Everybody Hurts (Violence of vulnerability)

Angry words dangerously suspended in mid air. Thrown across by the gullibility of a vulnerable heart. Lurking like demons to irreparably damage the intended. Some fail; miss the target and others craftily find a fragile part through our guards. The car is resplendent with heat and turbulent with emotions. We go round for a round. Empty the empty blames on each other. We scream through the dark, ready to charge towards our respective insecurities. We take our timidities by the neck while our capabilities watch shamelessly. We wring the weakness of our liaison and we shatter the vessels of our morale. We drain the energies out of our expectations. More angry words, more painful accusations. Our hands thrown up and fingers pointing threateningly. Peremptory knocks on fellable doors.

4am of a cold, inflammable night. There are families somewhere in the neighborhood who have fallen asleep inside their composite lives. There are trees that are figuring a way to come back in the spring and wind that is making a momentary stop outside this car. But we are too consumed in our disorganized little version of dysfunction. Maybe we should roll down the window and let a little trust inside. Maybe we should stop saying another word and reflect a little on that sad Cypress standing starkly in the cold. Maybe our defenses will cost us this night. Our doubts will expend a million moments. Maybe we should touch each other. Or just look into our eyes a little longer, with our mouths shut and endearments open. Maybe we should look at ourselves in the mirror, like that, waging this war, inside this car. Maybe the pregnant silence that will follow will reconcile the fragments of this night. And join this night back again, dot by dot.
Maybe we will find a way to unlock our vulnerabilities inside this locked car. May it be.

art title - demolition/vulnerability
artiste - Amy Jackson
url - here

Density of your deeds

Act I:
The smoke fills your bedroom. Delicious pungency strewn across your immediate atmosphere, bouncing weightlessly from the ceiling. Skeletons of your rescue-cigarettes splattered around your nakedness. Sands of singed nicotine surround your contour. When you move, it will be shaped like you, like you were killed there. You were.
Act II:
You crash into the fog. You burn yourself into it. Like crematory smoke of everything worldly. You are alive, breathing into the fog, the fog breathing into you, seeping through your lungs, a cloud of dense vapor, you feel it rub and coat you from inside. Velvet marijuana.
Act I (reprise):
The hovering smoke is heavier than the air you breathe, it is strangely magnetic too. You are lifted, not uplifted. Balducci’s levitation. All apparent. You want to break away from this dimension. Fall back into emptiness with a big splash. Keep falling, freely.
Act II (reprise):
You collide into the fog. It washes the stagnancy you feel. You are in motion. You want to run, you run. Aimless, amuck, adrift. It starts peeling your skin, congealing the hair. Delicious pain of sweet surrender. You are swallowed into that white hole. Keep running, endlessly.
Act I (reprise II):
You are still spinning centrifugally to the smoke. You are a satellite to the planet where you buy Gods. Orbital to everything dark. Gravitational to everything beautiful and everything ugly. Fabulous neon. Psychedelic sexiness. Jarred, blaring and arrhythmic. Tainted.
Act II (reprise II):
The fog engulfs you. Your edges are blurring, you are decompressed, you are dissolved. A pool of your being sifting through that opacity. Your memories have shut down (only those of your favorite swing at your school remain) Blank purgatory. Ablution of your actions, it is just one repetitive yet lovely constant now. Cleansed.

image url: here
image url 2: here

Snowflies,butterflakes.

I realized joy can never be relative. Leafless trees make a city look moribund, but to spot just one evergreen cypress on a street is what joy can be like. A TV show about a community joining hands to feed the homeless on Christmas day, watched by no initial intent, can later manage to move a lot of your inner scaffolding. That is joy. The unexpectedness of snowfall on the most potentially murky day is what joy has come to be, with me..

Butterfly houses always enamored me. A shrine to witness the wondrous transition of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Watch those brittle wings gently struggle to sprout from inside a cocoon. Take the form of an ethereal being, fluttering across the waves of air, swimming in an ocean of carelessness. So, anytime I wanted to block out the ugliness of subjected reality, like the times when you can’t seem to deal with the fact that Christmas can be lonely for some, or that the evergreen cypress (snow-sprinkled) outside your window has to stand in the cold all winter, I imagine a little cloud surrounding me, a cloud of imaginatively invented joy, of self-preservation.

Like a cocoon, it protects me while I momentarily hibernate from that moment. It becomes so easy to close the moment like that, pretend like the moment never befell you, never spun you, never turned you. While I develop wings inside this cocoon to help me lift off this unwanted, unwelcome earth. Like a thousand butterflies, engulfing me, like liquefying skin made of a million wings, a cloud of controlled motion, morphing into my shape, hiding me. Defining me.

And I only found out, on the day that it snowed, that this doesn’t have to be my fantastic vision, conjured by a desultory mind. Snowflakes falling weightlessly, staying afloat for those uncertain yet heavy moments, are like butterflies (both ephemeral). Butterflies made of snow that whirl in concentric flight around me. The whiteness of the snow hiding the murk of the street, of the day. And this time, reality confirmed my little bubble of imagination. It was reality (which we all try so hard to escape, make lame excuses from and cheat with sometimes) that showed me the silken thread woven between her and my imagination. And that was joy to me. Non-relative and simply confirmed.

artiste - Christian Clipart
art title - Butterflies and Christmas snow
image url - here

Unclothed, for once.

So, it's those times when you run out of wine and realize the immenseness of your dependency on it to adjust the dimensions of your gloom. Idiosyncratic gloom. The fullness of the wine in the glass tosses your securities. You know, the way your securities sometimes depend on the purpleness of the winter or the opaqueness of hope. There is an unstated, understood security I have come to find with the presence of wine in my house during winter. Before, I sought that security in the musky smell of my dogs’ bodies as they lay by my feet, sleeping but only narrowly so, always providing me with company as I sailed through the nocturne, all guarded.
I suffer a howling affinity for winter. I like the way it shuffles the order of things inside my carefully draped emotional demeanor. I seem to admire the fact that having wine becomes more of a physiological necessity than just some thoughtless guilty indulgence. The pseudo warmth works (almost) as a temporary substitute to the musky warmth I was otherwise used to. The dryness in the air is easy to associate with when you are replenishing a void. The early sunset makes dealing with the harshness of absence easy. The wait for snow will overshadow the other forms of longing meanwhile.
It becomes easy to long, watching the tiny specks of snow float effortlessly inside the glass globe. It is easy to swim deep into words and songs and poetries during this seasonal metamorphosis. Lyrical intensities don’t seem to fail you. Filled frames seem to do their job. Lowly burning flames on the side table seem to induce warmth of soothing magnitude. The hissing wind through the crevice of my window feels friendly too. Maybe I will let her unravel my robe. I can use a little sliver of winter inside my sealed house with depleting wine tonight. Inside my sealed skin with depleting strength.
When the hands go cold, the blood settles coolly in the center of the heart. Easy to heal. Maybe the skin of the heart grows thicker too. Easy to deal.
I will sail through this nocturne too, all seamless.

image source : http://www.cepolina.com/freephoto/f/nature.water.snow/snow02.bw.jpg


"I'll be your harvester of light, and send it out tonight, so we can start again.." - Winter Song, Sara Bareilles.

Curse of being cursory - the cursor.

Have you wondered how the cursor on our computer screen could be a reflection of our ever-so-transitory state of mind? It blinks with uncertainty and balks at resistance. When there are too many words to say, it flutters across like a brisk, aimless firefly. And with silence, it quietly fades away like the words that were never brought to being.

Maybe the cursor on our screen really is that part of our minds, which is like the magician’s hat, from where we, like a magician, keep extracting our words, pulling out the seemingly never ending string, forming a heap of thoughts, sometimes disarranged and sometimes resonant.

A jilted-at-the-altar Carrie Bradshaw sits in front of her Mac screen, a cursor, blinking in and out of sight, forming and dissolving dots in front of the word “LOVE”. And you can see how that cursor looks as poignantly empty as perhaps Carrie felt when she tried to get back at pulling out a string from inside her.

And that’s how dependent we are on a tiny vertical black streak of line for our semantic derivations. Love letters do not require to be written, wishes do not need to be spoken, and presence doesn’t need to be felt. Just pull out a structured string of sentence through the cursor and you are all set to convey the particular emotion. And when you have not a feeling inside you, when you are parched of the strings to extract, you will recoil, only momentarily, until your insides replenish again and are ready to be milked again.

It is all fleeting, touch-and-go, like impulses of a million emotions that hit you, every day, every now and then, some stimulating, some numbing, and they will stop by again, at the doorstep of that magician’s hat-like part of your mind and enter if you allow them, only to be drawn out later again… through your cursor…

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." ~Walter Wellesley, courtesy Lena Michelle McCue

image courtesy - www.maclife.com

image url - here

The funny, funny thing

You know there is the stratosphere of ‘rock bottom’. And there was me, some 30 feet below it. I wasn’t getting any younger with the quarter life threateningly beckoning at me. My career felt like a regurgitating toilet. And more often than not, I quietly lament over the inability to find being sorrowful as being cool (how I wish to be coolly sad, but damn my prosaic personality). Add to that was the weather that felt like I was made to conduct my life in a furnace. Even retail therapy failed me. So there I was, in this deepest crypt of miseries... And only freefalling deeper.
“It is funny how things don’t work out. It is funny how they DO”... That line from Sweet Home Alabama always gets me. I usually have a very pessimistic purview of the dynamics of ‘things working out’. I guess, optimists like to put a ribbon of fate on such rare, coincidental and convenient interlocking of events. So it was obvious I wasn’t going to see any damn ‘brighter side’ in that shithole I was going through.
And then that funny thing happens. That funny thing which sends you into this frenzy of confoundedness. Where you question the stash of beliefs that you have based all your cynicism on. All that defiance you secretly harbored for the corny movies, songs and poems that endlessly tell you how precious friendship is. All those mawkish episodes of “Friends” crash into you… How they plan a surprise for months, going through tiresome, personal differences to make it work. The way that surprise causes a rush of these funny, syrupy emotions and makes you want to burst into tears like a clinical emotional dork. And how you put together all of their shady behavior that they have been displaying all this time they were going through the predicament of planning a surprise. And regret on not having guessed any of that bad acting of diverting your attention from the surprise which might have lead to any premature disclosure.
And that’s how funny the way things work out is. How these miseries start seeming relative. And eventually diminished. How little things stop tampering with your composure. How little things start becoming existentially tangible. How a little, big surprise can alter the pole of your state of mind. How the realization of this precious relationship that you have subconsciously nurtured, makes you feel self-approximated and... Just simply, basically happy. Funny, eh?

P.S. Thank You to Sushi, Ash, MazakMasti, Tatu, Porny, Jassi-ca, Neepz & Dynamo for making my birthday the best I could ask for.. Love ya much & always!!!!!

Feathered

What happens when you have the misfortune of witnessing a pigeon being crushed under the wheel of a truck? What does it do to your day when you see this supernal being that is suppose to be air-borne, celeritous, sensing the slightest bit of threat way before it approaches it, free and unbridled, bouncing on a busy street (the last place it belongs to) and then being splattered open by a raging 100-tonne machine, pressing it’s body into a sheet of blood and feathers, dispersing some fragments into that paused air?

All you do is flinch away, your insides lurching, like someone squeezed your heart out right when it was pounding its heaviest.

And you go on.

Into the affairs of our lives, shook by helplessness until the next most routine occurrence tries to send us into the most settled state. So we watch the fireflies get caught up in a burning flame, setting their wings on fire and we learn to get use to it. We watch a butterfly crash into a car and fall down with the most silent thud and we learn to get used to it. We watch ourselves free fall, and we comfortably get used to the acceleration after the initial jolt, like it was a state of rest.

Or we settle down, in slow motion, like that broken aloof feather, the gravity pulling us down after all, and then sweeping us into another draft of unsettling air, to be again thrown up and then eventually settled.

And so we tread through our daily lives knowing that things, people, events will turn on us, abandoning their affiliations towards us, deserting us. We live in the constant, dormant fear of loss. A phone call can toss our world into a trench of miseries. A wrong turn can scatter the atoms of our lives into something amorphous. Breaking us into pieces and then making us back again, almost.

We go on. We get used to everything. Everything.

“We are all miracles” – from the movie, Little Children

art - Black Sand Feather, abstract landscape

artiste - Ross Alford

url - here