Zen in life & death ( in the memory of my late father)

Z

 

 

Blogging from A to Z Challenge [April 2015]

 

  

We used to talk a lot

about death

and yet

your physical absence

is so heavy to bear

 

the suddenness with

which you disappeared

person-body-ashes-water-nothing

 

was that the last birthday gift

teaching me

"m-e-t-a-m-o-r-p-h-o-s-i-s"

one more time

 

I was always

your strong girl

in your version of me

I could take on

the world

on my own

 

Maybe I could

because you stood

by me

as a shield

 

Now you are

my arrow and my bow

my aims and my means

 

you were warmth

and now you are light

 

I read this poem

to myself

every night

 

and I know

you are watching

me do it right.

 

 

******************************************

 

A VERSE I READ OFTEN FOR MY DAD

 

 

 

       "Love never disappears for death is a non-event.

I have merely retired to the room next door.

You and I are the same; what we were for each other, we still are.

Speak to me as you always have, do not use a different tone, do not be sad.

Continue to laugh at what made us laugh.

Smile and think of me.

Life means what it has always meant.

The link is not severed.

Why should I be out of your soul if I am out of your sight?

I will wait for you, I am not here, but just on the other side of this path.

You see, all is well.”

- St. Augustine

This isn't a post - 8 Stream of Consciousness

The world is a ruled
A4 sheet
its a tall tree that
can't see its roots

shadows grow and then darkness falls
look at electricity as a miracle
light often means hope

small prizes
leaps are happy
random music
on a toy keyboard
and the world returns back to order

A doll
and her bedroom, kitchen, living room
life neatly arranged
in a pink doll's house

no place for books?
a guitar in a corner
biting dust
the same songs stuck
with an irritating glue
called memory

fans, clocks, history
ripples, bangles
sieves, glasses
plates
life cycle
circles, circles
round pegs in square holes

time to go back
into the doll house.


 

This isn't a post - 7 (back to the stream of consciousness)

Fill the details correctly
life is a long application form
he once told me- no one loves old people. I want to tell him I am slowly getting there to the twilight of old age. But then age is just a number say the fools. Do they wear watches?

its dripping away second by second
every other picture of me looks like someone else
No one reads this, I am told
PUBLISH
I choose perish

Seek references
know preferences
ask, seek, achieve
no peace at all
Is worth a pay cheque? Is worth measured by love?

This finding yourself is only good for selling self-help books.
Why do I write?
because Bukowski doesn't let me sleep
because I made a promise to Eliot, Hemingway, Manto and Amrita Pritam

because the noises wouldn't stop
because schizophrenia is a possibility

only the mad ones are alive
the living ones are all compromised
for fame, money or the worst- LOVE

That was someone else
some other person who was ME then
some other space
she wore silver trinkets
loved the rain
and talked to diwali lights

forever is a lie
I type LO- for loneliness
autofill says LOVE.

 

OASIS

I scrub the lines on my forehead
on the Sufi's threshold
the lines of my palm burn
on the marble floor
destiny flows out

Rumi, Hafiz stand by
love is an inscription
embossed on a skin
by a pair of lips

like day and night
it grows, wanes,changes
never ceases
sometimes a wound
sometimes a weapon

I am weary of
this beating in the chest
Can the dead stop pretending to be alive?

you have knit all the wisdom
about women and men
about love and loss
in your words
my questions roam in your anecdotes
looking for an answer

"ISHQ" travels miles and miles
of my arteries and veins
to reach nowhere

and sometimes peeps out from
the corner of my eye
to blur my vision of the world

I am a sand dune
make,unmake
scatter, collect
I once loved an oasis.

OF ELIOT AND SCARS

Nobody writes poems with disclaimers
or prose with warnings
just like patriarchy
has led women
to believe
only fair, slim and hairless
is acceptable.

Her smile is so warm
maybe because she has no words
or does she
will the voice machine in her ear
ever understand love

women come and go fretting over
the shape of an eyebrow
No dear Eliot
they no longer
bother about Michelangelo

Go,look for the men who
wrote poetry
about the brow?

the girl with a limp
always smiles

the soft fingers rub
a fruity smell into my skin
and I count the dead cells
of the mind
Is there a wonder scrub that induces
forgetfulness
and erases all lines that time has cast

my palms look like the map
of a hidden treasure
only there are no destinations
just a long endless journey
the nails point at nothing

I am tired to even open my eyes
but the hands have changed
the postures, the stances
have altered
the eyes that once loved
now overlook, why life?

she parts my hair
and I am scared
what if she finds
the window to my mind
what if she knows
all my sinister thoughts

I miss the way my grandmother
rubbed oil into my reluctant skull
snip,snip
memory are you a hairdresser?

I don't remember her face
only a smell
of pickles,medicines
and loss.

I walk and walk
round and round
to nowhere
the maze is
my punishment.

each morning
is every morning
she says I look perfect
I am glad
she hasn't seen the scars.

Always is a myth

remembering and forgetting
that is all there is to it, the key of living of moving on, of letting go.

hoardings crying hoarse selling love, dream homes, ideal schools, dreams.
a hot cup of tea and someone to share it with is all I need then.

the kids do not know the ugly faces of growing up
they only see the glitter and the glamour
the power of shouting a NO emphatically

if every hurtful word killed even a single cell in the brain
half of us would be half dead if not more

blue isn't just a colour
its a mood he said
Is there a colour that is not a mood?
is there a mood that isn't a colour?

the same plots
with the same twists
and yet the characters may die differently

the sane ones are locked up in the asylums
the mad ones preach life lessons
and go back to their wretched loneliness
to invent new curses.

deserts and mountains
the beach with the sand and the water merging
the sea tossing and turning
in a constant wait
to spill over its cyclone sadness

the sun burning
giving the earth light and warmth
the earth has nothing to give back

some relationships
are always unequal, unrequited

the closures that never happen
the gratitude never paid
the forgiveness never sought
wounds of time the only medals

never before, never again
always is a myth.


 

This isn't a post - 6, meaningless banter..

23 March Bhagat Singh
Paash, the revolutionary Punjabi poet died on the same date, coincidence?

What is freedom? why is it so precious? Is it valued?

why are words valued? why is voice important?

Is FEMINISM a dirty words? Is it just a badge or an abuse?

The songs I listen to, the films I watch , the people I meet, their residue remains. Some of that smoothens my edges, some of that makes me lose the balance.

does my residue in them does the same to them to?

I am a spec in the cosmos but yet I am important because only this spec can fill this void, only this.

what are my questions? what are my answers?

This isn't a poem

Labels everywhere
on minds, souls and thoughts
and there is Eliot
on the shelf

today I can take
walk with him
on the streets of London
or anywhere

no longer afraid
of the asylum
that's where
the questioning ones end

the rest just comply
or shut down

the million-handed
octopi of thoughts
snatch words
from each other

and then
when the noise
reaches an unbearable crescendo

the words run helter-skelter
to meditate

you cringe or smile
there is no evidence
of any feeling ever

I look up
to find a face
to put up
for the other faces
I have to meet today.

 

This isn't a post-5

"I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.", said one of my all time favourite poets Sylvia Plath.
But this interaction with people that we have not in their voices, or with their faces but only with their online personas is this really conversation? will human interaction eventually squeeze into screens?

Truth and lies
hide and seek
black and white

What color is money? some say green. I say money is colorless yet it can color your vision and perception.

what is madness? walking like a herd with the majority and what is madness asking questions? breaking away?

Black sheep

But isn't being different rare? isn't rare good or is it the odd one out?


 

This isn't a post - 4 THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS SERIES

Triumphs and tribulations are the same situations in different lights. sometimes we relish a moment and at others we just wait for it to pass but there is no escape from this passing. This non-permanent is the only permanent thing about life.

In the rush to reach destinations the fun of the journey is lost. Like horses with blinkers we keep looking at how it will be ten years from now, missing this moment completely. Everyday living takes its toll on life and most of us grow only in years while our souls keep shrinking in the prisons of what ifs.

Sometimes the loss is irreparable but there is no need to keep trying to fill the void. Everything is not for us to make right, to change or amend. Expert opinions are also opinions, some situations should be allowed to be untouched by analysis.

If Eliot was born in Delhi or Manto in NewYork would they still be the same? Would The Love song of Alfred J Prufrock become The Love Song of Anand Janardhan Puri? Would it make any difference?

Each moment is the slave of its context and each context of its perception and we the biggest slaves of everything because freedom is scary, because operating without set instructions is risky.

This isn't a post- 3 THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS SERIES

Like toddlers of all generations singing the same or similar nursery rhymes without actually even understanding what most of them mean, we go through the motions of life generation after generation. Women grow up to believe love is selfless service like the legendary mother India and men grow up with the entitlement to that service as fathers, brothers, husbands, sons and lovers.

When I read DAFFODILS by Wordsworth as a student and much later when taught the same ( how can we ever TEACH poetry?) to my students on my first job in a college I realised I had never ever seen a real daffodil and yet here I was propagating the farce. Why can't we instead/also talk about the flowers that are more close to us like the humble Delia or the sunflower?

The ghazal on a loop in my mind has a line " जो बीत गया है वो गुज़र क्यूँ नहीं जाता " ( what has passed why doesn't it pass ". If all that has passed was really past us none of us would be burdened by the invisible baggage and the tinted glasses with which we see the world and others.

Fault finding the easiest of activities of  being "holier than thou", none of us let go of that wonderful opportunity of mud slinging without realising its our hands that get muddy even before the mud reaches the other's reputation. Sometimes letting out the venom helps but write it down and hit delete or better still write it down on a real paper and flush it down. breathe and without doing any damage LET IT ALL JUST GO.

This isn't a post-2 THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS SERIES

All the monsters, each one of them known as "I" live in an ivory tower, up above the real life on the ground. the life that does not accept or need boundary walls and wired fences, the life whose activity is not small enough to be captured in the security cams.

It is so easy to limit and so difficult to set free ,freedom is threatening because in letting go you could fall, bruise or go through an irreparable loss but boundaries are toxic when they are imposed for too long or too severely. Expression always contains the risk of being in the wrong but repression would the never be right.

Maps and routes and more maps and more routes, the destination is always within, the journey inwards into the troublesome landscapes of the past and into the challenging cliffs of future. The cacophony of instructions ,directions is often deafening and in the noise the innermost voice called instinct gets killed.

Each one of us intoxicated in our own personal opium ,your opium works for only you mine sometimes doesn't work even for me. Poetry is such an elusive opium sometimes it may churn your guts and at others just black tic-tac on a white screen- absolutely nothing.

NOTHING.


 

This isn't a post- THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS SERIES

why do I write? why do I need to write this, that or anything?
Why I commit poetry?
Why I commit life or why life committed me about 35 years ago?

Are why's the most important questions or are the hows and wheres important too?
I ask and words tumble out as if a dam of sanity has been pushing them back to the subconscious for long where they wait as a pool of experiences bubbling, stagnant but pushing at its seams to find that one moment of letting go of insane carefreeness.
when I coin my own words or I use a few for the first time and many for the infinite time do I make sense?
I am looking for meaning of all this of the cosmos in chaos. Why it doesn't pause and just like the constantly revolving and rotating earth it gives us only a semblance of being the same each day.
the learning is fun but sometimes when the lessons bruise and wound ,when there are weak moments of giving up, of disillusion, the mind wanders to the mundane- the lonely plant on my window sill or a perfect cup of tea that is sweet without sugar only because it has been waited for and cherished.
The bearings of being the beginning of being, all a never ending wasteland. The old copy somewhere in this clutter, the one with my younger handwriting of notes around it oblivious of what Eliot would mean to me many years later.
life is fond of me it seems it chooses the grind for me afresh every day so that I become a chiselled student , who writes and has a voice and isn't afraid of this madness.