Hallway Mirrors...

In a strangers house, I turn the clock to 10 am, and I see her sip on cardamon tea by the frosted window pane, you sit on the couch, covered in green cashmere you look adorable, and you read her favourite book, you tell her about the cat who ate too many mice and died of hunger. She tells you how so many people die of happiness each year. You go back to your book later and she rinses her teacup with such love as if it were her own baby.


In a stranger's house, I walk downstairs and I see her sitting on the green grass under the warm sun. I see you plucking red flowers for her, only the reddest will do for her, she wears them in her pale hair. You both sit there on the green grass all morning getting up only to get a snack. She tells you she likes pickled tomatoes and you ignore her. You finish your beer and ask her to get you another. But she's too busy with her pickled tomatoes to listen to you now. So you both sit there all afternoon on a toasty summer day, breathing in each other's warm breath. You both glow of happiness, summer and maybe even love.


In a stranger's house, I open the window and I see the dark clouds enter your bedroom and I see you sprawled on the bed and I can hear her say how much she loves the orange and pink quilt her mom made for her when she was 8. You just nod your head and she takes the cue and tells you about her nightmare. You both cuddle without talking for hours and then she disappears under you.


In a stranger's house, I open the door and only empty walls greet me now.

Stuffed Owl...

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row

has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.

The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.

Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,

which certainly was one of a kind.

A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,

the way monogamy is funny, the way

someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and emerged

as a human being. When you think of me

is my face electronically blurred?

I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest

satellite dish in the universe, your smile

as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.

Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.

I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,

how I once held the soft audience of your hand.

I've been ignored by prettier women than you,

but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence

so far, without spilling a drop.

Jeffrey McDaniel

CPR...

Yes, like a ship just sunk inside my chest. 

LoveSong...

He loved her and she loved him

His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to

He had no other appetite

She bit him she gnawed him she sucked

She wanted him complete inside her

Safe and sure forever and ever

Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away

Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows

He gripped her hard so that life

Should not drag her from that moment

He wanted all future to cease

He wanted to topple with his arms round her

Off that moment's brink and into nothing

Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press

To print him into her bones

His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace

Where the real world would never come

Her smiles were spider bites

So he would lie still till she felt hungry

His words were occupying armies

Her laughs were an assassin's attempts

His looks were bullets daggers of revenge

His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets

His whispers were whips and jackboots

Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing

His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway

Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks

And their deep cries crawled over the floors

Like an animal dragging a great trap

His promises were the surgeon's gag

Her promises took the top off his skull

She would get a brooch made of it

His vows pulled out all her sinews

He showed her how to make a love-knot

Her vows put his eyes in formalin

At the back of her secret drawer

Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves

Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs

In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

-Ted Hughes

Bubble...

It's going to be interesting to see how this turns out. I can see the same thing happening here in Mumbai. Big real estate developers building these big luxurious houses, some even come with their own private swimming pools, and although, Mumbai -the city of extremes- has that kind of money, there are also those who can't afford even an one room-kitchen in Mumbai. And so confused, I asked a friend what happens to those who can't afford multi-crore flats, and then she told me about Virar.

Anyway, back to China, knowing the Chinese, I shouldn't have been surprised:

The second, a Beijing municipal regulation restricting families to owning one apartment each has also failed because, as Chovanec said, “People got around [it] by getting divorced.”

Read, China’s Empty Apartments: Part1 and Part2.

And, Chinese hit by over-inflated house prices. 

Oohs and Moos...

Saturday was spent watching two alien movies-Smurfs and Cowboys & Aliens. Although the friend liked both, I liked neither, only because guys possess this awesome ability not to over-think, whereas I? I obsess about things that no one obsesses about. Like, why were smurfs so much like humans? Oh yea, so they had four fingers instead of five, yes, very wow, very original (clap clap)! Or then why did the aliens from some arbitrary planet look so much like humans? Only a grotesquer version. Watch these alien movies and you realise how unimaginative we humans really are. How shallow our creative abilities. How obsessed we are with our own image. How we have never really learnt to look beyond us, how we still think inside the box. I mean, seriously, if we can't even come up with decent monsters, what does that say about us? Our monsters and aliens drive the same machines, they desire the same things-gold, really? and they look pretty much like us humans-hands and feet and eyes and a brain and all that. Pfft!

Sorry for being such a nitpicker, but I am going to save my wow's for the real aliens.

P.S: If you must watch Cowboys & Aliens, watch it only for Daniel Craig. And then come back and tell me where I can find such a man. Not much fun being a woman these days I tell you. Deep sighs and a tub of icecream.

Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines...

This ruined my day.

Sigh. That delicate delicious ache when you love someone.

(Sometimes I feel I must have been a man in my previous life and I must have loved a woman with all my heart and maybe, I still love her, in this life.)

I could weep for days today. My soul is not satisfied.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered

and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.

Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.