These days

Such a wonderful time I've been having, doing things I never thought I'd like, doing things I never thought I'd do even, all thanks to D, V, and their peeps. Perhaps the time has come for me to stop figuring out how to build rockets and robots and instead enjoy karaoke and embarrassing-dancing. Everything has a price, but it only makes sense to have happiness cost close to nothing instead of a thousand dollars.

The Litany Of Delay

Sadness ascends to choose one more time /
Comes round again and no one to tempt /
Even though I ran to the delicious /
Liberty to calculate what I should but /
Will not tolerate the desperation to control /

Am able to give and sink in deeper /
To define it and find it and hide it /
We're sinking deeper despite it /
Let me show you everything I found back home /
Let me teach you to lie like a child /

Soon will you choose to let this go /
Choose to make us give away the strong /
Let the wanderers kiss and drown /
As Lenin crushes his beasts into gold /
Inking any kind of blurry papers for my disguise /

Can I hope to sell this dreary dream /
Television escapes me delaying the fearful /
Is this a test that has to be so delightful as /
Dreaming creations dying on the edges of squares /
I don't realize I am dying not old, not young /

Right and slow right here to give it like blood /
Right here I am still in blood giving faith /
Sight me later than some wonderful supermoon /
Wandering nightly and waiting all the other time /
People have no desire whatsoever to heal /

Damn it! We're all alone and this is the time /
The spirits of the night have chosen me /
Soiled with my name in a diseased clay /
Where will we go without patients to heal /
Tuesday has come and soon Tuesday will die /

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear /
Then, what deafness may we not all possess? /
What senses do we lack that we cannot see /
And cannot hear another world all around us /
What is there around us that we cannot? /

Blackbird's Egg

Ephemeral and lasting these sons of constant attention remain, swimming seas of white and seeking like brave fools the short-lived happiness that words bring. A bloodied chest of rubies with a curse screaming above their head, and I am pushed away, slowly, steadily, and I deliberately forget to fight as noiseless wonders fracture to an unforgiving life. My hollowness has been stolen and in its place is a black bird.

[caption id="attachment_819" align="alignright" width="420" caption="Broken sky, wholesome rain"][/caption]

A dreaded wall climbs high and lifts magnanimously on its bank a small green frog. The calendar is moving away, tearing slowly across the lines, the numbers are released up and down both at once. Ripples settle down in silence and the moon comes to watch a storm gently falling asleep in the morning. Jan-jan-jan, one by one, push the sun out. Was-now flaps its wings in a blur but white lingers, a black sun rises in the north, and the morning blooms now-was.

Dissension and debate rage on the outside while a sharp illness pricks within. Give me your promise, broken at birth, and exploit my choices as a preference. Blood on the world's hands and scratches on the queen's back, the marauder runs into eternity behind the pillars of creation. Reason gives fast pursuit but the catch is never done. Why must it be when the end is the end is the end? Raindrops slither down the damp wood and our fires won't burn for any bribe. The crime is only slavery... not you, my darling.

I'm a radioactive toy filled with evaporating purposes. Keep my right to freedom and keep my right to the skies. Give me the freedom to give up when I longer can, give me the freedom to throw my arms up, give me the freedom to shed a tear. To cry shamelessly. Dark patches of dried blood flake away into the wind while the sun sets slowly beyond the mountain, and sunflowers meet the Earth whence they came. The leaf, is airborne, skyward, as a souvenir of the true day.

A Suicide Note Inspired, Ironically, By A Strange Dream

I'm...

Becoming more and more lost by the day.

Do I need a lover?

Maybe, maybe no.

Actually, I don't need anyone.

I just need a cistern of depression.

I need to have conversations that might lead elsewhere from time to time.

I just need someone to enforce my fantasies upon.

To find appreciation for my effort.

To be the centre of attention.

It's not that I would do anything to get there.

I'm not a psychopath.

At least, not yet.

But it does seem to help from time to time if I receive the amount of attention I think I deserve.

I know I'm not asking for much.

When I know that there's so much to be given.

My peers tell me that I dance so well.

But I don't think any of them mean that honestly.

They've taken the notion of friendship, even of familiarity, quite too far.

They've mired it in their own need for politeness.

For gentleness, for care.

To be paid attention to.

Mired it so much that if another being were to ask for the truth, they wouldn't know what it meant.

They'd think that they were saying it.

They'd think that they'd all be like them.

That what was the truth for them would be the truth for everyone else.

It's not the truth anymore.

It's one very big lie.

There was this woman I... loved... some time ago.

She appreciated me for my dreams without even understanding them.

I know it is to be expected, to say the least.

I have to concede that some of my cantatas are astounding.

They are.

But judging that all of them will be is stupidity.

Or is it? I don't know.

It ought to be stupidity.

That's what I think.

If you don't think I dance well then tell me I don't dance well.

If you don't think I'm doing it right then tell me I'm not doing it right.

Why tell me I am doing it right?

Why egg me on?

That's not going to teach me anything.

It's only going to drag me deeper and deeper.

Lower and lower into a spiral of mistakes.

At one point from which I will not be able to recover.

And who will I have to blame?

Only myself.

I cannot blame those who lied to me.

I can blame only myself because I gave their opinions and judgments any weight.

I want to be paid attention to.

At the same time, I want valid attention.

I want truthful attention.

And for that, I will have to be valuable.

I will have to be credibly valuable.

I will have to be incredibly valuable.

And for value to come to life, life must be devalued first.

Devalued first...

The Voice

There are many different kinds of voices. Some you can hear, some you can't, some that seem to boom into your cavernous head from all sides, some that seem to sprout from the centre, some that come and go as they wish, some that you bump headlong into like an innocuous but ubiquitous lamppost. Then, there are those voices that are not inside your head at all, but at the other end of the phone call you're attending to right now.

These voices have bodies, I'm given to believe, something to which a head is affixed to, and through the head, words are spoken. For the record, I don't like spoken words. One moment they're there, the next moment they're gone. I hate that kind of indecisiveness - unless of course they're forced into a small box called a "voice recorder" or if they're carved into stone by a manic engraver. The voice in my earpiece is now telling me about what a bad morning it had.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Early morning... blues?"][/caption]

How do voices have bad mornings? Are they blown out into the world through a snot-smeared windpipe? Or do they bear messages as murky as the mind that conceived them? Actually, the voice in my ear seemed to be suffering both maladies: expletives four to fourteen letters long were clamoring for an audience with blatant disregard for the Doppler effect, and the immutable moss-green of the phlegm I could almost hear.

Whether voices can have bad mornings or not, I can. I was having one then and there. First call I get in the morning is from a "friend" complaining about how her HDD crashed and how I could be responsible for it. I was stupefied when I heard that, and when she went on to inform me that the catastrophe befell her after I forwarded an email from Reuters, I snorted. That was the signal, I'm thinking, for the barrage of mucosal sludge.

Even so, I don't like being looked down upon or frowned upon for hitting out at a messenger who's brought me bad news. That is unfair, to expect a receiver to receive all kinds of glop and remain silent. Come to think of it, that'd be the psychopathic silently-thinking cold-bloodedly-conspiring contemplatively thumb-twiddling Mephistopheles down the hall. An honest man should be allowed to lash out, to have it over with. The mistake lies with the dolt who set the messenger on his journey. He didn't sponsor any armour.

What can you do against voices? What can you do against something that seems to come from a head far, far away? You can shout back, sure, but that's head versus head. Can you trap voices in small black boxes? I don't think so. What's going to be in the box when you reopen it later is a rant without beginning or end, eviscerated neatly out of a morning it had sought to destroy but now, doing nothing to the evening.

How do you knock the serrated stiletto out of a voice that's waiting to stab you in the back?

A Song That Sang Itself

Vienna International Airport is small but interesting. I knew the ‘small’ part of it beforehand. The whole airport, though being divided into five terminals and displaying a confident sort of busyness, has the standard assortment of Duty Free stores to offer. However, the ‘interesting’ bit is something I think will remain so only for a few people.

When I took off from Stockholm’s Arlanda, I did not know that my connecting flight to Dubai had been cancelled, and that I had been rebooked into the 23.15 – a misfortune that left me looking at a stale 10 hours of waiting and watching the clock tick slowly away. An SAS employee at a helpdesk informed me about this much later – but what made the difference was that she really seemed sorry about my status quo. Also, the free food coupons!

Anyway, I landed at Vienna with nothing to do at all and, for the first time in 20 years, realised how important spending time usefully actually was. In those 10 hours, I must have spent at least five walking up and down the longer span of the airport. The other five, I spent looking out a window. That’s also when things were interesting.

The window looked out into an area where the planes seemed to be docked. The runway was a little way ahead, and that particular afternoon, it was very foggy and wet. Below, I could see the engineers bustling around with all their equipments and waiting for aircraft engines to go faulty or the wings freeze up. Just behind me was a shop whose banner read ‘Travel & Care’, and they played good music. Just then, Annie Lennox’s ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’ was going on, and my calves were starting to ache. I turned around and decided to lean against the railing set adjacent to the wall. A short while later, when I saw a couple staring pointedly at something behind me, I turned around again, but this time, for quite a view.

The metal birds were dozing while the brains ran around them in their trucks and what-nots. There was a group of crows in the distance, dancing with the wind. A parking lot below was full of cars except for one empty slot, into which was a black car was now easing. The vipers on its windshield were on full swing and its indicators flashed into the blockade brightly.

A gentle drizzle began just then, and if you had been there and put your face against the window, you could’ve seen each raindrop crash and slide against the Perspex. It was like watching the world from inside a prison cell: as each drop landed, a battle was fought just a few inches away from your eyes. So much torment and turbulence at the other end, and you stood here admiring a beauty that only you could see. It was beautiful.

The song changed to Green Day’s ‘Wake Me Up’. Just then, on the runway, an Emirates jet was building momentum for its ascent. Its tail fin cut through the fog like a burning blade through butter, and the dense cold clouds formed a smooth streamlined trail at the end. After the plane took off, all that remained was a streak of water suspended limply in the air, along with billows of dew that had been whipped off the ground. September ended there, and when I looked up, there was a lonely crow flying around in circles.

“Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last…“

The world just beyond that window was like a song that was singing itself, moving from one statuesque verse to another. The crows flying around the place as though not knowing what to do or what to make of the great white elysian birds beneath, the black car now easing itself out of the parking slot as nonchalantly as if it had nothing to with the bustle around it, the rain drops and their ceaseless pounding wanting me to belong to a tempestuous world. Music and nature are enigmas, and will remain so for quite some time to come.

Vienna International Airport was a ghost town that evening, and I was happy to be an ethereal part of it – if only to myself and to those unconcerned crows.

The Dreaming Grey: A poem

Mildewed in cold February were the leaves and grey
In the evening winds where they gently lay
        In pursuit of some joy forlorn
        Whereto the sands of time had never yet gone
        A winter’s fey, a winter’s fey
Mourned the mildewed leaves where they gently lay

Cloaked in dreary snow were the windows today
Overlooking streets where children ne’er played
        Forever lost in a neighbour’s dreams
        Lending an indifferent ear to our silent screams
        A winter’s lay, a winter’s lay
Called the windows unto the streets empty and insatiate

Unborn and nigh loveless were the words left to say
Yet hope remains for a callow to endure the starved clay
        When leaves may know their green again
        And windows may live their dreams under the rain
        A summer’s day, a summer’s day
So the children may remember the vaunt it is to play