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I shifted in the bed, opened my eyes to a conversation in the kitchen,
which would emerge again with tear-drenched eyes, later day, on
someone’s funeral. That’s how dead and lost people are declared
of “being missed”. I sorely miss those mornings when I opened my
sleeping world to the music of little birds, a few familiar ones like
sparrows in the badam tree, and softly lapping waves of the sea.
Things changed in my life. So dramatically. But not something worth
talking about. What I see, touch, move about, or talk to, feels strange
to me, though they look familiar as I grew up with them. Perhaps, this’s
how everyone feels when they come back home to their families, after
a few expeditions in life – failed or successful. I lie as still as possible
for as long as possible, in the bed, filling a body of emptiness with
a few pieces of words and pictures written or drawn on the walls,
which I gathered during my evening walk yesterday: someone has
a new glamorous car parked in front of his home, someone just
had returned from a land where everyone looked at him wondering
how different and foreign material he looks and talks like, someone
moved into a freshly painted house, someone lost his mother,
someone gave a cute puppy dog a home, someone left his job
and idles away time at home, a mother stood in the kitchen crying
for her daughter, as she does every day, a fresh war broke out
in some corner of the world, someone settled down in her new
neighborhood, someone wrote the final note in the stillness
of the night, a group of stranded penguins returned to the sea.
Someone walked away from his guitar feeling guilty about what
he said to the woman he is in love with. Outside the day, slowly, is
progressing, without changing the light in my room much.
The radio spreads songs on my face filled with despair. The ceiling,
under the pressure of my constant stare, would break up, soon,
into pieces. Everything changes, closer or further away.
{Pic : Our Balcony during the not so relentless monsoons. Taken by Munny at home}
…people spoke of my house
as ‘the house with the flowers’ ; it exploded
geraniums : such a beautiful
house , with the
dogs and the small fry.
…can you remember my house with the balconies where
June drowned the dazzle of flowers in your teeth?
- Pablo Neruda’s ‘ A few things explained’
{Pic taken by Munny at home: Fresh blossoms from the garden taking a bath in the clay bowl}
Things fall apart
in our houses,
as if jarred by the whim
of invisible ravagers:
not your hand
or mine,
or the girls
with the adamant fingernails
and the stride of the planets:
there is nothing to point to, no one
to blame – not the wind
or the tawny meridian
or terrestrial darkness;
no one with a nose or an elbow
or the lengthening span of a hip,
or a gust of the wind
or an ankle:
yet the crockery smashes, the lamp tumbles over,
the flowerpots totter
one after another
crowning the lapsing October
with crimson,
wan with their surfeit of violets,
others holding their emptiness in, circling
and circling and circling
the winter,
till the bowl with its blossoms
is gruel,
a keepsake in ruins, a luminous dust.
And the clockface
whose cadences
uttered
our lifetimes,
the secretive
thread
of the weeks,
one after another,
yoking the hours
to the honey and quietude,
the travails and births without end –
even the clock
plunges downward, the delicate blues
of its viscera
pulse in the splintering glass
and its great heart
springs open.
Life grinds
on the glasses and powders, wearing us threadbare,
smashing to smithereens,
pounding
the forms ;
whatever is left of its passing abides
like a ship or a reef in the ocean,
and perishes there
in the circle of breakable hazard
ringed by the pitiless menace of waters.
Let us gather them, once and for all – the clocks
and the platters, cups carven in cold-
into a poke with them all and
down to the sea with our treasure!
there let our furniture smash
in the sinister shock of a breaker;
let the things that are broken
call out like a river
and the sea render back to us whole
in the might of its crosscurrents
all that we held of no worth,
the trumpery no hand has broken,
but still goes on breaking.
Silence is all we dread
There’s Ransom in a Voice –
But Silence is Infinity.
Himself have not a face.
It’s because of them. Isn’t it?
You slam the receiver down, and wonder what to do next.
You close the door, sit down on the toilet with the seat lid lowered,
and give the floor a blank look for sometime. Or slam your fists
against the walls until it hurts, fill yourself with some unknown rage,
familiar tears. It does not seem to help at all. You do not understand
how cruel they can be. You do not understand any of this.
You sleep thinking of this “new acquisition”, which seems busy in
laying down a stone fence around your world. You wake up to see
stained cheeks, worn facial features, a fresh new wrinkle of sadness.
It’s because of them. Isn’t it?
You walk around as if you are in a bizzarish state of the union
with failure, a charming sight, so understated for them to steal
some glances from you when you are not paying much attention.
You look so boring, some sensible dress hung down loose over
the shoulders, which feel much lesser confident today. Your feet are
frozen inside the carriage- the shoes. You do not understand any of this.
You are making friends with the bitch inside you, which barks hysterically,
at those careless humiliations, casual dismissals, they make. It’s been done.
The Damage. You are weary of them -People who come with words.
Yes, you are weary of them – People who come with words.
Wearing no emotions. People who stitch a wretched soul out of you.
They do not settle for nothing less. They create stuff that pains most.
They are in the business – Casual Dresses for Inhumans.
After thought : “Lessons on How to be nice to others, how to be understanding towards others, need to be taken for such creatures in some class room. Admission is open to all age groups, both the sexes, old, old getting younger, young and young getting older. Kindness needs to be Advertised in & around the city – on the hoardings! such a wrecking influence, the world I work in and live about, has on me….”
{Link : Pink Floyd Or stay on as One more stunted mind}, someone who I write to these days, said something truly valid, ”People are being designed to maintain STATUS QUO in Organisations or Work places” .
Life’s all about – wooden benches, classes, stunted minds, Ants, Grasshoppers, Teachers’ pets, Bosses’s pets, Sleepers, and Coaches! A vicious circle is drawn with a renewed vigor ,time and again. Huh!
We don't belong to each other. We belong together. Some poems belong together to prove the intentionality of subatomic particles. Some poems eat with scissors. Some poems are like kissing a porcupine. God, by the way, is disappointed in some of your recent choices. Some poems swoop. When she said my eyes were definitely blue, I said, How can you see that in the dark? How can you not? she said, and that was like some poems. Some poems are blinded three times. Some poems go like death before dishonor. Some poems go like the time she brought cherries to the movies; later a heedless picnic in her bed. Never revered I crumbs so highly. Some poems have perfect posture, as if hanging by filaments from the sky. Those poems walk like dancers, noiselessly. All poems are love poems. Some poems are better off dead. Right now I want something I don't believe in.
{Painting : Van Gogh’s Village Street in Auvers}
There was no water at my grandfather’s
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people’s house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor’s cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.
Lost Generation by Jonathan Reed….{http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA}
I am part of a lost generation
and I refuse to believe that
I can change the world
I realize this may be a shock but
“Happiness comes from within.”
is a lie, and
“Money will make me happy.”
So in 30 years I will tell my children
they are not the most important thing in my life
My employer will know that
I have my priorities straight because
work
is more important than
family
I tell you this
Once upon a time
Families stayed together
but this will not be true in my era
This is a quick fix society
Experts tell me
30 years from now, I will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of my divorce
I do not concede that
I will live in a country of my own making
In the future
Environmental destruction will be the norm
No longer can it be said that
My peers and I care about this earth
It will be evident that
My generation is apathetic and lethargic
It is foolish to presume that
There is hope.
And all of this will come true unless we choose to reverse it .
Read the message, then read it again in reverse.
Which generation do you belong in?
Before I start this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me
Moment of Silence is a controversial poem by Emmanuel Ortiz published on September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. The poem links the history of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, the War on Terror, environmental racism, and structural violence to the attacks. This is one of first such linkages in public record.
elderlywomanprayingforMumbaivictims
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.
And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.
embargo against the country.
Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam – a people,
not a war – for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives’ bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war … ssssshhhhh….
Say nothing … we don’t want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.
Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador …
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua …
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos …
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west…
100 years of silence…
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness …
So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.
Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be. Not like it always has
been.
Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa,
1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.
And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.
If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.
If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.
If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.
You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all…Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing…For our dead.
EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002.
Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love
We hurry back to resume our awaited commissions:
the press’s annoyances, our bitter disputes and our
wars, ferments, infirmities, a battering music
that strikes at us without letup : we are
back in the ranks on the barricades :
though everyone takes us for dead, here we are
as before, with our counterfeit smiles, flinching,
we say, at the thought of our looming oblivion,
there on a palmless plot in the sea
where noses are chiseled in stone
like triangles traced in the sunshine and brine –
on a minuscule navel of ocean,
denying the spaces, closing our eyes to the ultimate purity,
the tribes who raised the nude stone and
the verities none dares to claim as a loving participant.
Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love
That is my cowardice now, the witness I bear :
I was meant for more tentative edifices.
Here in a waste without walls, a capital
hacked out of sunlight and salt, contemplation and stone,
Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love
I look back with the others, a trespasser,
afraid in myth’s limpid perfection, seeing only
blue silences encircling the statues.
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