MOTHERHOOD : A SONG FOR LIFE

Who chose whom
can never be resolved

there she was
on a screen
just a blinking dot
my baby girl !

the wriggled raisin face
was my gift from GOD

the days were long
and the nights longer
here she was
my closest stranger

I help her
write alphabets now
and know the world better

she makes me smile
and holds my hand
and makes my life matter !

This is an entry for a contest by Women's Web in association with Mom and me.

DECOUPLE

splinters from
memories,new facts
and associations
collide

words disintegrate
to letters
who decouple
re-pair and mingle

to make
new meanings ! 

Kerouac's soup for the writer's soul

Jack Kerouac's "Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" is one of my personal favorites in all of modern literature for its fresh insights into the writer's mind.Here are some of my connects/comments/reactions to a few of these essentials(in brackets).The original text is in italics.

• Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy (the most important word in writing is joy,your writing should be your joy,if it isn't that forget about it.
• Submissive to everything, open, listening (erasing your slates often to make space for new words,experiences and writing.)
• Be in love with yr life ( life is the canvas,the blank space and the mosaic its both,love this amazing thing.)
• Something that you feel will find its own form (form is incidental to content,it will come if you have the content to fill the shoes of form)
• Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind (let the thoughts flow from where they are coming,don't put check posts,they dilute the essence.)
• The unspeakable visions of the individual (if you are a writer worth your salt,find a word,make a word for the unspeakable and ensure it fits and conveys.)
• Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition (the world will not end with a spelling error but it might be less meaningful without a worthy thought expressed,so let the technical loose,if not all,a few.)
• Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind (the poems,novels and plays are all there,you have to strive to make them tangible on paper and screens)
• No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge ( every context you bring to your work deserves due respect,your craft would be lesser without it.) 

Original extracts from the text - Jack Kerouac. "Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" from a 1958 letter to Don Allen, in Heaven & Other Poems, Grey Fox Press, 1958, 1977, 1983.] 

GOD

Soon the decorations will be up
even the god's homes
in a kind of competition
to look better
than the other

what do we really
celebrate?
do electric lights
dispel real darkness?

the bards who
talked about the wasteland
get labeled insane

and the pseudo-religions
fabricated for materialism
have become pious

be GOOD
should be better
than GOD
it has an extra O !

THE BEATS

they heard the
cosmic vibrations

and believed
in cosmic visions

nothing was
labelled DANGER

Ginsberg phrases
Kerouac babbles

the twisters
and the tornadoes
of the mind

rubbing sanity wrongly
against the grain

the only ones
to witness
"the libraries full of tears"

the only ones
who understood
*conditions apply !

GROWING UP

Imitating the
pseudo power of
grown-ups

dressing up
and sometime dressing down

making,unmaking
deciding and pretending
to be in control

all is so attractive
to her eyes

in a hurry to
grow-up she reads and writes
eats the veggies

and thus
makes uncomfortable
the child in me !

Women speak or just English -Vinglish

The story of this Sridevi comeback is a quilt work of my story and the story of every mom and wife in India or else where.Luckily for me language was never an issue,the important and the non-important all was said in English because of my English medium education ,but nevertheless the issue of VOICE is as much mine as of all women every where.

All spaces including marriages have a power center and a margin,this time its refreshing to see a Hindi movie address the margins in all homes so effectively.There is no revolution brewing in the movie or homes,but it is nice that finally there is a woman who can tell with a lot of confidence what she wants and what we all want- Not just love,respect.

must watch !!

ROOM

going through
pages of poetry

written across
continents and centuries

poems of resistance
fear,conflict and love too

repeating the same story
looking from different windows
breaking down different walls

all converging in the same
one room of your own !

SINGING/READING

Diligently she shapes
alphabets
and sings a rhyme along

still untouched
by the corrosive complexity
of words and contexts

the rush is
to read all the
"mummy books"

and I struggle to sing
while I read !!

MODERNISM

shards from Picasso
fragments from Stein

modernism
all in vain.