just rain – and when one gets busy with the time that rain is born drawing planetary positions on the little leaves on trees with faces blank as paper one gets a sense of rain old and rain new, but still raining now as rain and that’s all there is

New rain wears monochrome masks of moments and memories before it disappears in old rain and all that remains in the end, is just rain that rains

When the rain of every time, age and lives of the past and the future hide, reside in falling droplets of rain that rains now (with invisible, naturally nonexistent lines separate rain old from rain new), endlessness of time does a few steps of joyous tap-dance on the roofs of the world (like the hooves of dream horses that run past lines on the map of infinity)

[Every story untold or unwritten falls with every falling droplet of rain along with all the stories of every falling droplet of rain, hiding in its silence]

Rains disappear, but never forgotten, always changing from this to that and in the end only to return to what it was when everything began – rain rains

koko said (locked up, locked in)

now feels like september - and at times
a forlorn november (or a cursed december)
i try to play it cool: remember a --------?
(don't have to say it, just because it rhymes)
raging, raging against a dying ember
like the dreams of dylan t, hazy slumber
(and his longings for sunnier climes)
i'm asleep, like i'm awake all the time
cities and countries: landscapes sublime
i've been to these places, but i don’t remember
here, now feels like september - and at times
a forlorn november (or a cursed december)

here, here: locked up, locked in

Early

But the song of the early bird

And the other early song of the bird

(Yet to be taken a shot at -

Crying for immunity and polyester)

Till the lost cows come home

Much later: after the break of dawn

(Dusk was her name, if I remember right

Or was it that she just smelt like musk

And was dusky of skin? Ah memory!)

Early night late evening like rain

Needles of silence: nothing is audible:

Immune to needle pierce shrieks - 

Noise of the world (but for) the words

She breathes in her sleep - gentle

Murmur of every word's worth

(So romantic, wandering lonely like a cloud)

Get to hear the song of the early worm

And the other early song of the worm

Not (an important thought)

(Once the bird 
Said
That it swam 
in the air

And the fish
Said
That it flew
in  water)

Pond-er

Alone a frog sitting on a rock
By the pond
Looking at fish that swim 
In the water
And at the birds that fly
In the sky – (and the reflection
Of the sky and the flying birds
On the water in the pond 
In which swim fish)

And a little later
With a sigh, gets up the frog
Picks up its stick
And it goes on a walk
Thinking about things
Longing to fly – like the birds
And on and on it walks
Till it reaches the next pond –
(The famous old pond)

Throwing the stick away
It jumps in – 
Blunk plunk nglunk
Splash

Glub glub glub

g.u.t

it has been raining on the mountains

for the last seven hours

 

he has been busy –

sitting at his desk

looking at the rain that falls

incessantly on the mountain

far away

 

gray, gray, gray –

all gray outside the window

falling rain

 

the room that he sits in, yellow –

all yellow, the walls of his room –

yellow, yellow, yellow all yellow

on this side of the window

 

such a monochrome moment

this one, in gray

violently attacked by the yellowness

of the yellow walls – and here (in this moment

of monochrome memories and

                muddled mindless middle)

all is one and one is all – he

is the rain on the mountain

and yellow is gray is

                yellow and a man and the mountain

are the same in yellow

and in gray

Naked Music

 Naked music of a Tuesday morning (after a cup of coffee thinking about all the saffron that grows all around growing hatred planting seeds of hate trees haittrees if you will, after the rain of the night before thinking about not thinking and sentimental states of vacuum in the minds of the thinker who creepily thinks about reading science fiction books quotes about which reach him immediately in a minute or two more before or after the end of the works inside brown glass bottles of cough-syrup worn around your eyes watching the world in the brown diffraction of light bending to prove a point like a little thin slim blade of grass in the woods right outside the doors of wooden log cabins built by recluse philosophers) plays nice and slow and comfortably loud while yet another batch of coffee brews inside my mind in the shape of you because the music is naked this morning of this Tuesday

Story of a Bear

 To go the extra mile wearing spectacles with cleansed visions of tomorrows and of Johanna clean and clear

For the night is a swimming pool filled with coffee in which I swim with the moon and an inflated tiger that refuses to sink

Fear is a cloudy kite that flies and floats over our heads reflecting our states of mind in three dimensions of solid, liquid, and gas

On a night with dreams of hunting vultures and complex numbers listening to old tunes where young men and women long to be in the arms of each other

And the other song is sung to the tune of silver moonlight that floods the rooms of lonely lovers with windows hiding behind or on the other side of thin blue veils curtains

Their songs are sung with mandolins of eight strings each – eight, eight, eight upright infinities and the number of prime numbers unknown like the intentions of lovers

Who make promises in desert mirages and mirror images of desert sands and camels that are the ships of the desert that however promise not to sink when they brush against icebergs of the desert sand dunes oh the seas of sand

But the promises of lovers who leave refuse to leave the wind – or should one call it the breeze of the desert – as they move from left to right and then from the west to the east moving against sunlight but with the shadows

Shadows of long coats have arms that are longer than the arms of the law flaw claw blah, blah, blah – country singers have sung more and much more about that

But what made a lover leave their lover with four hundred children when listened to for the first time later corrected by someone else that the children are just hungry – four hungry children – and it is impossible to remember the capital of Hungary when you wake up from a dream in the middle of the night on a steel cot whose skin is cold like that of a lizard that wears the skin of a lion or a lizard falling into a tin of blue paint running amok through forests claiming to be the kin of every animal in the forest till it rains

New letters of new lovers pretend to be something else – like sheets of a calendar that measure the passing of many a birthday, wedding anniversaries, festivals, annual days of remembrance and pages of newspapers are filled with little boxes paid for by the square inches – announcements, obituaries, words, words, words, wanted salespersons! Apply here, here and here – there – post box numbers, prime numbers, seventeen or thirty-one ah well just another evening of a bluesy Sunday when the sun has set once upon a long time ago listening to the story of a bear that did not mind being a bear that once went on a long walk seeing a lion the way behind the rustling of a shrub or should one call it a bush I wonder what you would have called it had you been there – I wonder what you would say had you been here and I wonder where you are now, I wonder what you would have said to me had you been there and the bear runs home but the lion takes a shortcut and reaches home even before the bear does and the bear opens the door to see the lion that the bear thinks is another lion and so as the story goes in past tense, the bear ran to its friend’s house and stayed there for five hours till it felt safe before coming home and oh what joy to find a home sweet home so safe and clean – ideally there should be an exclamation mark here but everything is ok on a day like this – or should it be anything is ok – should there be a question mark here – but they everything and anything goes so, so

Swish / Swoosh

 Amidst swishes and swooshes
Voices outside the window never cease
They keep talking – someone or someone else
(To someone or to someone else)
As they continue to slash
Leaves of tall-grown grass (& words)
Words, words, words – with their scythes
Wo – swish – rds – swoosh – wo – swish – rds
Swoosh – wo – swish – rds – swish – wo – swoosh
rds – (something must make sense to someone
or to someone else)

5. Expecting Rain (in D-minor)

 (Excerpts from the epic novel “Expecting Rain” by Pedro Fernandez)

 (1)

“Expect rain at 5 PM” is the note that somebody had left for me in my mailbox today when I wasn’t looking.

They must have dropped it in when I was asleep, busy building dreams that I do not remember now.

I felt emotional when I read the message first – and I still do – my hands gently tremble even now.

I do not receive letters or notes from anyone, but this anonymous message – almost a happy warning of things to come, to tell me something about the future (my future?) feels nothing short of a miracle.

I wash my face – and sitting alone on my favourite chair by the window, I drink a tall cup of thick, black coffee, listening to “Love minus zero – No limit”.

I searched for the mixtape (that I had once got as a gift for my birthday) – the tape that had “One more cup of coffee for the road” on it, but I couldn’t find it – so I had to settle for the other Dylan mixtape – this isn’t bad too.

I drink the coffee slowly and the warm bitterness is soothing – I keep thinking about the rain, promised to me at 5 PM – I feel calm.

I worry at the same time too, that if I keep thinking wild thoughts like this I would forget and stop expecting rain, at least consciously, and it feels sinful to do something like that.

I sit quietly, trying to stay calm, and through the window, I look at the deserted streets below, as I drink my coffee.

I take the last sip when a large yellow van takes a turn at the end of the road – the only movement I see on the streets and the world becomes quiet again when the van vanishes.

I take the empty cup to the kitchen sink and wash it with soap – the bottom of the white porcelain cup has nicely browned with all the thick, black coffee that has been poured into it all this long – for many, many years now – I have had this cup for a long time– I think I bought it – or no, somebody gifted it to me for my birthday – there have been so many birthdays and now I do not remember much about them anyway.

(I get all sorts of useful things as birthday gifts but as long as I can remember, I have only been gifting books to my friends and others – and when I learn later they haven’t read the books I gave them, I pretend that it doesn’t bother me – “oh, take your time!” I tell them, casually.)

 

(2)

“I would go on a walk,” I think to myself.

I put that little note into the pocket of my shirt and wear my slippers.

I lock the door and pull up the zipper of the black windcheater that I wear on top of a plain white shirt.

I take a deep breath and I start walking, whistling a gentle tune.

The streets are still deserted and nothing moves – the breeze, the rustling of dry leaves – that’s all there is.

I look at the sky – I see dark clouds – I expect to hear the sound the moving clouds across the sky in the surrounding silence – and I expect rain, promised to me at 5 PM.

I smile to myself, I don’t know why.

I finish the tune I have been whistling on a mental A-minor chord, perfectly harmonizing with the last three repeating notes of the melody.

I like the A-minor chord too, but I am a big fan of the strains of sorrow that hide behind the strum of a D-minor chord and I miss it now, suddenly at this moment when I’m expecting rain.

 

(3)

I walk past a fountain and I think about my fountainpen which sleeps in my table drawer – I had filled it up with black ink many months (or years?) ago and with it, I had written a letter.

I do not remember if I had posted that letter – the ink in that pen must have gone dry now – I should wash it sometime soon whenever I remember – I wouldn’t want the nib to rust.

Right now I should be, and I am thinking only about rain – I am to expect rain at 5 PM and nothing else seems to matter.

What use are the thoughts of unsent letters and ink drying inside the barrels of fountain pens?

I feel like a character in a Godard film – a film yet to be made, with just a one-line script: “The main character dies in the end” – meant to be improvised with the camera.

Improvisation or not, someone, well, everyone always dies in the end but I don’t know if it really is the end – but that is not a question I would like to think about today, because today I am busy expecting rain.

At 5 PM.

 

(4)

I remember the smell of roses when I walk past a rose-shrub that isn’t flowering now and I think about the Little Prince who must have gone back to his planet (with an almost insignificant name – I try hard to recollect the name of that planet, but I fail – memory is a wonderfully weird thing at times) – to be with his flower.

I wonder what dreams must he be dreaming in his little planet, alone.

I had once dreamt that I was walking down a deserted street on an evening exactly like this one here and now.

In that dream, I met a tortoise walking slow and steady with a question mark for a walking stick, singing “we shall overcome”.

It felt like the tortoise got offended (or I might be totally wrong in feeling that way) when I cheerfully said to it “out on a leisurely walk, are we?” – it just turned back to tell me that I should have known that it is running, and not walking.

I was quick to apologize, and I continued walking.

When I was in that dream, I knew that I was dreaming and that I would wake up very soon.

The sky grew dark and on that day too, in my dream, I think I must have been expecting rain (unlike today when someone else has told me that I should expect rain) – I am almost sure that I am always expecting rain, but this is the first time I am thinking about me expecting rain.

They have turned on the streetlamps and I walk through the golden glow of the yellow sodium-vapour lamps – I love the light from sodium vapour-lamps on empty streets – it makes me nostalgic – that golden yellow, in my mind, is the visual equivalent of the D-minor chord.

On my way back, I saw a rabbit that was running fast and I mistook it for the White Rabbit from the wonderland of Alice (god bless her soul!) when I heard it muttering “Oh dear, oh dear, I shall be too late!” but it wasn’t wearing the fancy waistcoat.

The rabbit looked like it had just woken up from sleep and was hurrying to get somewhere – like almost everyone else, always busy going somewhere or coming back from someplace else, never being where they really are, at that moment.

But then, I am not good at remembering things – and like any bad writer who wants to write multilayered intellectual sounding po-mo stories is wont to say, “it could have been a dream from the past, or a dream of the present – or, or, it’s just this moment in time, the reality that I am in, now.”

 

(5)

“I left a secret message for someone,” says the writer, with a naughty twinkle in his eye.

He has been wanting to write a multilayered intellectual sounding po-mo story – he has written many stories so far, but isn’t satisfied with any of them.

“I write and I write and I am never happy with what I have written after I finish writing something – all I have with me now are these ink-stained fingers and not a single good story!” he says – “Maybe I’m not meant to be a writer – and now I have taken to writing anonymous secret messages to people, and that makes and keeps me happy”

When I ask him if he too is expecting rain today he smiles, and gives me a piece of hard candy.

Looking at his ink-stained fingers, he says “How I wish the ink in my fountain pen would dry up soon…”

 

(6)

Not just today, but in the past too, I have thought about rain.

I have thought about that place where the rain ends – I mean, when it is raining here, it must not be raining at some other place and I have always wanted to get to that place where the rain of here ends – and I would stand in the middle with rain pouring down on one half of my body, and on the other half, there would be no rain.

I have always imagined this place to be a hillock where the rain ends and on that hillock is a small hut in which lives a painter – a bearded old man who makes miniature paintings of scenes that appear in our dreams.

He eats a hot bowl of rice gruel every night, cooked soft to perfection on his lonely stove inside which burn stumps of wood he gathered from the valley.

He sits by the stove and paints listening to the occasional crackle of burning wood – he paints throughout the night and neither he nor I seem to know when he goes to sleep – but he always sleeps well and feels well-rested too, I am sure.

I hope he too is expecting rain today, wherever he is.

 

(7)

Expecting rain, thinking about things this and things that – all with words, I reach the boundary of my vocabulary and I wonder if I have reached the end of my thoughts.

I know that I am left with nothing else to think about: having exhausted the things I could think about with all the words I have learnt so far, I go completely blank.

It feels like I stand at the end of my world, expecting rain at 5 PM.

But it doesn’t seem to happen so easily – thoughts replace thoughts – strings of words with apparent or obvious meanings, supposedly inherently in them, with a little help from their friends, probability, permutations, and combinations, give birth to newer meanings, creating newer universes in my mind and a girl named Lucy smiles at me from the sky with diamonds.

Lucy plays the lute when she feels bored and she writes silly poems in a secret notebook that she keeps hidden in a little trunk under her bed.

On some nights when it feels like it would rain – or on those nights when the wind howls like a foghorn, even when she wants to write silly poems, she never feels courageous to get her notebook out of the trunk under the bed because her friends have told her many stories about monsters that live under the beds of children – Lucy knows that she is a child.

But the monsters that lived under the beds, she thinks, are mere shadows that have escaped from those people who have been careless enough to let go of their shadows, only to lose them eventually.

The shadows then develop minds of their own and become monsters that feel warm under the beds of children.

Lucy wants to know what the shadowless people do – do they feel lighter than the others who haven’t lost their shadows yet?

Lucy tells me that there comes a point in the life of everyone when they lose their shadows, and she is quick to add, “but that doesn’t mean anything, really!”

Lucy then goes on to talk about reality – she has a lot to say about reality, dreams, and ‘mind’ – way too much for a little girl of her age.

Once when we were talking about coffee, I told her about how I always drink my coffee in slow sips and how it felt like time stood still when I drank coffee – always, always, I said.

And I loved it when she asked me “So you too measure your life out with coffee spoons?”

That line of Lucy’s about life and time and coffee spoons, I learnt much later, was borrowed by a famous American-British poet – but I know that it is Lucy’s line – I would know it forever.

Lucy is a nice name for a little girl who talks like this – she probably exists only inside my head – I don’t know.

Because I believe that she exists only inside my mind, I know that she too is expecting rain today, because I want her to.

 

(8)

A man wearing a long black coat and a deerstalker hat – smokes a pipe too – obviously a detective, given all this, comes walking towards me from the other side of the road.

Walking along with him is a woman in a flowing white gown.

“I am the philosopher’s mistress,” she says, “and he is the detective hired by the possessive philosopher to spy on me…”

“And we have fallen in love,” says the detective in a smoker’s deep baritone, “and we don’t know what to do…” he pauses to sigh, continues, “I wish it would rain now,” he says and looks at the sky wistfully.

I want to tell them about the rain that I’m expecting at 5 PM today, but before I could even begin, they quickly move away, telling me that they should start working on the spy report to be submitted to the philosopher.

Standing alone on the road, I feel happy knowing that there is someone else too, expecting rain.

 

(9)

Mersenne jumps out of my copy of “Harmonie Universelle” and talks to me about the D-minor chord.

I love listening to the things he says about the D-minor chord just as much as I love listening to the D-minor chord.

After a small lecture on the nature of prime numbers, with a quick ‘poof’ he becomes a postbox.

I drop the note (“Expect rain at 5 PM”) I had received today into the postbox hoping that it would be of use to someone else who would receive it.

 

(10)

I walk on, remembering all the seventeen stories that my grandmother had told me when I was young – seventeen stories about seventeen frogs that had wanted to fly.

She would tell me those same seventeen stories to me every night – and I never grew tired of them – I remember all those seventeen stories, with the same words that grandma had used every time.

Seventeen is a lovely number – a prime number – a Mersenne Prime too!

I love prime numbers – I love how mysterious they are.

At times, I count my steps when I walk and I smile at every prime number count.

I smile at my forty-seventh step now when I hear the roar of an automobile engine behind me.

I see a large blue bus – it slows down and stops right next to me – the doors open.

The bus is empty but for the driver – who turns around and nods his head at me as if to ask me to get on the bus.

Hesitantly, I board the bus and take a seat.

The bus moves on and once when I ask the driver where we are going, he doesn’t seem to hear me at all – he doesn’t speak a word, he has his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

I take a seat in the last row and I count the number of empty seats – there are 99 empty seats, and the one that I have occupied, 100 in all.

I think about all those 99 people who should have boarded this bus but haven’t been able to, for some reason – and I know that each of those 99 of them has a story why they couldn’t make it to this bus ride today when I am expecting rain at 5 PM.

I make a small note in the little notebook that I always carry in my pocket – “99 empty chairs, 99 stories” – something for me to think about later.

The bus stops in front of a large white building – the door opens – the driver sits still and I understand that I need to get off here – and I do.

 

(11)

The white building in the middle of nowhere – with its doors open – I have nowhere else to go – I get inside.

All the walls are white, all the floors are white – and it looks like an auditorium.

All the chairs inside the auditorium are white, and they are all empty, unoccupied.

I see Lucy on stage, playing a bluesy tune on her lute.

I sit and listen to Lucy’s songs for some time and I count the empty chairs – there are 99 empty chairs and the one that I have taken, 100 in all.

I am sure now that there are 99 stories behind each of these 99 empty chairs too – or perhaps they are the same stories behind the 99 empty seats of the bus– all of those who were supposed to take the blue bus to get here to watch Lucy’s performance this evening couldn’t make it – but I am sure, that there are at least 99 stories (or 198).

The concert ends and Lucy walks out of the stage – the stage is empty now but for a small painting that hangs on the wall.

I get up on the stage and take a closer look at the painting – it's the painting of an old man painting a miniature of thirteen people sat around a table, to eat.

I feel happy that there are thirteen of them in the painting – thirteen, a prime number!

I see the rabbit, Godard, Lucy, my grandmother, the tortoise, the philosopher, the little prince, the bus driver, the philosopher’s mistress, the painter of miniatures himself, the detective hired by the philosopher to spy on his mistress (but the mistress and the detective are in love – but that’s a story for some other day), Mersenne, and the writer with ink stains on his fingers – thirteen of them sat around the table.

“So the main character dies in the end?” says Godard, looking at the writer, and the writer nods and sighs.

But no one knows who ‘the main character’ is.

 

(12)

I get back home and I am happy that I am back before the rain started.

I do not mind getting wet in the rain, but I don’t feel like it today.

I find the note I had posted in that Mersenne postbox (“Expect rain at 5 PM”) back in my mailbox – with an additional line on top that reads “Return to sender” in large, red letters.

I feel emotional again when I re-read the message – my hands tremble gently.

I look at the clock on the wall – the hands of the clock do not move – the clock has stopped working – I must have forgotten to change the batteries.

Times stands still.

I make another cup of strong coffee and wait for rain.

It would rain at 5 PM – but there is no way for me to know the time – or perhaps it would be 5 PM when it rains.

I sit comfortably on my favourite chair by the window and drink my coffee in slow sips, savouring the soothing warm bitterness, expecting rain.

At 5 PM.

 

(13)

 

5 PM.

 

The End.