The Pill Merchant

It takes a little blue pill every time, to wake each of us up. We stay on the other side, happy in our sleep, allowing ourselves to live our life in the drowsiness of misery.  Nothing in this city surprises me anymore, the dust had long settled in the crevices of my lungs. No health official with his lousy application and flashy chart of referral  medicines could do anything about it. Sometimes when I am out on the roads choking carbon colloids and coughing my breath away- I don’t even get to excuse myself and on those days perhaps the anthem that’s locked inside my body oozes out through my mouth. The days go by in the arguments of lust-less opera. The silent opera of one’s mind make funny hideous sounds, and sometimes you meet people who in their own misery excuse themselves to be angry at the world- angry at their situation and yet sitting idly like a tall tree without a shadow to offer. I have often wondered that one day I would turn out like them, and I have often been scared.
On merry sunlit mornings over thinking leads to depression, and then I would look for ways to stay away- from people, situations, love and the likewise disease of the human condition. On one such morning, tired of my condition I looked for a solution. And this went on for quite some time before looking for a solution itself started becoming a problem. The gentle thunder storms were all over the city now, flashing electric signals over our head. On one such day, when the skies were roaring in connubial laughter; I met him. He was like any other man on the square, selling lozenges, to earn his daily bread. I felt his presence like you feel a magnet. It was different- that’s all I can say. As I approached him he started smiling tilting his head on one side and telling me – I have got the perfect dose for you mister. 10 buck a piece. I trusted his words, for I weren’t like those people who were locked in their own misery that  they were afraid to check out on the world. I must hate this world a lot too- I must hate people a lot too, perhaps that’s why I keep on mentioning them time and over again. I must remain above this, I thought. Those days I didn’t have any friends and people had an utmost dislike for me because I didn’t fit their understanding- or perhaps I was too bad. Sometimes the simplest explanation about ourselves offered us the most solace and yet if someone loved you they wouldn’t believe that.

I am evil, I must be evil.


The songs from the morning were locked in my head. Young lovers in tunic dresses, that’s how the lyrics went on. The man took out ten blue capsules and put them inside a paper envelope, and said, one for each night for the next ten days, and you will find happiness. I smiled at him allowing myself to feel humoured and amused both at the same time. The circumstances under which all of this happened was rather a turbulent one- my insides were still choked in conflicts and my outsides expressed that in whopping coughs, an ugly man the Pill Merchant he called himself gave me ten blue pills, to wake up on the other side of reality-
was it death?

It takes a little blue pill every time, to wake each of us up. We stay on the other side, happy in our sleep, allowing ourselves to live our life in the drowsiness of misery and then one fine day it all makes sense- this silent suffering and we get better, better than the present and the past.  I met a lot of funny people here and our stories ran parallel, and most of us weren’t what we thought of ourselves- we weren’t evil, our silent confirmations that we were sensitive and a bit ahead of our time, was confirmed, that was the beauty of that world. We were safe. I sometimes wonder if that world is a lie. But holding on conflicting opinions within you makes you a paradox- it’s better than being a bigot perhaps. The world still doesn't get us at times I feel. I don’t know what the Pill Merchant would think. He always smiles tilting his head.

The truth is I have been visiting a shrink lately, for all normal folks it must be a sin I guess, but I am a doer, if I have a problem I work on it, and when he heard that I write he asked me to write something for him. I don’t know if he would like this story, not every day you get
to meet a pill merchant, that too
an ugly one.

Je Suis Charlie, Je Suis Virat Hindu

I bought three pretty idols of Saraswati from the local market, and guess what, I dropped them from the third floor to see how many pieces they would break into. I got scorned looks from my neighbors and family members, but well the broken pieces scattered across the alley made a pattern which was rather beautiful, it was art, you see. My kind of art. What do they know?

Je Suis Charlie.

The sound of bombs.

Thereof, thereupon
through this turmoil history
you shall conquer this gossamer land
looking back at times
while never looking
back.

I still wake up to the sound of bombs,
mother. 

Through this turmoil of history
your name shall be etched in
the pathos of every lover and
in mornings when I
wake up, I will hear you
play Orpheus’s lyre- and time
shall lose its meaning in
beauty as stones will melt
like hearts,

and hearts will melt like

ice in the heat of

love.


It was 

But In Memory.

The unkempt time keeper-

what is that lies in the rudder of  

your soul?

The unhinged door, what more noise

could you possibly store?

The tousled wind, did you not make her

look at me?

Is it not I, who looks at the past or does the

past look at me?

And in memory begins

memory.

But in memory begins

memory. 

A Careless Poet

On a rainy day
little drops settle on the comfortable
grass tops amidst teary eyed daughters and
foolish femmes chanting to be
androgynous seeking their beloved
attention. Conversations aren’t good enough,
there are no excuses in the
absence of love.

How alone are you in this world?
Two times, say that, yes repeat after me.
Hear me. Grow up. Procreate.
Are you alone in this world?
How alone are you in this world?

The above words are careless introductions.
He is all alone in this
world.



-
Sick with piles, pain in the asshole but the
comfort of love undoes blood stained shit,
she is looking ahead into the years of
promises, wicked camaraderie- claiming to break bones,
like elephants her memory is emotive and
fragile but
often in the name of comfort people
wreck each other’s lives.
-

He writes with one breath,
and with only one breath
he shall take in whatever
the world has to offer him
oxygen first-

He breaths in birds, and their wings
filled with the templates of foreign lands
and sorrow sings la la la la in his heart and once,
or twice he would look up in the sky and try
breathing in the cacophony of the years he had
left behind- there was a young boy and there was
this young girl, and her smell would invade his
lungs and there would be nothing more but a blur
and he will keep on inhaling with hope
until he is old and bald and
his memory is about to fail-
static, dynamic, prosaic, poetic,
the shades of a story, the absence of love,
not make believe but truth, and then one must
release, breathe out- carefully as slow as you
can- a careful poet is not a poet.


I hear his deep sigh,
-that final breath
and there along with it
everything would come out
in the papyrus of present,
and he is afraid now, of
this moment between magic and megalomania,
of what might come out of what might
have been inhaled- satan, evil, bible, koran,
gita, a careful poet is not a poet. His
pure insides must have purified the black
and made it white, oh snow, how pure,
are his words, and everything
shall remain as it is in this world of
rancor and jingoism.

-
Fanatics, fools and wise men will
read them over and over
again- words, but in that depth of their
insidious prison they would
overlook everything, for first comes
the actions and then comes the everything
else but he lived the other way
and stepped ahead in this world

-

He is almost out of breath now,
he is staying within his overcoats;
cramped within a ten feet by
three space crouched hiding
behind anonymous words, and
as his life runs out with the
last exhalation,
with that last ink of
vacillating words
      nothing else remains.

Hari Bol, Hari Bol, I hear by the old ghat
as they take him by their shoulders,
and reduce him to ashes.




 He was a communist. A careless poet.
(They donated his body to the gods above) 

Like a hyena?

He is the man who makes friends
On the road, he is someone who looks for stars
on the dusty bylanes of a choking
city, a city, that's unaware of its slow death,
like most of us.

Well, most of us.

His friends, four legged, follows him
to his address of staying and
goodbyes. He sometimes offer them brisk end of
broken biscuits and them being his friends
ask for more, they speak of not much-but
the language of old people.



Often, they nudge his feet, and for a while he feels loved in
their sinless saliva that kills bacteria, and
after a while the city must always churn up
and throw out all of that-
those
vestiges of lost feelings.


Why he wonders.


Fairy nights are meant for fairies
and poets, but for his puppy
friends  there are not many
nights as they roll up to the
wheels of a
strange device leaving him
all alone-over and over
again.

Hush now.
The night's quiet and the puppies must sleep,
and friends must seek each other out in the
pleasure of a wistful silence;


and I?




I must write till the end of the earth.
I must weep like a Hyena. 

Another New Year, bebe.

Sadness in lovers is telepathic. Like human consciousness, it transcends mysteriously through the ether of space-time, at times twitching like a caterpillar glued in amber. Sadness is telepathic and when the year draws open with the scent of a new day, always look back for memory is telephonic- sweet or sour.

Happy New Year.