Idle.

Seemingly warm
Sunny day,
peeping thru the open blinds.
Barren trees exposing their skeletons
On a bright winter morning.
Narcissus in one of his
Zillion modern forms
Looking out of the window
and seeing the image
through a self-indulgent paradigm
Like it were his play of words
That makes the world pretty.

Mother.

An image of pristine beauty.

White accented with blue -

A rough textured veil

Covering the forehead

That had changed the fate of a

Million foreheads around.

Creases of kindness

Gathered around those

Windows to a stunningly pretty soul.

Heavy laugh lines

That bask in the glory of

Many a smiles they had generated.

Thin, pale lips

That had added the color of prayers

To countless unfortunate lives.

Mother to many children

Borne in the wedlock to

The service of humanity.

Mother - In every sense

Of the divine word

Spelling syllables of love.

Reality.

I was seated in the front seat of my Honda Civic, after a long time. I forgot how the road feels in the front seat. It does feel different form being behind the wheel, being in the front seat and not behind the wheel that is. Okay, so in any case, I had a better view at the world that was hidden under the veil of motherhood the last couple of years. Roads looked more vibrant under the bright traffic signals. The light of neon signs cut thru the dark night like a prism from a high quality diamond. I looked around and let the beauty of the night sink into my mind while my kid brother drove me to pick up pizza from a nearby joint.
He stepped out to get the grub and I was all by myself in the front passinger seat looking around and doing what I do the best - doing nothing! The car parked beside mine was vibrating with the music set to the highest notch on the volume control. A teenage boy was waiting just like me. I got a glance of him and looked around to see what else I could see. Then the door beside the Pizza business caught my eye. "Grimmon's" it read, In illuminated grey letters potruding from the front wall of the premisis. Underneath was something written in paint. Astigmatism made me squint my eyes as they were not framed with the seeing aid. "funeral services" I read and my stomach flipped. It was a weird feeling that I could not place. It was not a pleasant one though. I looked at the front door frightfully curious. It looked as lifeless as what it deals in. I squinted my eyes further to see what it said. A nine digit phone number with tiny lettering above it that said "crimation and burial services and Casket showroom"
"Casket Showroom" The word leaped on to me. I had an urge to go take a closer look, to peep in and see what a showroom that showcases caskets might look like. I did not dare. Was it not crazy to think such thoughts? Thoughts of wanting to see into a showroom as grave as this one right before me?
I looked back at the door of the pizza place. I could see a beeline to the counter, my brother somewhere in the middle of the line. I saw people walking out with boxes of pizza and bottles of soda. None of them looked at "Grimmons" like I was looking at the place. Intrigued, scared, numbed! A place that co-existed with a food joint, a dry cleaner's shop and a large grocery chain and none of the passers by seemed to have noticed it. It was there, like this reality that exists right before us but we ignore, or perhaps decieve ourselves into ignoring it.

The only reality that chases us all. The only reality that we run away from but can never escape. The reality that mortals ignore and go in a mad hunt of things that can never be immortal.

Me and my philosophy, reflecting over a business sign that stuck me hard and deep! so here goes.

Lifting the shroud of ignorance,
It beams
The ultimate truth
The reality of life
And beyond.
But makes us
Close our eyes
In its blinding light.
And all our brethren
Perish in
A powerful deception.
A beautiful Illusion
Endless.
Endless.


So here's to I, me myself for having the nerve to write this! LOL.
Cheers to Life!

Gift.

Nourishing green friends
Making exotic birds dance
Beautifying the scene
Messing up pathways
Making paddles of mud
From dry soil
Creating havoc sometimes,
With fellow playmates
Who show frightfully
Delightful audio visuals
That flash like a poweful camera
And sound like a Dolby stereo system.
You come drizzling now
And pouring now
You bring with you
life and decay alike.
A gift from the Heavens.
To quench the thirst
Of us mortals.

Attempt.

My kid brother tried to motivate me by demotivating last night. I read out one of my verses and paused proudly to get a reaction. I forgot I was expecting this of an other Virgo. I soon realised what I'd put myself into when he said.

I need
To go
To my room
And sleep.

For those of you who had not understood the satire, He was hinting at my so called poetry that was actually sentences chopped into several segments. "It is wonderful to have a supportive family. Is'nt it?" - to quote Timon's the meerkat's mom form Lion king 1 1/2. LOL.

Another quick complaint he had about the blog before he left to his room was that my writings are loaded with estrogen. He wanted me to write something like a journalist.

Dejected, I made a mental browse of thoughts in my mind. Every thing seemed to be so "me". So in the lines of the style I am used to write in. I thought about a blog that might sound different form my actual tone of writing and thinking. Nope, it doesn't work that way. I should probably try and attempt something more than writing my usual blah-blah.


I should write about Hillary and Obama I thought. My knowledge of politics - Zilch.


May be it should be about going green? I am not an environmentalist though I am pretty passionate about recycling stuff and placing food waste in the green-waste container.

Or should it be a heavy piece on the opression of women? I am not a feminist either.


Oh, may be a fashion blog about the NY fashion show or a tutorial to create smoky-eye like on of those blogs my cyber friend Tiffany writes. Who am I kidding??


So I swallow the travesty, and go on to write in my original style with my limited vocabulary. And before the spasm of creativity to write poetry dies out, I should make another medicore attempt of chopping sentences and writing about a powerful image that comes to mind.


Chubby face
veiling the traces of womanhood
Awkward posture -
An indifference.
The world around
Looking like a stranger perhaps,
That she would not care about.
Quintessential presentation
Of a life toiling.
An adolscence prematurely
Aging, to survive.

Clad in a neon yellow
And fuschia Salwar kameez
She looks at me like I am
A thing.
A chair, a table or may be a flower vase
That was right before her eyes all along.
My lips curve in a greeting.
She looks at me the same look
And the smile, as inconspicuous as her
Childhood fades before it is born.

Rough hands
Calloused feet
Bright pair of eyes
That ceased to dream.

Nonchalance personified
She walks around doing her chores
A fetus that was
wailing in its mother's womb
Less than a score ago.

Her disinterest in the world
Like that of a monk's
Strikes me
As a tear from my eye
fades before it is born
Like her childhood.

Block.

Something, Oh Something!
Blocking the champagne
Of imagination
From fizzing out
And celebrating
The birth of expression.

Okay, I probably need to sleep!

Tyops.

My spell check broke down. Now I can show off how lousily and hurriedly I touch type :-0 (read how bad I am at spelling!)

Canvas

Careless strokes
Creating ugly images
Lasting impressions
Irrepairable damages
Permanent stains.
Only if the painter
Has the understanding
Of the impact he makes
Can he create
The canvas of childhood
Into a masterpiece.

Unconditional.

His sharp nose defined
Like an angle.
His tender lips shaped like the Cupid's bow
His complexion, curiously blushed
To steal a second glance at the girl
on the other side of the window
He writes a note and hands it to her
Hurriedly.
She looks back with a perplexed expression
But does not reject to accept
The message.
Her smile is estimated to be
A million dollars.
Her beauty - beyond and above desire.
Her grace - matchless.
She follows him mesmerized
Into a world of trust.
A world of unconditional love.
She follows him, unaware. Unsure.
He paints her world
In the hue of faith.
They get lost in each other
In thought, In spirit.
Never looking each other in the eye.
Never holding hands
Never touching one another's shadow.
Devoring the elixir
Of togetherness
They walk together
Like parellel lines
Always close
But never
United.

Infatuation.

Her knight in shining armor,
Comes driving in an automobile.
He looks back to reverse his Jeep
And locks his eyes with hers.
The pair of innocent eyes
Looking thru the haze of the night.
Unaware of the tempest
That is about to shatter her peace.
The girl aged ten and three
Wakes up to get a glance of him
But he is gone...Like a reflection
In water. A dream shattered by
An awakening.
Then she hopes to find him one day.
Obsesses about him.
Imprints his image in the crevices of her heart.
His radiance, like that of the sun.
Her love like that of the flower.
She follows him to no end,
And proclaims her love
As first love - The most powerful.

The image dissolves into the light of the day.
She wakes up, the ten and three year old
Like she'd lived a hundred years
in intoxicating infatuation.
First love - she calls it
Till the dawn of a new begining
That brings the light of
Womanhood and erases
The adolescence away.

Puppy Love.

A tender bud in bloom.
Her heart colors the petals of love
In his thoughts.
She dreams about him with open eyes.
Longs to be noticed by him.
Vows to marry none other than him.
Her age, a couple of years short of a decade.
Her love - At it's peak.
She calls it puppy love
When she grows out of it.

Some things Learnt. Some Discovered.

I wanted to compile a list of things that formed a lasting impression on me.

Some are serious, some are funny and some are down right foolish.I'll try to acknowledge the source of knowledge where ever I can.So, randomly I start since chronologically it'll be a bit too much for my elephantine memory. *smiles*

1) Ego makes you lose reason. It makes you blind.- Something I'd discovered seeing the egoistic people around me.

2) A small leakage can sink a large ship - says my Rambabai ever since I was old enough to understand adages.

3) "All great men are understood only when they pass away" "Look at Jesus, Look at The Prophet Mohammed" - Quoted on the railway platform by a random gentleman of my dad's age when I asked him a question or two about his spiritual guru "Sathya Sai Baba" and the many controversies that surround him. I think he is true.

4) One should never stoop to a level where one looks for happiness in someone else's sorrow.Heard this twice, on two different occasions from my hubby Sarat and dear friend Kittu.

5) "Maturity is all about how you handle the child in you" says your truly. "More importantly Maturity is all about how you handle the child in the other person" added my super brainy brother in law who was the 16th ranker in JEE entrance.

6) All friends are family and all family are Friends. Almost always to me and most people. That leaves me wondering what makes more impact. Being a Friend or being family?

7) "Forgiving saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred and the waste of energy" A quote I read in the monthly magazine "wisdom" when I was sixteen.

8) When you try to whisper in a sleeping dog's ear, it charges on you. Learnt when I saw my lil sis Geeta try this on brownie, our little sheep dog with a mighty attitude.

9) "You live the way you want or the way people want you to live - I choose the former" quoted by my lil brother last month when I tried to convince him to chop off his shoulder length hair by telling him what people think of his hair.

10) Never use your brains when you have the manufacturer's instructions. Discovered when I put together Aarti's toddler bed.

11) "Sense of humor is being able to laugh at yourself. being able to see things in a spirit of humor instead of getting offended" Leant by watching my friend Satya.

12) "When you give a child a little, you get back a lot" My first cousin Gayathri (who is 19 years younger to me) taught me this some five years ago.

13) "Children are like mirrors" "All parents leave fingerprints on them by mis handling/handling them" - Not verbatim, but a quote from "The Five Men you Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom.

14) "When you are not doing something, you do not want to do it" says Joseph babcock, the friend I met in a community college.

15) "I am here as my parents programmed into me the commitment of pursuing things" Not verbatim again, but quoted by Janet Burgraff, my writing buddy when she arrived to a class two days after delivering her not so healthy fourth baby.

16) "You can either keep your house clean or hurt your visitors" Mom said after managing the most hospitable household for a good 35 years.

To be continued when ever I can remember more :-)

Midnight Profoundity.

I find myself reading more nursery rhymes now than all my family combined did in our kindergarden years. I wanted to raise a kid that'd love reading and I'd created a monster. Aarti doesn't quiet read yet, so she brings all her books to me and settles in my lap saying "amma eed" and she also makes out when I make up stuff and read when I am preoccupied.
So here's what stuck me about the rhymes that I'd heard eversince I was a child and all along till now. They are meaningless barring a few. They are almost lymerics but longer than four lines. So I though, I could on the fly, just makeup some rhymes. I mean, isn't it easier to write non sense? LOL.

So here goes

Computer computer,
You are better than my tutor
You tell me many things
That grow me wings
To go and explore
And learn about folk lore
Because being nocturnal
Can be a big bore.

Whew...looks like I ammaking sense.

Let me try again. May be with a kiddish theme where Ann sits on the mat

Ann sat on the mat
To play with her cat
The cat came to Ann
And Ann gave her a pat.
The cat wanted Ann
To give her a hat
So Ann gave the cat
a hat instead of a pat.

Okay...this turned out to be on the lines of a tongue twister.

I should try something really really fasicnating like the cow jumping over the moon and the dish eloping with the spoon.

The stripes on the zebra
flew away to the cobra
The straw in the sipper
wanted to wear a slipper
The number eighty eight
Worried about her weight
And the difficult division sign
can't begin to end it's whine.
Monkey, the eternal cribber
Cribbed about the rubber
On the tires of his truck
That got worn out in a click.

Okay, I better stop here before the readership of this blog dwindles to zero.

Anyway, writing non sense is not a big deal. Just like taking an exam that doesn't grade us or selling an item that is free. LOL. So before the profoundity touches its peak, I'll stop blogging and work on my beauty sleep:-0