"For My Old Amah"

v's dad, appu - appa, passed on this morning.
goodbye appu -- hope you enjoy heaven, and do say hi to dad.

To most your dying seems distant
outside the railings of our concern.
Only to you the fact was real
when the flame caught among the final brambles
of your pain. And lying there
in this cubicle, on your trestle
over the old newspapers and spittoon,
your face bears the waste of terror
at the crumbling of your body's walls.

The moth fluttering against the electric bulb,
and on the walls the old photographs,
do not know your going. I do not know
when it has wrenched open the old wounds.
When branches snapped in the dark
you would have had a god among the trees
who made us a journey of your going.

Your palms crushed the child's tears from my face.
Now this room will become your going, brutal
in the discarded combs, the biscuit tins
and neat piles of your dresses.

~Wong Phui Nam

"How to make amends"

He was hungry, so he ate the couch, the one with the pull-out bed. Of
course, when the wife came home, she was disgusted.
“Now what will we sit on, asshole? Last week it was the coffee table; the
week before, two kitchen chairs and a lamp. What next, the bed?”
He hadn’t thought of eating the bed, but the idea was appealing. It
probably would taste like sleep. Comfort food. He couldn’t respond to her–she
was always right, so he went upstairs to lie down. Somehow, the bed knew
what was coming. It shivered in fear. The man stroked the mattress, saying,
“Don’t worry. I won’t eat you. I promise.” As the bed settled down, the man
fell asleep and dreamed of eating the bed, mattress, baseboard, springs,
pillows. He stuffed everything in his mouth, chewing, crunching, swallowing
until he could no longer stand up. He laid there on the floor in the bedroom.
When his wife came home after work, she undressed, climbed on top of him,
slid under some loose sheets and slept. His chest rose and fell in time to her
steady breathing. Wrapping himself around her, he knew she would be next.
He would eat her and finally there would be peace between them, which was
all he ever really wanted.

~David James

Post It #28

image via chicolin

you can't marry someone because you think they will fit into your future dreams, how you've imagined it. you gotta marry someone because you're really excited about building a new future with them, dreams and demons and all!

Post It #27

Post It #26

image via felixmeijer

"Bottle of Blues"

I just found me a bottle of blues
Some strange comfort for a soul to soothe
Ain't it hard, ain't it hard
To want somebody who doesn't want you

And I've been waiting for a year or a day
Some strange weather must be blowing my way
Cause I got no mind
To go or to stay or be left behind

Holding hands with an impotent dream
In a brothel of fake energy
Put a nickel in a graveyard machine
I get higher and lower
I get higher and lower
Like a tired soldier with nothing to shoot
And nowhere to lose this bottle of blues

Egos drone and pose alone
Like black balloons, all banged and blown
On a backwards river
The infidels shiver in the stench of belief

I tell my momma I'm a hundred years late
I'm over the rails and out of the race
The crippled psalms
Of an age that won't thaw ringing in my ears

Holding hands with an impotent dream
In a brothel of fake energy
Put a nickel in a graveyard machine
I get higher and lower
I get higher and lower
Like a tired soldier with nothing to shoot
And nowhere to lose this bottle of blues

Well, I just found me a bottle of blues
Some strange comfort for a soul to soothe
Ain't it hard, ain't it hard
To want somebody who doesn't want you

Holding hands with an impotent dream
In a brothel of fake energy
Put a nickel in a graveyard machine
I get higher and lower
I get higher and lower
Like a tired soldier with nothing to shoot
And nowhere to lose this bottle of blues
Bottle of blues

~Beck

"ritual killings"

/1/
first, you get used to,
then you get used up.

the unspent words clot
into a lump in your throat.


/2/
today
the sacrifice will be
on an empty stomach

and a full heart.

~athiran

Victor Wooten with Prasanna

I went for a "Victor Wooten with Prasanna featuring Dr. S. Karthick & Bangalore Amrit" concert yesterday, presented by a new music school in Chennai, Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music.

The concert seemed to be a promotion for the school and Prasanna's new album "Be the Change" but at least we got to hear Wooten. If Mr. Prasanna had only left the marketing out of the music, and let the music speak for itself, my experience would have been 10 on 10. It should have truthfully been called the "Prasanna using Victor Wooten for Marketing of the Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music" concert -- ok that's a little mean.

Moving on to the music, Dr. S. Karthick on the Ghatam and the Morshanq for a bit was excellent! He's quite a sweet entertainer and a worshiper of Victor-bhai. Bangalore Amrit, on the Kanjira/Gangira, is also quite a talent and seemed to be enjoying his new playmates.

Victor of course was freakin' awesome. He really does play bass like no one else. A video to illustrate my point. If you missed him this time, don't miss the next.

Natalie Merchant sings old poems to life

Potential

I understand that I've wasted my potential. But potential, too, is man made.
Once I stop seeking answers about "old-world living" -- only then will I be able to return to this one.

"The Problem"

The problem (if there was one) was simply a problem with the question. He wants to paint a bird, needs to, and the problem is why. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy, series or sequence, one foot after the other, but existentially why bother, what does it solve? Be the tree, solve for bird. What does that mean? It’s a problem of focus, it’s a problem of diligence, it’s supposed to be a grackle but it sort of got away from him. But why not let the colors do what they want, which is blend, which is kind of neighborly, if you think about it. Blackbird, he says. So be it. Indexed and normative. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? He does, but he’s not very good at it. And just because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything. Maybe if it was pretty, it would mean something. Maybe if it was beautiful it would be true. But it’s not, not beautiful, not true, not even realistic, more like a man in a birdsuit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible, unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself, so that looking at the page is like looking out the window at a bird in your chest with a song in its throat that you don’t want to hear but you paint anyway because the hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not and the hand wants to do something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart. Answer: be the heart. Answer: be the hand. Answer: be the bird. Answer: be the sky.

~Richard Siken