Somewhere a Poet Was Put to Death

Somewhere a poet was put to death

Just now, moments ago, last night.

It doesn't matter 

Whether they stoned him in the public square

With pomp - gloating in their fear - their fear of the poet.

Or whether they just stood there with industrialized faces, 

Well rehearsed brutalities, practiced oppression,

And the poet just slunk away to his room and hung himself.

Somewhere a poet was put to death

Just now, moments ago, last night.

In this fragmented world that they so fear unfragmenting, the poet was weaving an everymans shirt. From the golden threads of freedom and  hope.  

Somewhere a poet was put to death

Just now, moments ago, last night. 

 

On Togetherness and Purpose

Sometimes life takes you on phenomenal journeys. Especially when you don't hold back or hold on. When you take that first very difficult decision to pack your stuff and go. The year has gone by swiftly. A year of leaving, a year of arriving. Even if this cherry pond is not the final place but it is a big destination. I have lived more for myself, by myself this last year than I have done before. My choices, my rules. And that's a head rush! Sometimes I pause and walk out of myself to get a sense of how I'm living. It's important every once in a while to do that. It helps to keep you rooted. It helps to see from the distance ones life like it were a painting or a film. It helps to see all the grains of important and unimportant things.

When I decided to go, I just knew I had to. I didn't know then how this place, this life and this path was getting me any closer to knowing my purpose. Isn't that finally what we're all looking for? Something bigger than ourselves to be part of. I envy people who have found that purpose when they are still young. I wish them all the luck. And there's others like me who live many lives in this one, who're different people every now and then, slightly schizophrenic perhaps, or great actors who don't act in the movies or on stage but turn their life itself into great big shows - taking on parts; the superstar, the hobo, the lost cause, the diva, the artist, the healer, the mother, the child, the lover the loved, the warrior, the despised, the friend...there are so many things I have been, to myself and others. So I spent the year consolidating myself/s....Looking at each of these personas and trying to find the red thread that connects all of them....I am alone. And now i think I have.

People started visiting almost from the the time I moved to the cherry pond. From different corners of the world. Some almost strangers. Some others who I have walked with for a while. Everyone with a dream for a revolution. Everyone fighting for something. Some to get by, some for a better world still others to get by in a better world....

There's the fighters who fight everything outside of them - they fight the system. And then there are fighters who fight all the systems within them....Those are two different fights - You can make it better for yourself - by that I mean you can actually make yourself a better human being than the world ever expected you to be or you can be full of shit but try and make it better for others.

In the last year I have met a woman who has put her faith in language. Her joys, her dreams and her fears - she wants to express them in an ancient language foreign to her - that's the better life she dreams of as she serves customers in a bar in Toronto in the heart of everything wintry - of being in a warmer place amidst warmer people rolling her tongue in circus like ways to speak a language hardly anyone speaks anymore.

And then I met this man who traveled half way across the world because there are no jobs for people like him in his own country anymore. Who is haunted by his alcoholic abusive father and fucked up childhood. He swings like a pendulum from victim-hood to abuser to victim-hood to abuser. He is obsessed with gangster films from Hollywood. He is obsessed with films in general. He is here. He often wonders why.

Then there is the artist who cannot get over his lack of privileges as a child and believes he now is entitled to a lifetime of freebies. He's a wonderful person always generous always kind. But he spends all his time negotiating in his dreams a contemporary world of art with all it's privileged slick players -he hates them, he wants to be them all at the same time. But when he is not dreaming he is awake to the morbidity, the sheer pointlessness of his own death and the act of dying.  

And the girl who is brave and wants to change everything in the world. Who will stand up and fight whenever she can. But at the end of the day her heart is broken because she loves a coward - a Brahmin boy who will never fight for her.

The local big fish in this small pond who deep in his heart knows how small he is in the big pond. Every evening he drinks until he can forget his life for a few seconds only until the moment someone asks him in that casual sort of way how he is doing and then he forgets to forget - every evening he tells himself the same story. Every evening he tries to convince himself by speaking to a hapless listener how murdering someone was the only choice left to him. He is incoherent with the alcohol and the weed, his words eaten up by his grief and regret.

So many people with so many lives.  My purpose is just to listen to all their stories - to be a witness. To love the stories and remember them and take them to others and bring others' stories back to them.

Get Out

Get Out

The Worker and the King

Often I hear the kings complain
About how much they do
How much they work
And then they add
Those who are poor,
Deserve it
Because they don't
Do what we do
They shirk
hard work

Have you noticed
Oh mighty kings
The faces of these
shirking workers
Have you wondered
Ever
What their dreams and fears are

Can you tell
One face from another?
Or are these shirkers all bodies
Dark skinned, calloused hands
Who smell of the earth
And not of Frangipani essences
That come out of colorful bottles.

Can you tell people from people
Can you tell when at your door the guard changed
Swiftly, quietly?
Can you tell that the woman who served you tea
And cleaned your bathroom yesterday
Is not the same woman today?


Did you stop to wonder where she went
Was there trouble
Did she get sick of being invisible
Or did she give up smiling

We who have been brought up to be kings
Soulless, blind and without hope or courage
Who have not known a day's hunger
Or what it means to go through the world
As just a body

Who are we to stand at our windows
Listening to our false oracles and gods
To pronounce this judgement
On those who are not us?

Shame on you mighty kings
In your cowardice and selfishness
You have lost your humanity
You are the ones
Who are undeserving.

And surely someday
You will see
That the world is no longer yours
It has been taken from you
By the workers who
Built it in the first place. 

Taboo - Do Women Do It?

Shh don't speak
Shh wait a bit
Let the night get a little darker
Let it get quieter still
Let the last lights be switched off
The last deep breath be put to sleep

And then you can.
Yes in the quiet of the night
Under the shroud of this dirty blanket
Then you can

Touch yourself.
Ooooh - touch yourself? Do you
Do I? Do Women..err..I mean do women do it?!

You'd be surprised how many and how often
You'd be surprised how many do it right after
A husband or boyfriend or lover has turned away and gone to sleep
Leaving you wet and wanting
Hands trembling, mind a jumble of desire and disappointment
And anger...I made you come fucker! I gave you that blow job and let you in me
And wanted to pleasure you in a million ways
You did your thing
You didn't bother to know, or care to feel
After all these years - you still can't tell

That the trembling hands
Tremble for pleasure
My pleasure. And when you turn away, start to snore
And the bed begins to shake
It's not an earthquake in your dreams
It's my time
And so i touch, and shake, and hold and pace
I travel through my body
Feeling it, wanting it, loving it
I find those points that make me feel electric
I know what they need, just the right touch
Sometimes feather, sometimes sharp
I gasp silently, as I get closer
To that explosion
I want it to come, but I'm enjoying this too much
I don't want it to stop
I don't want to be sore

I want you to know
Lying next to me
That this is what makes me feel like a woman
The woman that I am
I want you to watch as I do this
I want you to want me to feel like this.

But then the sad truth is...
Shh...let's never talk
Let's pretend women
Don't desire
Pleasure

Crave
Touch

Want
Orgasms

Do
Masturbate.

http://www.storypick.com/delhi-girls-about-masturbation-video/

Came across this video just today. My poem may give the impression that women only masturbate because their partners don't pleasure them well or enough. But just to be clear. That's not true. Masturbation is beautiful - it puts me firmly in control of how I  want to treat my body. And no one knows or understands the trips of my body better than myself. And that's why I masturbate. Often. Happily. Orgasmically. 

I wish I was the receiver of this letter...Dear Sugar

Dear Sugar I Love You

Tiny Beautiful Things

Little Women

Yesterday I met a little girl at office. She is a colleague's 6 year old daughter. She was carrying a pink bunny and in the four hours she spent at office the bunny never left her hand. She's named the bunny 'Bunny'. This is what she found at a mall in south Calcutta when she was there on holiday.

Little-girl-like-little-woman
Pinked out.
She loves her pink bunny and wants a pink tablet to play
Pink games on.
Like her little-girl-like-little-woman cousin.

She doesn't know what sports are
Because they're not pink.
She likes to cycle
And she is her pink bunny's mommy.

She doesn't believe
Her pink bunny
Can grow up to be anything
Because she's a doll.

Little-girl-like-little-woman
She doesn't believe her pink bunny
Will like the sea.

Beautiful little-girl-like-little-woman
I wish for you colors
Of freedom, and power
I wish the world were not so cruel
to have caged you already into
the color politics of it's womanhood.

I wish for you to know
You and your bunny can be anything.
In your games
You can be lovers
And comrades
You can be partners in crime
You can be students and fighters
And under the sea explorers

Little-girl-like-little-woman
Little-woman-like-little-girl

I wish for you
That someday you will no longer
Be little or feel little.

Someday you will grow up
And have your own mind
Make your own decisions
And live your own life.

Girl-Like-Woman
More power to you.