The Porn Star

A gleaming highway and a lonely cab

foot on the accelerator but you can’t outrun

this lonely life….

A lighted cigarette and hands on the steering wheel

smoke curls upwards to join

the orgy in the back seat….

The camera zooms in and she screams with delight

all plastic faces, all plastic smiles…

Her forty minutes are now over

and I drive through the woods

to reach her house in suburbs…

She asks for a cigratte and our fingers touch

so spent like a buring candle

so cold, like the grasp of death…

A cottage looms large and a kid gushes out

arms outstretched and hugs are exchanged

“Where is my toy?” the kids screams

“Ask your dad” she says

with a finger pointing at me……..

Death, Life and Fighting Back

Some days back my friend asked me, if at any point in my life I have felt like giving it all up and embrace death for all the tranquility and peace it exudes. Though her words were not as eloquent as mine and she might have just been trying to prick me with this notion or may be an argument with her best friend over which dress to wear might have sparked this chain of thoughts. But that apart, her question actually got me thinking as to why people with perfect lives need to bother themselves with such notions; may be because it’s only these people with perfect lives who can entertain such conventions or perhaps because there isn’t anything perfect as far as this life is concerned. I didn’t need to ask myself if I had ever considered death as an escape route, as an exit strategy may be but never had I thought of death as something peaceful or something delivering. More so because I am too disillusioned by the way things around in this life that all my hopes for finding salvation in the one after this are already shattered beyond repair. I would rather prefer to stand up and fight each time this life tries to pull a Waterloo on me because I believe that you don’t get to bow down and surrender when this life is throwing its best punches at you. When life throws something at you, you stand up and throw it back. So what if I ended up losing every other person I loved in life, that’s not the reason enough for me to stop looking for love, maybe I am just fooling myself by hoping to find love in the arms of some stranger, maybe by the time I do find love my heart would be so broken that there won’t be much left of it but I am not going to settle for the crumbs that this life throws at me. I am going to stand up, dust off my bottom, and look it in the eye and fight because some of us are destined to fight against our own destiny and it is in this recalcitrance, defiance and un-acceptance that I choose to live my life.

We wake up each day, battle the cold, sleet, rain or sunshine and we make choices at each step, choices which no one else can make and it’s is these choices that make us unique. Some of us may choose to accept life as it comes , some of us can make peace with our pasts and for some of us past doesn’t even matter but ultimately all of us have to choose our own addictions and it is in this defiance I happen to find mine. May be it’s my hope that I have already faced the worse that keeps me going and it’s not that I don’t love peace and this relative solace and it feels really nice to stop and look around once in a while but ultimately I have to get up and move along, taking with me what I could and leaving behind just a trail.

To pin your hopes on death is like pinning your hopes on what will lie beneath a darkened cave, it would be like trying to find light in the darkness or putting all your hopes on the hopelessness. We all have messed up in life, we all have made mistakes but whether you choose to live in past for the sake of your future or you live for the present, whether you choose to accept what you have or you go chasing an utopian dream, either ways always try to live life on your terms. Like my friend said, look back if you have to but don’t regret because no one can ever make the choices you have made and no one can ever be you.

Would you find me????

Through these deserts, through the sunshine

Would you be my blanket 

On those cold and merciless nights

When all your dreams come crashing down

When everything wrong seems like right

Would you be the one to believe in me

Even though my words seem to be so full of lies?

Through these spirals, through this vortex of time

Would you like a ocean keep all my secrets inside

On those gray and cold mornings

When the sun is so hard to find

And it starts to feels like December underneath these August skies

Would you still be my shoulder and hold me strong when I cry

Even though I have lost all my battles

Surrendered, bowed and died

Would you still give me your lips and bring me back to life?

Tears of Happiness and of Pain

There is something about pain which make us seem insignificant, almost pale and diaphanous in comparison because there exists just so much of it in this world, at each and every step, nook and corner that whatever we are going through no matter how much emasculating it may be still doesn’t even come close to the real thing. There are people living through this pain, deprivation and poverty, people who can’t even hope leave alone cry for things which we want but these people are also the people whom I think to be the happiest because these people have a hope that someday things would once again get better, their belief in goodness is still intact and this belief is what keeps them going. Pain, if you ask me is the biggest of all levelers, it just brings about a relative simplicity to our lives, it brings about a kind of humbling feeling which makes you live for what you have even though what you have are just vestiges or excerpts of what you want. It’s when you see around yourself and allow yourself to feel something which people around you are going through, you just can’t help but cry, cry at your insignificance, at your own ineptitude in making something out of your own life. It’s always easy to cry for our pain but we have to teach ourselves to feel the pain that someone else might be feeling and believe me it’s not that tough to cry for someone else because pain is universal and all of our tears are related at some level. It’s not just about tears but the way you relate, the way allow yourself to feel and at first nothing of it will make sense more so because we as a generation have been taught to hold everything inside. The day you learn how to cry for someone else’s pain is the day when you could be truly happy because nothing could bring about more sanguinity in your life then the realization that there is still something inside of you that isn’t dead. I remember seeing my grandmother cry whenever I would return from college and also whenever I would leave, to me her tears appeared all the same but now when she has gone somewhere far and away from me, I realized all the prayers she would have said just so that she could once again see me walk back through those gates. In that instant I realized about those tears which so willfully flowed streaking her cheeks, those were the tears which flow when all the promises that you have made yourself are fulfilled. I remember the night when my friend told me about her boyfriend who cheated on her, that was the night when I first truly cried for someone else probably because the fact that someone could even think of scattering a heart as beautiful as hers was something I didn’t know how to react to. Life teaches us in retrospection and when you look back you realize there is just so much that you should have felt but never did and when you think of it you just can’t help but cry. Now when I look back, a lot of things, a lot of tearful moments make sense to me, like when my mom was pregnant with my sister, I remember placing my hand on her tummy and feel as my sister would kick and I remember clearly my mother cried at that instant and I thought it was probably because of the pain but now I know it was the joy of bringing a new life in this world was what she cried for. I don’t know what it is with me and kids but whenever I see kids I just am filled with an overwhelming sense of well being and I feel as if all is well with this world and when one of them holds my hand I don’t know why but I feel proud of offering them the sanctity which they need. Life is about giving and I don’t see why we can’t cry for someone else and believe me nothing will bring you greater joy then the fact that you have related with someone who was in pain. Pain and ecstasy are one and the same, just identifying with one brings you closer to the other. I read in a book that these tears are symbolic of our humanity; the civilization which cannot cry for itself is the civilization which invariably dies, there is nothing wrong with crying for it is one of the first things which we do when we are born and probably it’s one of the endless ways that makes us feel alive.

View from a Park Bench

A dull ache permeates through these winds

As your feet rustle through these yellow autumn leaves

Silent clouds of melancholy filling your eyes

With unfallen tears

Waiting like a dry and yellow unfallen autumn leave

Hoping for a gust, waiting for a release.

Passing through those rustic gates

Looking for familiarity

Amidst all these strange inscriptions and names

Like a dry autumn leave

Trying to find a resting place

Far away from sheltering branches of a tree.

You bent down and place your rosary

With your lips moving in a silent prayer

Gently with a touch as light as this wind

You brush of the dust from the epitaph

Engraved on the tombstone of our beloved’s grave.

 

Would You Die For The One You Love???

Sometime back, though I am not exactly sure when, I heard this story, story as in an allegory, kind of a rhetoric, a glorified question mark which makes you think and more often than not leave you feeling undecided about which side should you chose though your choice do not really matter for irrespective of the choice that you make, you don’t get to get alive out of it. It was, I think one of my ex girlfriend who told me this story and I guess it was supposed to be used as a trick question with a sole intent of eliciting my level of commitment and I won’t be far off making a conjecture that my answer did had something or the other to do with fact that we eventually broke up. The story was like, there is a flower and who so ever plucks it will die, now what will you do if the one person you love the most asks you to pluck that flower, would pluck the flower and chose to die for the one you love or you would chose life albeit without love, there was as well a belligerent couple almost on a verge of divorce thrown in between but I don’t think there part was of any consequence here. My answer and broken relationship notwithstanding, I thought of the story to be completely stupid but nevertheless I was left almost perplexed, unable to comprehend as to why anyone who loves me would want me to die and that too for a stupid flower unless it was my death and not the flower which they wanted. “Would you die for the one you love” almost sounded like a tagline for some Hollywood flick or like a line from some senseless Enrique Iglesias song or any Enrique Iglesias song for that matter but given the fact that after all this years I still am confounded by the question means that the question did had an impact on me and especially when I am unable to remember the name of the girl who asked me this. Come to think of it, the question above everything else is about the choices that we make at each and every step all in the name of love, we chose the people to fall in love with, we chose to be with the people we love and it’s by choosing to be there for a person we express our love, perhaps love is all about choices, all the intermittent and concomitant choices that we make along the path of love. Will I pluck that flower if someone whom I love asked me too, perhaps not because love for me is all about being alive and given the trouble we all go through to find that perfect someone, I would spend my life being with them and taking care of them, rather than dying at the hands of a stupid flower just to satisfy the whims and fancies of someone stupidly in love.

That brings me back to the question that what if I really love a person and plucking the flower is the only way to salvage a relationship, well in that case I would chose myself over the relationship and let go though my heart would be broken and I would cry for a day or two but I would move on because eventually, we all do and perhaps it’s better for such a relationship to die rather than dying for such a relationship.

across the street

I saw you standing across the street

Looking confused and baffled

We have walked quite a few distances together

You loved walking and I loved to hold your hand

And when you talked it was like sunshine would flood into my world

I looked at you standing at the intersection tucking a wayward strand as it caught air

I can walk again with you as long as you will let me hold your hand

With you by my side I could walk to the end of the world

I look in your eyes and I fear nothing now

Death perhaps can only take you away from me

I look back at you and you look sad

There are tears in your eyes and people all around

And there is blood on the street.