Verse

I didn’t have to ask

If the sky was blue or blood was red!

But i ask

I don’t get  cues 

That my banter is read…

 i know..

And still i ask

I know Somehow that these texts are awaited

Cherished even?

Like a prophecy is whispered into my ears. 

I didn’t have to ask if roses bloom

Or if rivers flow..

They do, i know! And i ask. 

I didn’t have to wonder if love exists..

I see it n feel it

For me, and flowing from me..

Emerging and expressing itself 

In elaborate words.

Like i need words to show 

What needs to be felt 

Like I need answers to obsolete questions

Yet I ask 

As if I am Asking 

If the Earth is round and the sea is deep! 

Universal truths i discount, just for the heck of it..and question them :) 

When i was born, I know I brought 

A legacy, a destiny..

Of love n joy

Of poems and letters 

Some are willed to you

Some have your name written on them..

I bring them to you and ask

Do you look for them?

Pretending i don’t know!

Or maybe because when you reply and say yes,

There’s a joy that emerges upon seeing you

In your responses:) 

This n That

 I actually blogged yesterday. It was about a film I watched recently - The Banshees of Inisherin. I was deeply moved by what I could read in between this brilliantly stirring plot. And I wanted to share my perspective, my personal take on the abstract plot line and the open ended finishing. Somewhere down the line, I felt like I wasn't really capturing what my real take away was - I was feeling a short of words - very underwhelmed so to speak, like they were stuck in my throat. But I wanted to keep the commitment  to write and I didn't have the time or will to rewrite and so I published the post which didn't cut my approval.

Shortly I realize there was some sort of a glitch in the post and I left it as is, thinking I'd tackle the fixing later. Someone who is a regular here sent me a screenshot of the blog, actually walking me through unpublishing it and making sure it was just a glitch and making sure my account was safe. So the underwhelm I felt as I published it turned into an overwhelm of gratitude for having this friend in my life. We sat through it since noon, trying to copy paste and republish it, until I realized it was acting up and concluded that the universe is giving me cues to get the review out like it is intended to be, and not dish out a watered down version - just to keep the commitment.

Ever since, I tried to rewrite it, only to be greeted with a lot of pauses as I maneuvered  through my daily grind. I thought I'd do my easy peasy lemon squeezy short cut and scan around the house, to find a muse and feign a verse. But then I thought - why not do a this n that post? So here I am into the third paragraph, not really knowing where I am going with this - or that, for that matter!

I had a tough few days, a emotional stir. Dunno where to blame it really, or I probably do know. When I go through these upheavals, like most humans do (unless they are realized and live in the woods, away from human interactions and instigations) I seem to have developed a conscious coping mechanism, thanks the pseudo  gyaan I acquired through reading the many spiritual texts over the past six years. I watch the state of the mind like a third party and go - Ok, Bee is feeling low, so Bee should be prepared to feel high soon and vice versa. The human Mind - I hear, is in a vicious  cycle of being happy and sad, an infinite thought loop- somewhat like a yo yo, up and down. 

It renders a lot of power to know this much and take the energy off of the emotion and vest it into the observation.  But long before this half baked Yogini took form, I derived the same exact wisdom from a lyric by Gulzaar ji, from this film named Dil se.

It says - "Gham Dil ke bas chulbule hai, Paani ke ye bulbuley hai, Bhujte hai bante rehte hai" 

Which means "The sorrows of the heart are just naughty, Water bubbles they are, They form, and they pop"

They say that the lesson appears when the student is ready. And when we keep our eyes open and our hearts receptive, I think we get all the wisdom and support we need right within our reach. It could be an Oscar contending screen play, a glitch that pauses a blog post, a fluctuating emotion or a lyric from a bygone memory in the distant past.

After all - life they say, is too short to be little. And in there - 

How much to learn? 

How much to live? 

How little time???

(Pictured - My favorite yellow roses, living it up on my kitchen island, not caring how long they would last )

ReVerse

 Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com

Sometimes I tell ya

I feel like I am peeling an onion

As I flip past the pages of life.

The flavor cutting through the air

The spicy pungency

Filling my senses

While I wipe my eyes

And shut them wrinkled

As I slice through the layers of lushness.

These bits, later, would add to the flavor of the dish

Elevating it to epic proportions.

But the chore it is, I tell ya

To cut em and cry.

I remember the random suggestions I heard -

Keep them in the fridge, place them in water

You won't tear up!

Somewhat like the advice one gets

Rummaging through life.

Keep em journaled, talk them out

Take em to a walk, toss em in a bin

Now when the verse goes reverse

And the block makes you grin

What would one blog about?

Layers? tears? onions? life?

Return of the Ramble

 

I fly past a daily grind

Don't let it trick you - this flight.

It isn't anything graceful.

Rather a lumber

And a tumbling down

From chore to chore

For more to some more

Of Godforsaken things.

I love them mostly

Or believe I do.

Except the dishing part!

That, I love? I do not!

Suds in the sink, form and pop

As I watch them in preoccupation

The visual seems to register

And then doesn't!

Pop - The reminder.

Pop up, that is

Of the ramble that awaits here

To be doodled

Almost in an urgency, 

Like someone somewhere is waiting

To see what I would ponder about

And string in aplomb

Or settle in stupor

Scattering scrambled words to make a note.

I ramble, and I roam

I settle as I reach home -

The one that is abstract

A heap of wordage that cocoons me

And aids my metamorphosis.

If you are here,

Who ever you are..

I know not!

But you should know

I draw from you, as much as I write for me.

For us may be?

In this doodle where words and pictures blur

And become one.

Just like you and me.

Photo by Andrew: https://www.pexels.com

Verse

Up there

The things I reach out to.

In the other realm

Birds made of feathers,

Made of metal.

That graze the skies

Serenading the blues

I wish to take a swoosh

Defying gravity

Going about, looking down 

And letting out a laugh

At the mirage that it is, 

The illusion, the deception 

The Laugh in question

Is to acknowledge 

That I am an idiot - 

By choice.

That I partake in the parade

Knowingly, with full consent.

Now, isn't ignorance a ticket

To some slack?

I neither have  the ticket, nor the slack.

Awareness they say

Even when paired with ignorance

Is a virtue.

(Ah, there goes the vicious cycle again,

The urge to defend and acquit the culprit.)

I look up to let in

And the 'let go' when I look down

Waits patiently in queue.

I don't have forever

That should be the message on a sticky note

Displayed conspicuously

In my eye span.

Reminders galore

Up there

The grazing branches of trees,

The little critters buzzing in the morning sun

Promising the light of the creation.

There's a vast space out there

To spread and rejoice

What do I choose?

A dungeon of delusions

Landing me back on my bum

Right into where I intend not to be.

What fetish, I make out of this maze.

Photo by Valeriia Miller: https://www.pexels.com

 

Talk

Would you  get me

If I talked in pictures?

I said nothing

And flashed images.

Would you get me

If I talked in silence

Filing my nails.

Polishing them and stealing a glance

From the couch I plonk in 

As I wait for the varnish to dry.

Would you get me

If I said I had to say nothing

But I was fibbing

And am dying to pour it all out!

Would you get me if I sat idle

Did nothing!

Said nothing.

Just lingered around

Like the smell of a fragrance

After the person had left the room.

Would you get me if I am trying not to be gotten

Sulking, throwing a mute fit of sorts.

Would you get me if I ignored you

As a means to get noticed by you.

Would you clean my mess

And hug me for 30 seconds.

Yes, just 30 seconds.

That's all it takes to regulate emotions

I was told, by someone qualified to tell.

What amusement it is

That all that can't be gotten 

While wanting to be gotten

But pretending to not to

Can be cured with something

As simple as

A hug.

 Photo by Whicdhemein - Pexels.

Nomenclature

 I am the tiny little dog

The female dog

There's a word for it - Bitch.

But somehow it feels like an expletive 

To use it  publicly.

They say 'Bitch', like it is a swear word.

A bad word.

'Bitch' is an insult kept in a cuss, wrapped in abuse.

But the tiny little dog I am

I don't care for treats, so the plans to placate

Motivate, manipulate - if any

Won't fly!

I am too big for my britches. 

Oh I mean, too big for my mass

I have no perception for size.

I treat all as equals. Like soles. 

Err...Souls.

I stand up, pulling myself on my forelegs

Over exaggerating my slight existence.

I don't care much. I don't care enough.

Wait, there's fine font!

But when I do care, when the treats are abstract

And the bonds metaphysical

I die caring.

That's all I do. Care.

Pretty much that. 

And that's plenty much to do

Size is just a measure.

Wealth is just a number.

But love is beyond. And Above.

(Pro tip - Use that as a treat)

I might be tamed.

I am a tiny little dog 

(Yes, tiny and little are repetitive )

(But just so you get the point, that I am really, REALLY little)

There's another word for all these excess words

Bitch.

But that's a cuss word.

Its funny how meanings shuffle

And distort.

What difference does a label make?

I am a tiny little dog.

I was supposed to be house broken,

Well trained.

Friendly.

Quiet.

I swear they even gave me an accreditation .

Good girls don't cuss.

They don't bark. 

Good girls can't be Bitches

And Vice versa...

But I am a tiny little dog.

Screw what the etymology  says.

There's one word for it

Bitch.

Put me and the my word together and it becomes.....

Good girl Bitch.

yikes, that sounds like an oxymoron.

But they are synonymous. Much like tiny n little. 

But whatever!

Happy Birthday - Tiny little Good girl Bitch ;)

Thank you - Photo by Terrance Raper - Pexels.

Black and White.

 

The other day, I was going through a parenting moment with my second born. This child has an over active imagination and a tendency to improvise on things every time she narrates an incident to me. 

For instance, if Mr. Price, her second grade teacher and her had a conversation in the corridor, it would add up in content every time she chooses to repeat it. And she chooses to repeat it at least three times in one go...so you know how the script expands as it gets repeated. I, for the bad cop that I am, keep interrogating her without calling her out, ever so gently bringing the focus onto the details she stacks up on the convo - kind of making her question / correct herself without killing her spirit and her rich imagination.

The other day we had a discussion. About speaking the truth. I was trying to tell without telling, preach without preaching that there's a fine line between imagination and fibbing. Between improvisation and manipulation. But it was a slippery slope, a conversation that was punctuated with a lot of thoughtful pauses and childish questions. Now the subject matter 'truth' seemed to seep all over, creating a lot of ambiguity. 

So why is important to tell the truth? I asked her - after telling her stories that demonstrated the importance of being truthful. No one would believe us if we are caught telling lies too many times - she seemed to get to the core of the issue. Just when I thought my mission was accomplished, I realized that there's some fine font happening here. Speaking the truth has layers to it. That not speaking the truth is not always a bad thing, and in some contexts, it is perhaps very necessary. 

What if we would hurt someone's feelings if we speak the truth? - I brought in an example of when I said that a painting someone made was fantastic when I thought otherwise. If there's no harm caused but good done when we lie, so to speak, it is okay! I concluded. 

The 8 yr old looked like she got it and got about her routine. But I felt like something was incomplete in this conversation, the conversation in my mind space went through things that might go above and beyond telling the truth - I felt the need to tell her more, to tell her in detail that life isn't black and white and everything seems to shift based on the situation. But I wanted to spare her tender self from cryptic philosophies...Life would get to the teachings, slowly but surely. Right?

This morning, when I was walking home with my neighbor - this pleasant lady that doesn't seem to have bad days or bad hair days, our conversation treaded the topic of separation anxiety. It's a fresh school year and we saw kindergarten kids being dropped at the gates where longing stares are exchanged between them and the parents. 

"I saw a kid cry the other day" - I told her. A sight that isn't very common in the part of the world I live in. I could be dated, but when I remember my school days in India, I remember  tantrums and separation anxieties spilling all over the place and kids that cried to no end when they were dropped off at the school gate. Like I said, I could be dated. 

"Oh here?" she seemed to be as surprised as I was when I spotted the incident. "May be the kid didn't go to pre-k" I analyzed. "Could be" she offered. 

Then She spoke about her own experience with a kid crying at the gate - the kid being a common friend's carpool mate that had a similar melt down when being dropped. The friend that came to drop him was clueless as the kid broke into a full blown sob fest at the entrance. The new rules forbid parents from walking into the campus at drop off. "I scooped the kid on to my hip and walked in to drop him at his class, waited till the teacher arrived and made sure some grown up was around to handle him" She shared animatedly "For that moment I didn't think it was necessary to follow the rules. It is a little kid's anxiety in question and I didn't want him to feel abandoned" 

I had a smile on my face. We are taught to follow rules, to speak the truth. But are we encouraged to speak our truth? The things that we see, we feel and we deem as important? Do we stand up for what we believe in and put our foot down and become rebels when the situation nudges us or do we confine ourselves to the rule books?

I remember watching a reel on the Gram - a reel from a famous Bollywood film where a paraplegic goes into a monologue urging all and sundry to break the rules, kiss slowly and live fully as life is short and unpredictable. At that moment, I had a flash of a thought that kind of deciphered the 'breaking the rules' part as an act of abandon, an act of artistic liberties...

But I think this is what it could have meant - Break the rules cause rules aren't always the roads that lead us to truth. And bend the truth cause the what is true need not be right. 

Photo by Alexander Dummer: https://www.pexels.com

Ode to Gobi - (The Cauliflower )

 

I sit here and wonder, looking at thee

How, holy miracle you are borne on a tree..

A plant, a bush or on foliage you occur

I sit here and wonder of the emotions you stir

I fry you - frittered, doused in corn starch

I devour you in November, I devour you in March!

Then I grate you and stuff you in pockets of bread

I gobble up, yummy gobi - with a yoghurt spread

I look to spot you in farmer markets' stalls

There's plenty of bounty but I hear your calls

Beckoning to me to come take you home

Oh tasty cluster of flowers, shaped like a dome.

Now I see how the world obsesses by my side

chopping you to feign grains and calling you the upside

Of avoiding starches and filling the tummies

with flavor and fun and all thing yummies.

Now crust you become, on a pizza of all things

Now base you become and give me happy wings

To launch myself into a vegetarian eden

Your virtues they line up from China to Sweden

Now if I had to pick a food and call it a fave

If I have to look for a  muse and string verses of rave

You come to rescue on the plate and the blog

You serenade the senses you clear the brain fog.

Pictured - Gobi (cauliflower) Parantha from my humble kitchen to accent my humble blog.

Ponder - The Guilty pleasure

 

In all honesty, when I am committed to write and inertia takes over, I apply a short cut. I write in a free form, a verse form. It cuts my work time into half and I am not worried about the coherence of the thought or how clearly it flows, or how grammatically flawless it is. But at the end of it, I get a feeling that I had cheated on the exam. 

Is working smart a vice? Sometimes I look at it as such.

But to ponder I choose today. And the subject matter was lurking in my head ever since  I binge watched the doc series about Johnny Depp case on Netflix. Now my age old attention span is something only I can understand, especially when it comes to confining myself to a screen and holding myself captive to someone else's thoughts. But I did watch through two episodes out of 3 in one sitting and that's some sort of power that subject had over me and I have to care to admit. 

But while I was watching it, my mind did drift back and forth into the awareness that my attention span is being stretched. And I didn't break character after all - I wasn't as captivated as I thought I was because the chunk of my attention was consumed in analyzing why and how this subject is sucking me into it. Domestic discord isn't new to me, I had passive exposure to it growing up in a household that had two class A alpha parents. And I'd be lying if I say I don't actively go through it from time to time as a grown up in a long standing, relatively solid matrimony. When familiarity takes the foreground, there are things that become inevitable - for instances, contempt in big and small doses should be expected. 

Especially after many winters to my married back and two children, I have to say, I am breaking the conditioned 'good girl' mold and speaking my mind without dimming myself just so I accommodate the other party. Empathy I understood, should be applied in two parts - One in understanding why the other party did what they did and not judging them, and the other in speaking up and telling how I don't need to bear the burnt of their wounds if they choose the easier way to deal with their demons by taking it on others. 

Now the Johnny in question might be dapper and debonair , with a few (need a fact check here) Oscars standing proud in his curio. What's eating Gilbert Grape is a film I can watch again and again being partially amnesiac towards my attention span. And Amber might shine like an amber in a no moon night, sporting a smile that lights up the whole court room and making a heterosexual  female (that's moi) watching her with a half agape mouth. But both of them are human. And the last time I checked, no human is perfect. 

Now, I get ever so slightly flustered when 'the love of my life' phrase is thrown around liberally. A lot of things that we assume as love are not love and in a co-dependent relationship such as a marriage, it is near impossible to love in the truest sense of the word. There was a clear give and take in this relationship as with all of them and I don't for one thing need to take sides or cheer one party cause both of them are humans in a marriage. While the proceedings carried on, I had a strange sense of watching something staged and I wouldn't know why - could be one of my biases, could be my skepticism or could just be the fact that there's a civil case of domestic discord, a topic as mundane and commonplace as snowing in north pole and both the parties are privileged and privy to things that most pedestrians are not. 

End of the day, I had no sympathy for either but I do empathize with both and I also do understand, it was a marriage of equals and none who so ever had a back seat so to speak. At the end of the day, what happens between a couple is not entirely know to the couple themselves as we as human beings are not honest with how we look at ourselves most of the times. We don't apply the critique to us that we liberally apply to others.

Now, is the topic the civil case or the guilty pleasure I had watching it? It is said that the human brain likes problems. We fetishize conflicts like nothing else, we like being in tricky situations as it is an addiction to the ego - case in point, we enjoy thrill, drama and violence. We like solving puzzles, sorting through mazes. We do not seem to value peace, quiet and stability as much as we are drawn towards the former - Or I would have let my exhausted, period drained backside to get extra sleep and rest instead of partaking in the pressing issue that's being televised. Pretty people of the virtual world, let me tell you it is the work of the larger than life Ego that's never wrong, ever!

So yeah, that's with the guilty pleasure. That seems to take over most of us unless we have busted the loop and fallen out of it. It is easy they say, the ones that got to the other side - ocher robes and a hut in Himalayas are entirely optional.

The maze, the mind, the madness :)

 

Photo by Jonathan Borba - Pexels

Once upon a Tote

Once upon a Tote

I stumble upon stuff galore

Unsent letters, Unspent notes

Stashed up chamomile tea pouches

That took a beating 

Around the confines of the bag.

Once upon a tote

A lip balm found an invisible cranny

To expire and smell rancid

By the time I rediscover it.

Random receipts from the grocery store

That slip through the cracks of memory

Gift cards that are perhaps used up

Or never used.

Once upon a tote

A novella takes refuge

like it were a rescue camp to start anew

In the hands that lovingly caress her

And flip through her pages like 

Her nerve endings are being aroused

Like she is being made love to!

Once upon a tote

Numerous need-its

Perish, never to see sunlight again.

Perhaps, somewhat like the possessions 

We chase to make us complete

The baggage we accumulate 

In wishful thinking 

Of a brighter tomorrow

On the other side of this dusk.

Once upon a tote

Resides the urgency, the panic

The over preparation 

That consumes our days

While they slip by

Like unsent letters and unspent notes.

Like rancid lip balms and crumbled tea pouches.

This 'Once upon a tote',

Upon the peg of the future

Hangs for dear life

Wiling away the present

In the ironic absence

Of wanting to get there

While existing here.

 Pic Courtesy - Musa Ortac - Pexels.