Au Hasard....

Away from me forever…

2011-11-22T13:37:00.001-08:00

On just another morning much like today,
I saw her walking down the road,
As my heart flew in pursuit, it flew hard and away,
And here I am, ten and eight seasons later, looking down the lonely window.

I thought the pieces would finally come together,
I thought I had seen love at first sight, as they say,
A thousand letters and poems and prayers later,
My love is walking away.

A million possibilities of the road and bend,
And a million things I spoke and did,
None lead up to this end,
Where I end up alone and in pain.

On that day as I followed her down,
For a drink and banter through the early night,
In a fancy tavern called North Bound,
All things were perfect and the stars lay in line.

And many drinks later, as we saw four of one,
Singing a song we danced to at the tavern,
I walked a lovely lady to her home
And she kissed me a memory for the night.

My heart was beating a quake I’d never heard
And my head was light, from love or ale,
Was this just alcohol of love or both,
That was churning in my head and spinning my world.

Third time we met all the world lit up bright,
In sparkles and colors of passion set on fire,
More ale and brine flowed free that night,
And the future seemed to be coming together.

I had never felt joy and delight coalesce such,
And ride the night with appetite thus,
Over many peaks of thrills, pleasures and much
That I have never felt before.

As I dreamed, depleted and slack from joys,
Of the roll, pitch and yaw of love,
My heart dreamed up an orb,
As my mind and all its senses wandered in oblivious sleep.

I remember now the evening, like yesterday, when ,
We walked down the cold wintery river bank,
I told her of my love and how I wanted her to stay,
With me forever as my wife.

She smiled and cried and laughed all at once,
And a magical spark lit up those warm sunny eyes,
”Yes” she moaned, and we went for a dance,
Under the moonlight, ah! Such beauty was life.

I paid no heed to friend or family,
And repelled all struggle from the right lobes,
I shattered caution with spontaneous frivolity,
As we vowed love by the ocean and a setting sun.

The myth is a bigger enemy of truth than the lie,
But the myth of love is more potent than I could fight,
And as the beautiful spring bloomed into the winter dry,
A myth of love pulled over my eyes.

We danced and sang and made merry as summer came by,
I shared my prosperity and well being looking forward,
To a joy, mirth and love filled life,
On passed the happy days.

The rush of newlywed faded to everyday,
Time divided between love and sustenance,
I never saw the love fading, but fade it did,
As romance turned to pleasantry and in time to silence.

As the youth and wild through age and knowledge came ripe,
And time moved from brisk to slow and tenuous,
We moved from we to you and I,
And we moved away to different rooms, that became different worlds in time.

We smiled and wined and dined once every year,
Talked of the whirlwind days of love and danced to slow tunes,
And once every day to the next winter day, next year,
I kissed you goodnight.

But I never kissed you as I had kissed you the first time we kissed,
And you never felt the flames of the third time we met,
And we never tried to build back the myth from the bits,
As the pillars wore off slowly but surely.

This morning you were all tied and standing by the fireplace crying,
I knew in my mind this was the end, my heart wished it away,
”I think it is best this way than spend every day dying;
Fare ye well,” you said.

I knew then and I know now, I should have said something,
For you waited a long moment of silence for me to speak,
As I stand looking down the lonely window, as you are walking,
Away from me forever.

Want a cup of coffee?

2011-11-14T08:00:00.001-08:00

I woke up in the morning and there was no coffee in the pot and no ground coffee to put on the gurgling machine to bring together my caffeine fix. Which got me wondering, how interesting it would be to attempt to live through a day without coffee.This was my day of experimenting with the meandering question of whether coffee is an addiction or just, like God, a refuge when all else fails. My angelic thoughts speak aloud in a ministerial voice, “it is a bright morning and with the perfectly good weather, it will not be very tough.” and I went about to boot up my day when the devil thoughts whispered from somewhere in the corners, “it’s Monday my master!”

And between the good thoughts and the first withdrawal symptoms, it took all but ten minutes to experience the first withdrawal symptoms, the great Monday yawn, as I liked to call it. This particular variety had one very interesting characteristic. It generally occupies a whole minute of micro yawns that for an unexplained chain reaction resulting in a short term facial contortion that is almost straight out of a cliché ghost movie. While my conscious mind was occupied with controlling my mandibles from flying apart, I have unconsciously ended up in front of the empty coffee pot. Again! “It’s okay. It is just a yawn that will pass,” whispered Angelica, my angelic thoughts. The devil in me, was grinning, not a loud grin but one that was evil enough that was not something to be ignored.

It was busy on the outside with the city rushing in all directions with an endless purpose to keep moving. It seemed to be that a million people were in perpetual and yet random motion, each driven by their own force fields set up in a strange complex and continually conflicting maze. And as a whole, this complex universe had no direction forward or backwards. It all stayed stagnant somehow in spite of the tremendous individual momentums. Maybe Pink Floyd’s Wall was a better kind of existence overall given that there was a net direction that the rows or children were moving in. As compared to that picture of a depressing world, this one seems to be all dressed up and running around but within some predefined boundaries that were not expanding in any particular direction. Maybe, in some ways all the apparent freedom of choice and action was more depressing. Especially on a Monday morning when life seems void of meaningful direction.

I tried to focus on Angelica, as I called on her for strength, to summon the will to stop staring at the dizzying array of people dragging themselves on to the race that would be the week ahead. It was a most hypnotizing battle of immense will of angels of action fighting the devils of inertia that I had to join this morning without coffee. My devil called himself Mr. Monroe – call him the devil but he sure knew the meaning of style and even in his name he was contriving to misguide. Angelica was never the favorer of conflict and spent most of her time enabling me to fight the conflicts myself but this morning I needed her to get in the conflict to help stop the dull and ascending roar that Monroe was summoning up in my head. This would soon become a pain and would soon diverge from between my eyes like the fingers of a river forming its path to the sea; finding corners and cracks to flow through and spread across my mind.

“Hold on for a little bit longer and soon the day shall lend you the business to busy yourself away”, begged Angelica. Well, why not! The river of pain was gradually ebbing up towards the brim of the burrow closer to the right eye as I go about getting my notebook and references together for the day at the University. Ironically enough, I had planned to teach the Depiction of Angels and the Devil through history. As I stepped out of my shades into the sunshine, Monroe seemed to come all alive with great energy. His music was now beginning to flood the neural roadways with severely destructive intent.

Like a faint and isolated breeze, a sweet and bitter scent blew from across the busy corner and filled the minor void I was walking. Monroe conquered and froze all action. “You are wrong. This cannot be the only way,” cried out Angelica.

“Be at peace!” roared Monroe in vocal strength that was uncommon. “You stay out or else I shall…”

“What will you accomplish?”

“Do not try my patience Angie! You have not seen my full wrath yet!”

“Do as you will but you shall not conquer this battle,” Angelica said in a calm voice. A sudden vigor passed through my blood and my lungs swelled up with fresh air masked from the force of coffee. I came back from Monroe’s devilish spell and started walking towards my car. By some incidence my car was parked conveniently for a quick exit out of this crowded crossroad with a mist of fresh brew hanging in the air.

“This is war,” Monroe’s voice erupted from amid the throbbing music like a tribal song and then all went silent.

“Hold on, my love.” There was warmth in her voice of a mother’s embrace. It calmed me down from my now tearful desperation. “I am with you.” The silence was a pleasant window to sounds of the morning world as I absorbed the otherwise disruptive noise of engines – they sounded like I was in a dreamland watching over from a great distance as the random art of chaos spread across the streets.

I was almost at the gate when I smelled the whiff of a fresh and strong brew again. This was not common since there was no coffee shop around and the nearest coffee machines were too far to be able to carry this far. I started looking around. “Be cautious, this does not smell right,” Angelica spoke! Yeah, tell me about it. Do you think… As my independent thoughts trailed the world became hazy, spotted with dark oval spots. And it filled with a piercing screech, piercing through all of my bones and belly as everything went dark for a moment and almost instantaneously cleared up. And there is front of me was a woman in her late mid ages standing with a small baby looking in to my eyes from in front of my car. The woman was visibly shaking as she turned to walk away with her wailing burden. I put my head on the steering wheel to feel its cool leather smear the drops of brine across my forehead. “I cannot win this,” I whispered.

“Yes you can. Just hold on to your consciousness and let me fight the rest.”

“No he cannot,” Monroe again! “Get your fix, how tough can that be?”

As stubborn as Monroe grew, feeding continually on the mines of desperation and inertia that were being opened up, Angelica, the alter ego, fighting him while sapping on any minor remnants of positive energy left from the weekend past. Monday was no easy day to summon the strength to fight you worst will! I inched my car ahead through the gate trying to search for a happy place to run away to. These days, happy places were rare and almost always faded memories of very long back. I was back with my sand castles when, yet again, I saw the cup. My father’s cup of coffee that never seemed to empty till the day his life ran out, sat on the table. I remember it being a faded colorless entity but in this flash of happy environment, it shined bright red with a piercing halo around it reaching out from some deep seated memories to begin a carpet strike of my neural existence. My happy place dissolved into a bright red flash that was the beginning of a migraine.

Angelica was turning all rooms upside down looking for something, Probably another happy place for me to drown me in while Monroe looked on with a smile. He had seized all motion and just stood at the temple watching and smiling and holding the bright red cup resting over his left elbow. All she found were cups - brown, red, black, dark blue, more red; a dizzying exhibition of coffee cups. She shattered all the cups she could find with a muted crash and bleeding over the shards until all was red and turning brown with an overpowering fragrance. I could feel and almost hear the throbbing as I reached under the seat to pull out the stashed bottle of pain killers.

“Want a cup of coffee to swallow that down?” came a familiar voice floating from somewhere. It was Angie, an advanced history student at the window with a Starbucks cup. Instants became discrete event packets. “You don’t look well sir!”

The next event packet, streaming like a stained motion picture replaced the mid eastern face with two sweaty hands. One holding a Starbucks cup and the other, palm up, with two ibuprofen tablets resting on them. “Thanks Angie.”

Life at Sam’s…

2011-10-15T15:54:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning to the shrill bell of Sam’s alarm bell, I am not sure why he has Bee Gees as his alarm! But then, when he sleeps he is quite unaware of what is going on around him and without the brain shattering nasal overtone of the Gibbs he would probably sleep on until midday, like he normally does on Saturdays. And that’s only on the sunny Saturdays when he awakes only when the sun is burning my green engines at full torque from overhead. On the cloudy Saturday, without the sunlight in his eyes, he will probably even forget my water till the late evening. And his snoring gets worse when he is sleeping through the day; I can hear it all the way from the patio above the incessant chirping of Julia and John’s six kids. And let me tell you, J&J’s kids could beat the Gibbs to the Grammy, were it 1970s. They take to their parents, with their loud electric and high pitched chirping.

The J&J’s returned recently from a trip south, where I believe they had passionate courting before coming here to hatch out the fruits of their love. Another flock of chirpy bunch. Last year Anthony and Gina laid a smaller bunch and they were a calmer lot. Between Julia, John and their restless kids, the garden was quite lively and wanting for some peace. I am not sure where the name J&Js came from but it stuck and that’s who they were now. Somehow it suited the noisy and chatty family that they were. There had not been so much loud chatter since Sam’s last girlfriend moved out and that was eight seasons ago.

It does have me worried that Sam has not had a new girl in two seasons and that he might have hit a sort of a long term dry patch, spending inordinate quantum of time reading and cooking. The blinds have him hidden in the evenings, but from the changing tone of music from within the house, it seems that he is binging on alcohol. With Gianna, the last girlfriend there was some talk of settling down and having kids. This led to some hope in the greens that maybe some good would emerge from his endless streams of weekly women. Gianna stayed through the season and things were beginning to look good till there was a lot of screaming one night over an email from a past lover of Sam’s. It did not last for long but while it did, the name calling added significantly to my human lexicon.

Gianna was good to me and while she was in the house, my supplies were regular and the patio and garden got cleaned with never seen before frequency. From what we could tell in the patio and garden, she was a bit of a conservative and sometimes obsessive when it came to maintaining squeaky clean. That was good for Sam whose clothes would sometimes find their way on my feeble branches serving as hangers for drying his sweat. I distinctly remember some guys in a GE truck coming and delivering what looked like a washer and a drier, some time back; never quite figured out what kept Sam from using these equipments instead of water and sunlight like he is stuck in a 1970s Western!

I am told that Sam moved here after his grandfather passed leaving him this small house and a large garden to keep. He wrote his first book sometime in the first year and there was significant song and dance at the time in this garden. I was brought here by the surviving grandmother about two years afterwards when she came to look after him for a short while after his wife left, the hedge in the corner tells me. And the parties have been fewer and increasingly farther away since I was put in this rather dirty corner ledge. And, the guests have reduced in numbers ever since. There were some guests who kept coming back and I tend to count between one cluster party to the next as the time that Sam productively employed himself in his writing. But, I guess, his books have not done too well off late. And since I have not seen a gathering for over the passing of two winters, he is not writing much either. Now and then a rather heavy man with a cheap cigarette smell will stop by and have a drink with Sam, talk about prospective subjects and something and finding his ‘mojo’ again. With Gianna long gone and the fat man hardly serving as a prospective muse, it does not seem quite likely that Sam will find that ‘mojo’ thing he desperately needed.

The alarm kept going for some time, longer than normal. It would take Sam some time to hit the first snooze but never this long. Of late he would generally hit hit the snooze button about thrice before we saw his shape through the window walking around from room to room as if he were looking for something. He would continue this for an hour or so before making all kinds of noise as things got tossed from one heap to another. He would then step out into the open with a pink or blue cup with a strong smelling coffee and his writing stuff looking like one of the asymmetrical hedges in the garden. He would combine this time in the late morning writing some and mostly staring without focus into nothing specific in the garden possibly trying to find some inspiration to crystallize from what now was wilderness from the lack of proper keeping.

Most days he would suddenly wake up from his trance and rush out at a dizzying speed suggesting the triggering of the memory of some urgent activity that needed to be completed. Given the timing of the sun’s position I soon realized he would rush off to get something to fill a gastronomic void. His return would generally coincide with the falling of the sun probably after an equally long staring session in some other location. This time would generally be when the mailman, Gregory would come once in a while with sparse mail to drop into the mailbox. Once in a while some other suited people would drop in only to be disappointed buy a locked and empty garage. One time that Sam did encounter these suited guys, they were trying to sell a blower for dry leaves. I wish he had bought this piece of equipment so that the garden would look cleaner than it does right now. What a mess! With fall in full progress, even I am losing leaves all over his patio.

The alarm stopped well into the afternoon. Not sure if it had run out on its source of energy, because since we did not see Sam’s shadow tossing between rooms, or it was him turning it off. At least the song was off just leaving the J&Js to sound up the atmosphere. The cocktail of Bee Gees and J&Js’ buzzing was drying me out. The wind was stirring up by now and I could sense a storm headed overhead. Since Sam missed turning on the sprinklers, I hoped that some rain accompanied the storm. Storms were rare in these parts unless it was one that was stirred up by Sam, courtesy his girlfriends or a drunken party that made me thank the Gods that I was not born human.

The last fortnight had been oddly different though. There seemed to be great focus on the writing that on the emptiness of the greens. Maybe the mojo was found or would this be another script that would only get fewer guests than before, for the lack of this mojo thing.Sam had been out late and would come in sometime while I was in deep slumber or through the kitchen window, as he did when he left the key indoors and forgotten it in his rush to lunch.The wind had picked up speed now and the leaves were flying off and the branches were bending towards the west.

And there he is finally shuffling around the room! The landing of the garbage basket flying in the wind and landing against the outer wall of his bedroom – the crash probably woke him up from his deep sleep. He had slept through the afternoon and was probably hungry as I was thirsty by now. The sky was darkening from the impending clouds and the oncoming light and the J&J’s were quieting down. And there was another shuffle that I was not expecting. It is silent when compared to the shuffling noise but I was not mistaken. I was a little weak from the lack of moisture and I could be dreaming up the second shuffle. The sprinklers went on as Sam stepped out into the patio calling behind him, “Hey Jenna, come out here, looks like it will rain tonight!”

Strange Foreign Beauty

2011-10-09T18:59:00.001-07:00

Of course I find you beautiful! Most often in an erotic sense of the word but I have seen you in movies while stealing a view at a TV in a neighborhood TV store or exploiting the occasionally open window to the sitting room. I tried to understand and follow your language but I could only catch the accent neutral words. I thought you were aliens from an unreachable part of the great cosmos and here you are in strange loose clothes roaming the underbelly and clicking away with a large camera. The urge to stare is as strong as the devil is and for all the power of my will, I cannot help but stare at your fair skin and blue eyes, with hope that maybe my dreams will come true. I have dreamt so long about you as I sit in the long queue of vendors selling groundnuts to the affluent of my kindred who try and dress like you and walk and talk like you. What folly has bewitched them for they know not that Goddesses and humans do not mingle only by changing clothes and brushing complexion to their dark ugly skins.

And you must find it funny as you are stared at by most of who pass by and those of us who sit here everyday waiting on a glimpse of you. “Fools”, you must be saying in your mind. “Have you never seen a woman before!” But the women these pretentious of my kindred have lived, bred and lived their lives with are so distant from the stars where you hail from that they cannot control their awe of your beauty. It is like the candle in the wind drawing moths to their helpless doom.

What’s this? You are alone today wondering around without the God who touched your lips yesterday in front of the marigold bushes. You must not wonder alone in these streets infested by the devil’s impotent armies disguised in fancy clothes! Most of them have no love for the women they swore their love to. They will impregnate your ethereal innocence with their vile thoughts! These are called men in our tongue and they will never love you as you should be loved and cared for. You are too beautiful to mingle in the presence of such lesser beings with their problems of life. They live their sinful existence full of pretences and lies making profit of others’ misfortunes and lack of means. Surely the Gods of your stars must be aware of this low life and have warned you of the rift that separates you from us.

You smile at me from a distance. I cannot understand why you smile at me but I feel a strange heat in my ears and something in my empty stomach churns. I nervously smile back as you point a finger at me and then at you camera, “Picture?” I am not sure how you want me to look but there is not much variety I can present, you see. I hear a whirl and click! And whirl and click again! And again as you move to different spots continuously pointing your large camera to me. Shall you recommend me to your Gods for a better life. I hope you will ask them to help my abba get a job so my amma can stop her night job. Abba is always intoxicated and beats me and amma, but it is not his fault. Life has not been very fair with him and he has failed every time he tried. Amma does not like going with strange men in the middle of the night but I do not earn much you see!

“Thank you.” I offer you a small newspaper packet of warm groundnuts. This is what I can offer for a recommendation of special favors from the Gods who rule on your stars. I shake my head vehemently when you offer me money! No way I can take money from the Gods. And then it happens as you lips touch my cheeks! Everything turns hot and all my extremities freeze. My Goddess blesses me and paralysis seems to grip all my muscles for a moment as I smile and with extreme effort get three words out all the way from my stomach to my brain for translation and then to my vocal cords, “Thank you Madam!” The afternoon daylight seems to wane compared to your smile as you turn away and fade along the road.