Oceans apart

Sometimes you don’t feel the distance, you talk

through the stretched time zones, nearly every day,

carefully aligning your staggered clocks.

Sometimes it’s just a text – ‘okay?’ ‘okay.’

At other times, the distance is a log

from here to the vanishing point, its weight

unwieldy, no language, no dialogues

to lift it, to break through, communicate.

So you leave it hanging, leave things alone,

you wipe off the scary scenes in your head.

You keep mumbling, it’s nothing, it’s the phone.

It's not him. It’s just the phone that’s gone dead.

Nothing’s golden at a remove, silence

equals no rare metal beyond a distance. 

'It' is flexible and quiet and sometimes not flexible at all

It’s a distant single file of women

trudging through the scorching morning deserts  -

It’s a single winding line of silence.

A flower blooming, ignoring the fence.

A rash of lights on the dark of nightskin -

It’s always more in silence than in words.

It mostly needs no further embellishments,

a trade-off between this silence and that.

It stops too at the rank and the rotten

and tries to see nothing is forgotten.

The blanks of pauses make their quiet difference

the truth and the toothcomb, concise and exact.

Today this blog completes five years, and I was looking through the posts and here is the very first poem I posted called Pixellate.  A lot of water under the bridge since then, and I am rubbish at marking the individual waves, but I do notice how amidst all the changes, some things don't budge at all.  

What are you celebrating this weekend? Have a happy one!

The Portrait of a Certain Silence

It’s not hundred percent, there’s birdcall, thinned

by the distance, the bird’s far off somewhere -

not tuneful but harsh, a throb on the wind,

the gnawing of water at the island’s fringe

a claypan of sound under the shallow layer

of silence. There are different kinds, incomplete

even when it’s peaceful outside, all tranquil;

the red noise still continues its own beat

strums its strings, digs its toes into the beach,

runs fingers down its own skin, can’t be still.

You know, I had this dream in my head of a recuperative, relaxed September after the total merry-go-round of August.  This image that I would settle down languidly on the couch every morning. The coffee mug would refill magically every hour.  And I would have written this perfect couplet by noon and then polished it till it outshone a diamond by nightfall.  Ha! Pfft! Mice, men, gang agley with a vengeance.  The image has had to be...um, revised drastically downward.

The honest truth is - the MOOC I did over summer turned out terribly addictive. Once it finished end Aug, in some weird, panicked fit of withdrawal I went and signed up for some more. So there goes 'languid' out of the window for now, no hope of getting it back into my life till November at least, when the current ones end.  I hope to work the addiction out of my system by then and get back to my 20 words a day type output. We shall see.

The good news is of course lots of stuff to read and ye olde horizons expanded, and then those long horizons might just wriggle themselves into the writing somehow I hope.  And gazillions of writing assignments, too. It all adds up, though I am not sure exactly how or up to what.

But I do have a grip on my iambs finally, I think, and may even begin to understand feet and meter and stuff like that very soon. I might even take a stab at a properly dressed sonnet in its tux standing on its own feet over here. Who knows?

Is your life languid right now?  I hope it is as languid as you want it to be.