Thursday, November 25, 2010

Red Moon

Toil, for you cant find relief
In the drunk-evening songs
Your mates sing by the mejhi;
Bound yourself in knots,
As irregular migrants filter
through government offices
Sweat, salt, skin:
Opium-feckled eyes.
Hold,the reins of your desire
On xewali-fragrant autumn dusks;
No point venturing out
Into the cold-blooded dwellings
of security posts
Only the half-dead roam
the curfewed streets
On nights like these.

Notes:

mejhi: a traditional bon-fire lit mostly during the Assamese festival of Magh Bihu in January.
xewali: (Assamese word) an edible flower, also called, night-flowering jasmine.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.

- Jean Baudrillard

Thursday, October 28, 2010

"Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" and speculative moo-moo

by David Hume, ed. by Dorothy Coleman:

"What peculiar priviledge has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favour does indeed present it on all occasions: But sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so natural an illusion."

and Heidegger has something to add too: "questioning is the piety of thought".

so let us doubt, reinvent and question all we have been told to accept. since half baked knowledge is no good, and we have passed that golden age of ignorance, one might as well go the whole hog!

Now is the time to manifest
Madness
Full Circle.
One has to rein
the Mind
to Focus.

And came upon these lines on a poet's webpage:

Art demands constant toil, incessant work, and undistracted time.

"Until you reach your liberated and free self, isolated from the constricting selves of others, you will not accomplish anything. Art is strongest love. It avails itself only to those who thoroughly surrender their whole existence to it."
- Forugh Farrokhzad

Highway City Rodeo

Handle bars on the reins
of a slow-moving jet-plane.
Troggling humpledy a’times
Et serpentine s’times.
All roads are marked in blue and white
and green signs,
yet It loses its means
to various ends.

Mechanics with smoth-clayed faces
Kids with potty flairs.
Baba in snake-skin suit (attire)
Powdered chalk on the face.

Love in the back-seats
of its carriages
And across
these aisles.

30 May’10

Scraps from a dialogue diatribe

On reading 'Paradise Lost', by Milton~

Aesthetics: Eve's spine is harmony.
Ethics: But was the snake historically grievanced?
Metaphysics: Thy will always be done.
Feminist: Revolution- death to the sexist tongues.
Avantgarde: Two-ness= 1ness+ otherness.

Adam: Where am I?
Milton: You are why the apples are savoury.

nonsense verse, mindscaping earnestly:)

To My Valentine-Ogden Nash

More than a catbird hates a cat,
Or a criminal hates a clue,
Or the Axis hates the United States,
That’s how much I love you.

I love you more than a duck can swim,
And more than a grapefruit squirts,
I love you more than a gin rummy is a bore,
And more than a toothache hurts.

As a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea,
Or a juggler hates a shove,
As a hostess detests unexpected guests,
That’s how much you I love.

I love you more than a wasp can sting,
And more than the subway jerks,
I love you as much as a beggar needs a crutch,
And more than a hangnail irks.

I swear to you by the stars above,
And below, if such there be,
As the High Court loathes perjurious oathes,
That’s how you’re loved by me.

Poker PotLuck, a scene re-enacted.

Scene: Sunny morning. A colonial club in Maymyo, Burma. two gentlemen shake hands, exchange names, Byron, an experienced pokerface urges Ballistic, the curious newcomer, novice-at-poker to the table. ...

52 cards unfurl,

Byron: Should we deal than?
Ballistic: I have dealt in microfinance in detail.
Byron: Lay them cards, mate. Lemme show you the Royal Flush, first.
Ballistic: O brimmingbroomsticksbloomsburydale, you are of noble blood, after all!!!
Byron: Foul!

Delight!

Let all your fantasies fly
To a bower-garden under
the window.
Lots of green;
and mauve flowers,
smooth petals and
soft pollen on the tips of tendrils.
Kite-flying festival
Overhead,
In autumn’s titillating temperatures;
we hug closer in
our bower-tower
and gaze out at the painted
blues skies dotted
with multiple bearded sheep
stretched out on a vast canvas
for our hungry eyes.

23 Oct’10

Ambers and Woodsmoke

Inhale, Exhale,
The mist turns a shade heavier;
As the story unravels mystically
High notes of bird- song
fill the stealthy time:
One catches the wayward breezes
Who whisper erotically
at doorsteps,
woodsmoke smell mingled with pungent sweat
water-diluted brushes of black paint
smudged with charcoal stiffs…


Fire crackles,
Colors explode,
Senses heighten,
As our feet dangle
on the edges of our dreams.

August'10, Vattakannal.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

time warp looking glass

time is in a loop, i am in a warp
in a strip that can be
continuously replayed,

like a new vibrant dream,
like, a strange explorative landscape,
like a powerful work of art,
a hollow scream inside your visera,
waiting to burst out
flow through you raptured,
and,
rock gently the ruptures
of faith and desire.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

In the name of the Destroyer

Today the forget-me-not blooms
anticipating its monsoon;
Dogs announce the advent of a restive summer;
This season, summer outsmarts spring
And monsoon is a wayward witch.

This watermelon seller wanders around the old city
Singing with a parched throated voice
Of oriental princesses bound by a curse
and of the estrangement of Nature.
City-dwellers hear his refrain
Their tastebuds tingling with a known thirst,
a desire for the here and unknown beyond..
Flesh, seeds and rind
might just quench these primitive urges.

Harlequin dance-theaters
with a twist of magpie-like flitting romances,
high on tales of raconteurs cooling off,
stealing time to smell the scents of flora and fruit:

a desert dust always mixed in the air.
No sea in sight
The (hot) earth will swallow these waterdrops…

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Soundtrack for a Revolution Trailer



Want to see this movie on the African American Civil Rights Movement, with great music as background score..

Chef Bora and Little Paradise :)

http://www.timesnow.tv/Aromas-from-Assam---Part-1/videoshow/4345760.cms

the other

Trinkets at the market-square
10-odd money changers,
One lone ATM.

White, brown, yellow,
(haha, correction please)
Intermingle and experience
In a tenuous existence.

Shrines for living gods
And a repertoire of symbols:
Drum bells, jambo, chants
Prayer beads of a turquoise color.

Refrains of a meditative melody
Giving glimpses of sensitive lives
Viewed from other quarters.

- sushmita kashyap
- 24th May, 2010

something i composed on a still standing bus. crap. but critique. it
is prose n poetry now. i should work on turning it into poetry.