Her words: they pour, like children to the playground

Saturday, 18 December 2010

Wednesday, 20 October 2010

  • A Warm, Well-Lighted House

    It was a night of idle chatter that transitioned into the white lawn of early morning. Had they paid attention to the world outside their window, instead of the steaming mugs in their hands, they would have noticed the fresh snowflakes that now crowned streetlights. Outside, the edges of passing nighthawks became increasingly blurry. As the new day crept forward, one by one, the inhabitants of this house began to leave - some to work, others for breakfast and coffee - the morning’s rituals took place far from this house.

    The alarm blared and jolted him.
    One remaining soul clung to the vestiges of sleep. As he pulled the blankets over his head, he felt the thin interface between dreaming life and waking life dissolve.

    In the house, the same last person set down his mug and finally rose. He felt the tail-end of his conversation trickle from his memory like water from cupped palms.

    He peered over his alarm clock, and saw the terrains of his real room.
    Just nine more minutes, he reasoned. With a swift slap, the noise ceased     and was instantly replaced by the white silence of snowflakes carefully descending.


    *

    'Well-lit' is the unglamorous cousin of 'Well-lighted', no? Well if Hemingway could do it, so can I :P

Tuesday, 14 September 2010

  • Kay Ryan: Soft

    In harmony with the rule of irony—
    which requires that we harbor the enemy
    on this side of the barricade—the shell
    of the unborn eagle or pelican, which is made
    to give protection till the great beaks can harden,
    is the first thing to take up poison.
    The mineral case is soft and gibbous
    as the moon in a lake—an elastic,
    rubbery, nightmare water that won't break.
    Elsewhere, also, I see the mockeries of struggle,
    a softness over people.


    (softness hovering Elsewhere
    Ms. Ryan dives; only she escapes its claws)

Sunday, 22 August 2010

  • well, it's your wife's grave misfortune...



    to marry a man who takes Ayn Rand seriously.


    “I don’t require of my artists that they be perfect craftsman; I require that they inspire me. What is sad to me about Rand is that she could, but that the creator of Gail Wynand [a complex and deeply flawed character seeking redemption in The Fountainhead] could create only one; that she could no longer imagine him when she looked out at mankind; that what she showed us instead was her need to reassure herself, in terms frankly delusional, of her superiority to it.”

    The closest equivalent of your Dagny Taggart in reality, WOULD be madly attracted to a Gail Wynand.

Thursday, 01 July 2010

  • & CHASE

    the course of
    tongues run along
    wood, whose fondness
    kneels & forfeits quiet dissolve. To say
    it's collusion; splinters against taste against
    shape, that freeze or melt all mount
    the same, small betrayals to

    thin air

    freeze to melt
    popsicles
    stained and plummet

    on cue
    on clean skirts &
    then defy, lips that
    enclose unwilling
    gasps
    &
    tongues curl
    to fabric
    the stains &
    let
    gravity
    dash on
    to say,
    it's you,
    & inflect, you
    Thin air,
    you
    ungrateful
    frolicking thief.

Saturday, 01 May 2010

Sunday, 11 April 2010

  • your gunmetal embroidery

    your foil, grazed upon
    skin that dusted, as
    arteries slew pipelines so
    once torrential, your systoles
    now trickle,
    clot by clot,
    through a vigilant metallic
    stifling.

    now
    they live in tin-man bodies; and glide
    with rare friction - those
    negligible of forces, to
    assure of its contact.
    While we scour in
    to piecewise plating
    off reflection: One Another
    and grate an intact, welded
    sustenance within.

    still
    Mechanics could not bend flesh, nor
    would Oz lend hearts mightier
    than velvet-enclosed sawdust
    still you'll try
    fiercely to sew softness
    through edges rigid
    in chafing
    daily cases.

Thursday, 08 April 2010

  • Fiction is not

    imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.

Friday, 26 March 2010

  • Departing Providence, Rhode Island

    Asked
    the professor of medicine
    about lessons learned
    through words.
    Yes, I thought
    now here
    is the question for
    a real, pulsating
    response.

    They are
    tiny confessions
    whispered, discarded, or adored
    in poetry, they will
    as T.S. would say
    communicate
    before being
    understood

    Yes,
    He smiled, and
    seemingly understood,
    that is the way I write
    my own fiction as well.

Monday, 22 March 2010

Wednesday, 17 March 2010

  • Ode to Donne (No one is)

    a puddle -
    lesser
    recycled seas.

    concrete
    below no rain
    can quench the
    sun's eventual,
    lure.

    no one is 
    alone, enough
    to seem
    unsplattered
    no one meets dirt
    untarnished
    though
    everyone can
    rise clean.

    no one can
    part tides
    with no rifts
    in closer shores
    While no skylines
    may run
    from the next day's
    dawn.

    no man
    sails alone, lest
    secrets
    be swallowed

    no one is 
    a puddle

    for long
    before being
    a sea.

Thursday, 04 February 2010

  • Better Days (A.F. Moritz)

    Never anymore in a wash of sweetness and awe   
    does the summer when I was seventeen come back   
    to mind against my will, like a bird crossing   

    my vision. Summer of moist nights full of girls   
    and boys ripened, holy drunkenness and violation   
    of the comic boundaries, defiances that never   

    failed or brought disaster. Days on the backs   
    and in the breath of horses, between rivers   
    and pools that reflected the cicadas' whine,   

    enervation and strength creeping in smooth waves   
    over muscular water. All those things accepted,   
    once, with unnoticing hunger, as an infant   

    accepts the nipple, never come back to mind   
    against the will. What comes unsummoned now,   
    blotting out every other thought and image,   

    is a part of the past not so deep or far away:   
    the time of poverty, of struggle to find means   
    not hateful—the muddy seedtime of early manhood.   

    What returns are those moments in the diner   
    night after night with each night's one cup of coffee,   
    watching an old man, who always at the same hour   

    came in and smiled, ordered his tea and opened   
    his drawing pad. What did he fill it with?   
    And where's he gone? Those days, that studious worker,   

    hand moving and eyes eager in the sour light,   
    that artist always in the same worn-out suit,   
    are my nostalgia now. That old man comes back,   

    the friend I saw each day and never spoke to,   
    because I hoped soon to disappear from there,   
    as I have disappeared, into the heaven of better days.

    one of my favourite poets. Image courtesy of unhappyhipsters.com