a well lived life. If you're

a frog, you can call

and announce it,

or not. Nobody actually cares.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

Everything tears. Let

the tears be.

Soon there will be

more, and less.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

I think she'll come back

another one said, shaken

or stirred by a story. Moment

I knew this one would

also leave. Ah, well.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

I've ( Read more... )

The rains have paused

leaving only the cinnamon of a kiss

withdrawn. About three sounds

now, and only one of them is me,

breathing. The flowers are still

yellow, after I have missed them

fall.  I see only the faraway shine

of puddles in the empty playground.

I am an optimist, and I have learnt that I must trust this instinct rather than put my trust in other people, or indeed, in myself. To be suspicious of  my own intentions is to arrive at something better than the headiness of feeling that I am right. Others will act out of self-interest, and that is a good reason not to trust anybody. My capacity ( Read more... )

I dreamed that I went

quietly into a noisy bar,

they had nice wooden tables,  for some reason,

and smiling people who I seemed to know

and cannot remember now who  began

handing me their smiles, and I looked up

as I was doing these exchanges

of currency to see you

sitting at a quieter table

unaccompanied. I stuffed their handshakes

into a ( Read more... )

To discover the stranger I have become to myself. In a way that is beyond sadness or mere happiness.

I remembered tonight my first drink.

There are many occasions that qualify for this title. The time I tasted vodka in a story by Alexander Raskin. Or the time I sampled a capful of whisky and ran away from the taste and the guilt. The summer ( Read more... )

Or so the lyrics went. I thought who is this sweet uncle, little out of breath? And when I checked it was our young king, Ilayaraja.

Brothers and sisters of wherever, and whatever kind, there are two matters of pressing concern here. One, Ilayaraja's voice has changed or aged or wotever. I say this because I did not recognise it instantly, which is ( Read more... )

With three films this year, I felt a surr beginning, a rasp, not a song, like a cat's tongue might feel before it licked your skin. I knew that I wanted to write about them. But I had other things to do. And the moment for saying anything went away.

Maybe the feeling will come back.

We usually have an above-the head shelf for throwing words in ( Read more... )

A papaya tree that shook

but hugged me back

and held me still as I

langured upward in the recklessness

of being eight. We cheated

gravity together.

That guava tree

which bent only a little

when I put my toes in its crooks

and hung there, biting

now plucking ,

feeling my pockets wobble

around my thighs in fullness.

That garden, those stones

( Read more... )

Is a greeting card some old love sent you in the year 2001. You have no memory of what it said because you opened it in a cyber parlour and there were people on either side, peering into their own screens but capable of monitoring the love on your monitor with one lizardly sideways sweep. So you glanced, and you stored it for another day, and the ( Read more... )

I watched The Big Lebowski today. And I am without words, because I watched it it in one shot, unlike all the other times.  Those were interrupted by ads, and my boredom, compelling me to walk away from the TV, and giggle, and replay the last line I could remember, and then come back, fifteen minutes later, absent from that moment , inside some ( Read more... )