Remembering Macedonia. Chapter Five. Tropical Storm.

And we decided to leave. Leave behind this world of illusions and step out out and feel the earth beneath our feet and the breathless gasp of life clamped in our fists. The Great Renunciation. Just that, for all the life in me, I just couldn't place what there was to renounce in this joke of a world, in the first place.

The seven beer bottles had sweat in the humid midday air and left round pools of condensation on the cracked, ash-strewn wooden table. The air was choked with cigarette smoke and the sultry smell of scanty rain. Smoke and the funeral pyre of life as we knew it.

Nirvana. Parinirvana. All that was left was the divine rebirth into eternal time. The ashes scattered into those round pools of time.

I was sitting by the highway - my fraying linen shirt open to the breeze, my faded jeans soaking up the sun, my half-torn boots growling impatiently on the sand. I could see Alex walking down from the horizon, his shoulders held up, his feet striding over the incompetence of melancholy. The sun shone behind his back, and the breeze on my bare chest brought the tattered loneliness of lavender and Mac's perfumed hair.

While they stood in the alley, his head already swollen with cold beer and summer rain, he was assaulted by the very same scent that clawed through his senses and made his hair stand on end. He would have taken her then and there and lost himself in those shadowy groves of her hair. That scent of loneliness.

But they didn't speak a word. He brushed a lock of hair from her petal-pink ears, but his whisper came out as a sigh. He smiled, as his fingers drew a line down her cheek. But her face was drawn and her lips taut with the grimness of a stormy sea. Her eyes caught him in a distant silent stare - Midas and Medusa locked in this woven tapestry of fate.

It was not that she understood. But neither did she question. But those eyes were filled with such a density of resolution that it shocked and scared Alex for the only time in his life.

The black hole of desire. The singularity of dismal fate.

When he turned his back to her, his paces decided as always, Mac didn't keep staring on or drown the silence of her existence in long-drawn wails. She tied her hair back and vanished into the unreal brightness of the tropical day.

But waiting by a deserted highway, I heard tears that never came trickle down her face. Somewhere, far away, a tropical jungle would be battered and lashed by incessant torrential rain. Or maybe it wouldn't rain for a thousand years forth.

Alex was by my side now, his face lit up with the jubilation of life, and the freshness of every breath he spewed out into space. He gave me his arm and I picked myself up, shaking the dust off my jeans. The sun behind our backs; the night, the road and eternal life spilling out of the horizon.

Remembering Macedonia. Chapter Four. Trailing Fingers and Rings of Smoke.

Those were heady days. The painfully white sun beat your head to a throbbing, pulsating mass and everything burnt with a brightness that hurt your eyes. The nights, sunk in the acrid stench of cashew liquor and the salivating smoke of hash, were as warm and swampy and nauseous as a hairy armpit.

I was never good with names . And those nights when I wasn't listening to Alex's myth of the constellations or shoving someone's face up a drainpipe, I would disappear and coalesce into some nameless dark alley whose existence in the world was heralded only by its putrid smell of sweat, dirt, smoke and piss. There, nameless women passed through my hands, their faces receding into the darkness of night and memory. Fuck that. Rather, I think i never cared to notice their faces or whisper out their names in the dark. All that mattered was the raucous odour of sweat and bad breath, the stale taste of smoke-stained lips, the greasy locks of hair clutched in my arm, and the rhythmic unison with which our bodies melted, moulded and moved.

As plastic as clay. As mechanical as a fucking locomotive. They often whispered that my name had more to do with my virility than my obstinacy.

But Alex was different. He had Mac. Macedonia, who filled his days with whispers and caprice. Macedonia, who filled his nights with the rhapsody of longing.

She was summer

And winter and the scent of

The thousand seasons in between

She was poetry

And the muse

Her ringing laughter

Of pleasant nights on a breezy beach

Her black hair

A tumultuous ocean at night

Where his fingers trailed

As they brushed her nape

The spray of ocean

And the scent of salt

And wheat and fresh-cut grass

Her breath on his neck

As she whispered and wept

Her voice soaking his face

In summer rain

Alex woke up when her half-moon eyes lit up like the rising sun. He slept among the enchanted lime-scented forest of her hair, that vineyard of dreams and memories and eternal childhood.

Mac, whose dreams gave birth to the days of the Buddha. Mac, whose bated breath was the distant rumble of cosmic rebirth. Mac, whose deep ocean eyes into which the icy glaciers would melt and spill over some day. Mac, whose fingertips felt the texture of time and yearning, loneliness and remembrance.

Yet, when Mac said she loved him, Alex McIntyre was benignly silent; his thin lips retreating into the masked serenity of his face and his eyes tracing the ringlets of smoke from a stubbed-out cigarette.

Remembering Macedonia. Chapter Three. Alexander McIntyre and the Question of Life.

Alexander McIntyre was the Buddha. I never doubted it for a moment. Knew it the moment I met him - those eyes locked in the perpetual state of oneness with the whole of being. Buddha's parinirvana. Alex was what the Buddha had achieved through his death. Knowledge. Wisdom. Cosmic bliss.

Alex had read every book, every line, written or thought by man. He never read to know more. He knew everything there was to know the moment he was born. He was nestled in the womb of the cosmos and weaned at the teats of the Milky Way.
He read to ascertain; to confirm the legitimacy of the anguished self-expression of troubled humanity. Every drop of ink ever spilt were merely drops of Alex's volatile blood, blotted up in paper before they vanished, were absorbed back into this cosmos of meaning. He was the illegitimate gran'dad of all human thought.

Alex was also the happiest and most self-content soul I ever met. His ears were tuned to picking up the resonant thrills of music of a windswept rainy night or a car screeching to a crash (door-frame shattering, windscreen imploding, et al). And when you looked into his eyes, you could hear the very veritable symphony of the Universe, from the drop of a pin to the birth of a star, playing blaring out loud like a cranked up transistor. He never had reason to be bored.

All the same, despite his self-restrained calmness, the Buddha understood the unassailable logic of life.
The world is full of sorrows.
Desires are the main cause of sorrows.
Sorrows can be ended by killing desires.
Desires can be killed by unravelling the illusory nature of the cosmos by following the Eight-fold Path.
Undesiring life. Life not to be spent attaching itself to ephemeral motives working towards illusory desires. A blind man grasping for a wisp of smoke.
The only reality of life lay within yourself. The twitch of a muscle, the salty sweat on your bare chest, the blood throbbing at your temple. And the undeniable reality of pain. And the irredeemable fact that our blood is alloyed with iron, and it is all so easy to rust over.

So, Alex and I lay countless nights, on concrete drainpipes and railway sleepers, breathing in the collective stench of humanity curdling the air, as we stared out into the sky connecting the stars. We did not need to speak. He drew the lines on the dark backdrop of the deep blue night sky, and the stars danced before the our eyes inebriated with hash and cheap country liquor. The stars recognized us by face. We, too, were two hapless beings shackled down on Earth by something as vainly unseeable and untraceable as gravity. Gravity... very grave indeed.

It was through this orchestra of the night sky, where I learnt about of Rembrandt and Plato, the Summer Solstice and the tapir, that I met the brightest star in the night sky. She was called Mac, Macedonia.

Remembering Macedonia. Chapter Two. The Glacier and the Jungle.

And Alex was standing at the door, half torn off its hinges. His summer blue eyes were locked on me, transfixed by this wild beast of dark and dreams and nightmares.

Blue cold eyes.
Distant planets in their orbs,
Or satellites in space
Watching everything unseen,
Clutched in place by those
Talon-like eyebrows.
Admiring,
Yet questioning.
Eyes too sharp,
Trained on reading
The blank eternities of space and meaning
That lay between the lines
Of the printed page.

I hated the gall of him. His questioning stare that seemed to lay me bare and dig claws and talons deep into my flesh and pull out my innards in some sort of grotesque pagan ritual sacrifice. The cold neutrality of the hard altar stone. Would just have walked over to him and pummelled his head so hard, all that would be left would be a cracked bone bowl of thick lukewarm porridge.
But those eyes knew too much. And beneath the self-controlled serenity those eyes knew what I was doing. They burnt with the same blue heat of the Bunsen burner and the alpine glacier.

I dropped that ragdoll of a head. Stamped the light out of it with one languid step of my heavy foot and felt the crunching sureness of dislocated teeth and pulverised bones. Reached out for the beer bottle on the table and walked over to Alex, meeting the icy glacier stare of his with the warm fetid swampy jungle of mine.

What followed, as they say, was the history of man.

Remembering Macedonia. Chapter One. The Colosseum of Dirt.

Still remember the day I first met Alex. My eyes were blurred by the sweat dripping off my brow... The warmth of fresh blood as it spilt down the side of my face... The very exuberant vivacity of life and living - sweat and blood. I was chewing my moustache - a thick black caterpillar - my mind locked in contemplation. Locked in my vice of a palm, Fernand-o-whatever-fucker, his head look small, inconspicuous, unimportant. He was knocked out already. But that greasy-with-sweat unimportant head of his posed a very important question - as important as life itself, to take the next breath or not. Bar table or beer bottle?

Chewing moustache, contemplating this vehement question, my eyes - blurred with sweat and blood and life - were scanning the wreckage I had left behind. A dozen broken tables and upturned chairs. Half a dozen or so slumped bodies, with faces blotched an shirts in shreds. Beer bottles lay shattered on the floor, blood mixing freely with alcohol and flowing down in dirty veins of grime. The lighting was dusky and the creaky fans croaked in a cacophony of applause.

I was the Roman gladiator striding over this Colosseum of dirt. I was Jimi-fucking-Hendrix smashing his guitar on the amps. . I was the stench of sweat wafting up in the tropical sun. I was the taste of mud spiked with cashew liquor.
Bucephalus (Bu, as they called me). Ox-headed. Obstinate. Black-maned. I was whatever the fuck you called life.

Roadwards

Leaving behind the track of memories

And dry leaves blowing in the dusty road,

I step out

Head out,

Roadwards.

Penniless,

Bagless,

And soul-less.

The sweltering heat -

A sun as white as snow -

My eyes reddened

By the dust on the road;

My face, a mask of grime.

The road stretches forever.

Cutting across

Plains and palms,

Deserts and farms,

Railroads and dams,

Pains and balms,

Bhajans and psalms.

The road cuts through

Right and left,

Right and wrong,

Heaven and Earth.

The road is attempted immortality.

It never ends.

Its median lines

Never wavers.

The road is redemption.

The road was dug up

And leveled out

By eyes searching

Beyond the horizon.

And eyes, with regret,

Wanting not to look behind.

My eyes are burning

With the sweat

And heat

And a million colloidal dust particles

Peppering it

With the predictable unpredictability

Of Brownian motion.

No, they are not tears

Of sadness,

Weariness,

And worries.

No tears, no regrets

Anymore.

The cinematic silence is shuddered into the reality of dust, heat and acrid kerosene smoke as a 12-tonne truck pulls over; its brakes creaking in unison as it descends from Heaven or Hell or wherever on Earth it comes from. Its chrome grille gleams in the midday sun. Its orange face is as bright as fire.

The driver's name is Charon. He is blind. Not that it matters. The windscreen is caked with an inch of dust. All that matters is that, for a few shared cigarettes, he can drive you across to Oblivion.

Everyone makes that mistake.

Pinning spots down on maps

(Like insects to be dissected and have to be pinned down 'cause they may run away from scapels and spatulas and inquisitive human fingers.)

And pinning camp tents

And picnic baskets there

When you reach.

Jolly good holiday.

Without feeling

The dust in your eyes,

Grime on your face

And the taste of exhaust fumes

Of the thousand cars

Which never stopped.

The road is the destination.

The road is where it ends

And where it begins.

Like life itself.

There is nothing outside the road

Or beyond it.

A few threadbare memories

And dry leaves scattered by the dusty wind.

Goodbye Macedonia

Farewell Andromeda

And a million synchronized notes

A satin black sky pierced with stars

Leaving Macedonia

Blurring in dust

Goodbye Macedonia

Farewell at last.

Macedonia.

Whom Alexander left behind to conquer the world.

Macedonia.

For whom Alexander, at 22, left behind his world to bring back the world.

Macedonia.

Dreaming of whom Alexander drowned himself in inebriation, cradled by the rivers of Babylon.

Distant Macedonia.

Whom Alexander never met eyes with again.

His fingers traced the white star on Bucephalus's black-as-death forehead.

Whispered names of stars in a crisp springtime Mediterranean sky.

Turned his eyes skywards

Searching lonesomely for familiarity

In a sky clouded with

Grime, and smoke and a million wraith-like spirits

Rising from the embers of burning Hydaspes.

Long-dead memories float off

And become murky clouds

Strangling nostalgic skies and referential stars.

Searching for a line

To thread together the stars

Into a necklace of pearls

Kissing Macedonia's slender neck,

Realization dawns in a smoke-stained autumn evening

Of clotted blood and plundered bronze.

Nothing happens for a reason.

No grander scheme

Nor a silver thread

Joining the heavens.

Vainly searching for a garland of pearls

He left Macedonia

Dying in dust.

Yellow Sunshine, Blue Filigree

The sunshine on his neck was like the warmth of her breath. The sun played among the entangled locks of her hair - all gold and bronze and lustrous black,

He took her hand in his.

Tender. Fragile. A lotus stalk.

And ran his fingers over the back of her hand, tracing the pale blue filigree of veins that showed through the paleness of her skin.

Her eyes. Always half-dreamy. Lost somewhere in the dense foliage within herself. She wasn't smiling. Not surprized. Just dreamily waiting for each moment to drag itself into the past.

If only I could look into your past, he whispered. if your palm can hold hidden all the secrets of your future, it seems just logical that I could read your past here. Flowing timelessly through these blue rivers of your memories.

And the present? Her voice distant and dreamy.

The present? That's what we make every moment we live. That fragile line between two certainties. The fingertips of time. The touch of your hand. What we create that spills over the moment next to add to our past. Teardrops and icy glaciers which feed our rivers of memory.

Silent half-parted lips.

Half-dreamy eyes tracing the contours of some cloud.

A blue filigree.

And the warmth of sunshine on his neck.

Grey is bluer than you think

Good morning.

A weeping afternoon.

Not a wisping breath of wind.

The musty smell of tamarind

Trailing airy fingers through

Earth-soiled dew,

Rubber balloons and cigarette ends,

A dime and sixpence,

A few dropped tears,

Listless tingling fears,

Smiles and smirks

Embroidered into a book,

And a pistol in my hand that shook.

It is as simple as buttoning your sleeve.

Even simpler.

Idiot-proof. Sharp. Efficient. And no quivering quavering metallic heart.

One trembling finger

And a six-ounce slug

Explodes the silence in vehement self-conscious defiance

Cuts a straight line through the two inches of air

(A line too straight to be natural

Yet too straight to be man made either-

The lethal has a beauty that is incomprehensibly divine.)

And pounds into soft tissue

Crunching bone

And lodges itself into

Soft electric pulsating

Grey matter.

The body snaps out of synapse.

Acetylcholin.

Resounding echoes in an empty chamber

Of a sound that never registered.

Too quick.

Quicker that hopes and synapse hops.

Hops and barley and beer.

No thought, no regret, no fear.

Red blood. White bone. Grey matter.

The sky is grey.

And old and stale

As moulded out butter toast

With furry rhizophus spreading out black fingers into its very heart.

Black fingers.

Nerves of thought.

The wind is a faint reminder

Of a long forgotten secret.

Of words that made me smile.

Laugh. Cry. Fear. Long. Wish. Love. Yawn.

Feel.

The mould smells of the past.

Thick, sweet and balmy.

Like sweaty palms.

Warms me up.

The moment has passed.

The grey is blue.

Bluer than it seems.

The gun clangs on the floor as frail fingers let go.

Sweaty and warm.

Good evening.

Bad night.

As Buddha smiles, so do I...

It was definitely the blueness that called me out. Placid. Tranquil. That self-content smile of Buddha played all over the surface. And in all its serenity, the water seemed thicker than it possibly could be.

As I stepped out of the window - the wood smelt of grandma's tales - the air was so crisp, the grass cracked under the weight of my shoes. They gave in willingly, dreamily; caught inebriated in the surrealism of that winter morning. The warmth was a surprize. The sun was out and the sunshine held you warmly yet loosely. Like a lover who had known you all you life; its fingers gently exploring every edge and curve in your body. And the snow fell so lightly, it melted off your skin, leaving behind moist lips where it kissed.

The water still beckoned. In its blueness. Its softness was there for all to see. The grass, despite the morning dew and the uncertain snow, was still too sharp. So were the craggy hills behind it. In the watercoloured sky, the clouds were too sharp-edged - their edges too white in the morning shine. And the wind had a bite of coldness that pushed needles till my bones. The water, by obvious contrast, looked too soft.

Marshmallows. Cherry blossoms. A leaf dropt somewhere. Floating handkerchief. Down feather. Dandelion head. Steam rising from a warm cup of tea. Too sweet.

I was neck-deep in water now. Again, the warmth surprizes me. And the ripples i leave on my wake don't move too far, nor too fast. They seem too lazy to fight the thickness. Too pacified by Buddha's unknowing smile. I walk forward. Even deeper.

The Buddha is everywhere. His presence, everything.

I do not choke as i reach underwater. The water for all its swaddling thickness, has by now wafted to ether. I can still feel its thickness around me, and its touch. It feels like I am walking in a thick breeze that hugs me, wraps its soft arms around me. I see clearly. Too clearly to be underwater. And then I pause.

I can definitely feel it happening. That irrational heart-scoffing fear when you lose something you prize the most. Feel myself losing out. Not that it was material. Not that I ever valued them when they existed. Not that I never wished them to be torn away. But the loss... The contradiction dawns. They were all I had gathered all through my life. They were my unsigned bank cheques, my unnamed appartment, my framed sepia photographs. They were my promise for the future.

As I stood at the bottom of the lake of tears, I felt it all getting thicker, all around me. The wrapped arms hugging tighter. And I felt my memories, my hopes, my dreams turning into ether. Warm. Mellow. Soft. My vision's now clearer than ever. I could see each wrinkle, scar, bemused smile, buried sorrow, as my memories float around me. Away from me. I can see each molecule. The electron cloud. I feel I am being one with them.

As the lake opened its eyes to the watercoloured sky, on it played the Buddha's self-contented smile.

Betraying the cause.

Causality

The relationship of cause and effect

The principle that nothing can happen without being caused

There was blood seeping

Tracing lines along the grains in the wood

And marking out the cracks in the floorboards.

Blood spewing out of his half-open mouth

And his bleeding nose.

His eyes were half-closed.

Half-open.

Staring aimlessly,

Trying to make meaning out of the rust patterns drawn into the bottom of the refrigerator door.

Trying in vain to substantiate life

And place pins, and hold it down,

And dissect its viscera

As he lay, dissected himself,

In a pool of blood.

His blood.

The blood of the cause.

The high-octane fuel that once charged

That turbocharged mind of his

Which identified, improvised, illustrated, illuminated.

No doubt he started it.

His mind was the manifesto,

And here lay, bread and wine,

And a thousand delusions which escaped the confining quotations

And puzzling citations within that psychical text.

Now with the knife staved deep in his chest,

It still was not easy.

Cutting a shredded line through his heart and his left lung.

Blood oozed out.

Filling the chest cavity.

Pulmonary oedema.

His lungs compressed, filling up with blood themselves.

As he choked on the high-octane fuel

That kept spilling though his breath now.

The blood wrote histories on the ground.

Stories he meant to achieve.

Walk in front of them, at the head of the procession.

His chest bared open to bullets

And cannon-fire.

Wrote tales of forgotten beds

And forsaken love.

The story of a cause

And how it made sense of the world to him.

How he tried to make them see it.

All they heard was a mad man's ravings.

All they saw was a path paved to their grave.

The knife plunged into his heart.

Soft and warm; and red with blood.

Allegropolis. Episode Four. Upturning the Fishbowl.

The fishbowl of existence. That unabated sense of euphoria substantiated - matter and the immaterial - within the inebriated minds of a million memory-impaired goldfish. The nauseating sense of aloneness. Sobriety in the middle of energy-pumping rave party. Ohh!! the flashing lights... The blacklights and the numbing baseline... Elliptic Epilepsy. My head spins. Counterclockwise. Understanding what lies beyond - the real substantial. They wont listen. Bluddy senseless goldfish. They are caught in the dream. Between the non-existent past and the stillborn future, their world is a stretched out elastic band of a present. the tension tears through my being. [T = mg cos A + mv2/l]. I run for the restroom. Nausea.

The band snaps. The fishbowl topples to a side, water pouring down its side.

Water drips down my face as I step away from the washbasin.

The Lassitude and Longi(ng)tude of Loneliness

On retrospection, he felt certain he must have left his mind behind. The take-away counter, most probably, he thought to himself.

But, he didn't realize it then.

When he stood there, in the busy bazaar -

Shoulders bustling for space

A stream of rickshaws blaring air horns

The bickering of women and vendors

And catcalls of a few who leaned by the stalls scanning the crowd

The occasional whistle of the policeman

The ringing bells of cycles snaking their way through the crowd

The unmistakable market scent

Of incense, jaggery, sweat, salt,

Rotten cabbages, fresh fish and soiled paper -

This heady concoction of sensory perceptions we so distanced and muted, he felt he might have been overhearing someone else's thoughts. Again he didn't realize it then, 'cause his mind was elsewhere.

Resting on the clean grazed stainless steel and glass take-away counter, shuddering to the unusual chill, his mind was dreaming. And creating those exquisitely intricate dreamscapes it so often indulged in.

Her warm kiss of sunlight on his neck.

Her gentle breeze running frail fingers through his hair.

Her lazy sleepy waves whispering music to his ears.

Her scent was a valley of flowers and rain and sunshine.

Her hair, waves of an ocean in night.

As he stood in the marketplace, the summer sun turning the world a monotony of white, he was searching for secrets and truth, for reason and meaning, as he looked into the endless depths of her eyes. In those few moments of lazy transcendency, of silent mournful longing, he was the loneliest person on the planet.

Yet, he remembered vividly that he was with her the whole while.

Leftovers and Left-Behinds. Surviving a Revolution.

The table was rickety as it was, being put together from discarded bottle crates with boards nailed on top. A very certain tremor quivered over its surface when he banged his fists and pushed his chair back. The knife clanged on the ceramic plate, in tune with the distant church bells that centuries ago used to warn the villagers when the malevolent Putana prepared to spew smoke and flame and brimstone; that ominous note of dark skies, grey ash and blood red earth. A few crumbs of bread floated off and rested peacably on the table.

Peace.

The tip of the cigarette burnt bright red as he pulled in a drag.

The ash broke off and floated off with the dry desiccating breeze.

His eyes were fixed on the horizon.

She looked elsewhere, searching for an answer. Searching for a reason despite all the illogicalness that shrouded the age. Her nose twitched at the familiar tinge of cigarette smoke carried over by the wind.

Peace.

She sat at the table, brushing that lock of hair off her face. Her fingers ran through her scalp, entangled themselves in that forest of melancholy.

He was inside. Could hear the cupboards being slammed shut. Rustle of papers shoved down into a bag. The sharp click of the lighter as another cigarette was lit. The faint memory of smoke trails out of the shack again.

She did not feel sad. Just a sense of time catching up. An intense feeling of tiredness; like when you sit down halfway through a marathon you did not have the lung to finish. A knowing recognition that they could not outrun time, especially when one of them was perennially straining back and looking over his shoulder.

Peace.

And the the tale of silent evasion.

Of hiding away from time.

Trying to find

An island of recluse

From fire, and hell,

And brimstone

And the vicious anger,

Hatred, greed,

And that indefatigably alluring

Hold of ideology

And idealism.

The dream of peace.

She remembered. The tantalizingly melodious sound of the stream. Carving secrets on the pebbles and whispering them to the trees. She remembered his fingers tracing lines on the water; the same way they would draw lines down her back. And her neck.

That distant summer afternoon, long before the paradox of peace confronted them with its brutal banality, she remembered him writing their dreams in the water. She remembered how their dreams seemed to take tangible shape in the dexterousness of his fingers. And how they were washed away. Caught in that flux of time.

When he stepped out of the house, he was the very college boy she had fallen in love with in University.

His eyes were evasive;

Shy.

His face half-turned.

The unkempt hair.

That forest of melancholy.

And the overgrown stubble.

He slung his bag high

Over his shoulders.

Closed his eyes

Not to meet hers.

His footsteps downhill

An ill-tuned verse.

A fly with blue wings

And the leftovers.

When she left out her cry of anguish, he was too far to hear. Too far to turn back. Too far to meet her eyes, hold her waist and kiss her neck. Her voice was a strained violin note trying to drown the silence that engulfed her in that forested melancholy.

Silent Mind and the Midday Shade

The words were always there.

Laid out

And arranged

Like the gleaming silver cutlery

On the pressed linen tablespread.

Surgically sterile

Tools to cut,

Slice,

Chop,

Tear,

Stir,

Scoop,

And dish out

Reality in more palatable

Versions of the truth.

They were blunt in their sharpness.

But they were always there.

I never thought of them.

Never repeated them

A hundred-and-twenty-two times

Each day

As I scrubbed myself down with soap.

They were always there,

Dancing,

Even before the thoughts

Remained unthought of.

Like the shadows

Dancing on the tablecloth

As the trees romanced with the midday sun.

As if that shadow play

Had started much before

I was called over for lunch.

Or maybe even before the sun even rose today.

The mist of memories

Fall down as worded raindrops

And spill ink

Into a dictionary of incoherence.

I sat in the shade

Of that redundant romance

And saw a rainbow

Staining the midday sky.

Allegropolis. Episode Three. The Bridge over Lethe.

The bridge stretched forever, a thread of light held taut between civilization and the blind horizon. The rain was beating down on my hat; streams of water cascading off its rim. Through the curtain of water, I saw the blackness of Lethe pummeled white by the torrential downpour.

Allegropolis, where everyone smiled. Flanked on either side by the endless blackness of Lethe. And Lethe, that seemed to stretch till forever. Lethe, so wide that its banks disappeared beyond the horizon. The raindrops added to its width, and depth.

The water cycle. Evaporation. Precipitation. Evaporation. As I stood by the siderails, water running down my chin, the black oblivion seemed to be soft velvet. Somewhere i could sink in. Where the blackness would wrap me up. Hold me swaddled (or shrouded) in its womb.

Lethe was so full of thoughts, reflections, remembrances, recollections. So saturated, the words and letters got so muddled up, they no longer made sense. The raindrops were words too. Words cast out of mind. Words on exile. For in Allegropolis, all should smile.

The lights of Lethe were upon me. A psychedelic concoction of joyousness. As I looked back through the mirror, I saw that gilden thread of light fading into the white sheet of rain, somewhere in the middle of Lethe.

Lacing my shoes

I wished
The light night breeze would carry,
Softly swaddled,
The scent of your hair
Through the thickness of the air.
I wished
The words you dropt,
Casually strewn,
Would turn the black asphalt
Into a clear starry sky.
I wished
The air was as liquid,
And feather-light,
That it may blow off
My thoughts, hopes and memories.
But my shoelaces
Are entangled,
And I trip and fall
And wake up bruised.
The air was thicker
Than the blood on my arm,
As it spoke to me,
A voice deafeningly calm -
Ain't it better that you walk alone?
It better 'cause
The air ain't thicker
When you wont take away my breath.
The wind blows softer
Not ODing on crystal meth.
At least
Though i trip on my laces,
I dont fall over the words
You left on the ground...

Contemplations on Trance Music

The tones play on.
Muted melancholy.
The residual silence
Of some 140 beats per minute
Trying to
Shape the air into comprehension.
The beats were meaningless.
Some abstraction.
Craving to make sense
To seem significant
In the ensuing and preceding silence.
I was listening
To those
140 momentary spasms
Of silence.
Silence chopped violently into pieces.
Those 140 tiny moments
That paused with pulsating energy.
Like a heart.
Holding back to pump life
Down the veins.
The track peaks.
The violence is shudderingly real.
And once it breaks...
Oh bliss.
My heart falls back to its lazy rhythm.
The turntable is melting into haziness.

Their eyes were watching god

So says Hmmmbug.

As god was working his divine rearside off, trying to replicate his abode on earth, as he twisted clay within his hands and made out his divine image in two ungaily stickmen, those eyes didnt comment on his craftsmanship. If god was a better sculptor, we would have been living in paradise. He was the prodigious kid. He was also the prodigal son. Those eyes waited for him to falter. For him to fall on his knees, in frustration, for failing to be the promise he was born as.

God could have made a better sculpture. His fingers very nimble, dexterous. He simply chose not to. Thus was his revenge. We are collateral damage of god's self-exacted revenge on those formless eyes forcing him to form.

On a Green Meadow on a Misty Afternoon

The clear blue lake spread out in front of him. And beyond them, the distant blue hills paled until they merged and became one with the clouds and the pallid blue afternoon sky. The lake rippled in the breeze and the sunlight sparkled off the lapping waves.

He didnt know why he had to be here. Why now. He simply had that urge to escape. Run away from those thousand and five invisible hounds that all but clipped his heels. He was tired from running away. But it was even more tiresome staying where he was. And now as he left his body loose, stretched out on the bright green grass of that endless meadow, he felt like had left the lot behind, and maybe his body too. A feeling of transcendental bliss.

He sat up. Picked up that pebble lying next to him. This pebble too must have chosen to run away someday, and laid himself down by this lake until he became a fossil of his existence, he thought to himself. He felt its smooth cold texture on his palm, felt the weight of a thousand years that had polished him to compliance. He took a breath and launched the pebble towards the lake.

He wanted to see the pebble skim over the surface. Instead, the pebble plinked down to the bottom of the lake at the first bounce. Its ripples cut a swathe through the tepid waves that lapped the bank.

The anticipation of expectancy. That longing for perfection, of a perfectly smooth pebble skimming over the fragile surface of that dreamy blue lake, endlessly, until it disappeared over the horizon into the mist that shrouded the hills. It was not to be, for the pebble wished otherwise. It was an outcast like himself.

The frustration of a thousand shackling dreams, the bewildering anticipation of a thousand hopeful fingers that tore their way through the ground, pointing him the path they wanted him to take. And groping for his feet while he tried to trample over them. The thousand blades of grass all around all pointed skywards, that pinnacle of perfection.

His eyes were rooted far away in the distance. Across the lake where he had willed the pebble to go. Do the blades of grass point skywards there too?! Or may perhaps someone might send the stone skimming back from the far bank, through that veil of mist?

At the bottom of the lake, the fossil finally found solace among many more of its sort who didnt make it to the other bank.