......

shit, shit, shit...arrrr####******

need to come up with neatly typed five pages, full of sense, with footnotes, bibliography and other adornments.

The five pages will be a little passport, a pair of wings, a door to another life.

But, how much weight can you make words carry? They screech, yawn and tumble all over, spilling coffee over crazy mornings.

....

It doesn't work. The idea is half cooked, the words are all over. Why don't you lie back and be Rip Van Winkle for another year?

Sir, have you ever sat and watched the solemn funeral of years? They are capable of running in the same circles over and over again and die their customary death standing in the same freaking point where they began. So, you need to push them off mountains, drown them in rivers and sun them on islands-hoping that they will learn a thing or two. May be swimming, may be zen, may be new grammar, may be disenchantment, may be just anything.

....

There is never any spring which fills your inside with colours, never a rain which drenches your very being, never a touch to hold you here or there. The high of the long distance runner, the promise of a change of scene, another backdrop-hey words, can you behave for once, for the sake of new road signs?

Learning to Fly

" Phir se ud chala...."

The strong bursts of wind brushing past...the clouds, the heights, the seas...
Stay still...close your eyes..bring up all that is in you into these moments..and give a go at flying...

Another life, another place. Grey mornings, the absolute silence of nights, the smile of comradery with fellow worms, stacks and stacks of books...a few stray tunes here and there.

"I never stopped at any scenery,
I never met even myself,
I have this complaint but I am not angry,
all cities are same, villages same,

people are same and same names.."

Culling meanings from here and there, trying to build what you know not of. Long bus journeys to the wrong museums in search of footnotes. A few words amidst all the translations over dinner tables, the hearty laughs and the sweetness and loss of words which become chinese whispers.

" I flew up again,
these earth-like dreams, however much you dust them from eyelids,
they come back..
So many dreams, how should I say I have-
broken, left, and why..

sometimes from branch to branch, sometimes leaf to leaf,
sometimes day is night and sometimes day is day.."
.............

May be the wings are just a figment of your imagination and you will fall, fall and fall like a stone. But still may be you need to give it all that is left in you, carefully packing away anything which might hang like weights on the imaginary wings.

For Moments

Life is short-like the winter morning at your window with its white layers and a bewildered orange sun.

The green paint you dabbed on the wall, yellow stick ons of work which flutter like busy sparrows, a cheap map to remind about places to go...

There is never enough time to stare into nothingness. Desert journeys which get drenched in songs of rain and end with a silly string of camels lined up in a bead. A small pub in a quaint town with people and ideas which will float and stay like butterflies in your head....

Moments are like stray tunes..you need to bind them in some haphazard way...to have the honour of listening to the most exquisite tunes.

Time can also pass by you all dead and still and moth balled. The shrill monotone by which you earn your bread, the dead wall of arguments which lure you to bang your head against them, the choicest morning curses showered on the auto wallah.

So need to keep stealing moments and hours and days and years.....to float, to read, to make, to write, TO MOVE...

There is nothing in the world like the surprise of a new land with all its odd ballness looking you in the eye for the first time.

Hey

Hey street lights on the way, we haven't sat down for a cup of coffee for a while. Need to light and float those lamps in water. For the moments when TIME likes to sit down and explain a thing or two. This too should pass and soon the dust on the road will become everything.

Hey haggard old rain, yes, need to pay your muddy pools a pale little paper boat. In return for the debt of drizzles when hope fluttered to fragile tunes.

Hey flowers which bloom all over the park in a frenzy, hey majestic grey mountains who knock on the train window, hey rainbow which condescends to land on a window wiper...there is a post card written and signed for you, left near the door. Just ask the wind to carry it to your way.

On Life

There ain't any cross roads. Sadly, they don't make it in that bound Hollywood script way. Some one in the sets says a line, and it stealthily makes its way into the dialogue. The lead actors get caught up in a traffic jam or just decides to bunk. The stand in person gives the take and it looks almost fine. A baffling story line, at times with more melodrama than all the Latin American soaps put together, at times just random nothing no signal noise for ages, at times banana peel slapstick comedy which will make your heart break with laughter, at times rivers of sorrow borrowed from Greek tragedy with  a hint of Shakespeare and no clear indication of the fatal flaw. And, the audience walks out dazed caught between improbable and just what was it all about . May be it is  supposed to be an experimental work which sucks at places, with no intention of communicating just about anything, deeply profound at the wrong places and childishly simple and weird in patches.
..............
Please pop into the shop and buy a bit of Zen, available in chewing gum flavours.
...............

The evening will arrive, in all its solemness. A pile of wood, shafts of fire. A hoard full of onlookers. 

"Take a couple of rounds and then, jump in", some one will tell in a matter of fact manner.

To rituals which smell like burnt hair how do you explain that you are from the living?

....

There are days when self  feels like freezing real life like a live chicken and closing the freezer door shut. All  done and now, let us get back to work.

There is work fuming, cribbing, falling apart. If only I could cut out the multi coloured multi layered crap which plays on loop all the time and just decide to be glued to the edit machine.

Never believe when they tell you that you can do a day job, earn enough money and follow your dream through a few left over hours. By evening brain will  be in a blender and mind might be conjuring up a meditating Buddha in the midst of the 6 O' clock traffic jam.

Then in the true spirit of people who handle their lives not very well, you could dial up a few loved numbers and give out quack therapy sessions on how other people should screw up their lives.

Between, whatever is the fun of life lived the right way? The memory of those moments when you took the wrong turn and ended up in the wrong way. "If I had done that life would have been some thing else, I would have been some one else"- aren't those moments priceless? What is the fun of being our boring selves if not for the idea of losing a chance at being some one or some thing else.
...........
Shouldn't have left in that hurry. The idea of homeland is most beautiful when it is a nostalgia.
But then, how else will you know that you don't belong any where and is hence forth free to float

Some times life has this habit of giving an eraser to you and wishing you good luck with it. So, just shut the eyes tight and let whatever is falling apart go away.

Some day the sea will wash in truck loads of sand and a few sea shells. Then one can may be pull life out of the freezer for a bit of fresh air.