Vague Wonder & The Princess of Trouble

When I woke it was raining. I half-opened my eyes and sensed a vague but insistent downpour. It fell upon the trees outside with a gentle, even loving, force. I lay there with my body still, my mind wading through a crush of burning love. Lashing out at me from the recesses of a fickle heart, caressing despite a violent force- keeping me from sleep and keeping me from waking. I was slowly lulled by a dark spell, embracing me in its thrilling folds, pushing me into a dreamy sleep.

Thunder rumbled. Had it been a few moments, or an hour? The rain was relentless. That dark place had not let go of me. Even now, I stood at its threshold- looking out from within, as if I might fall out. Fall out into a light that hurt my eyes. But I wanted to go back to that pitch black, where I couldn't see myself. To slip back into that ill-advised enchantment. I turned from one to the other, standing on that precipice, but I couldn't tell if the abyss lay before me or behind me. It didn't matter, the choice was not mine.

The constant pitter-patter was a rough lullaby, but the cackling bursts and their hideous beauty kept me awake. I could see her beckoning visage, but I didn't know if she was in the flashes of light outside, or in the soft darkness beside me. I didn't know if she was calling out to me plaintively from the shadows, or softly whispering from the blinding glare. Were her pleas real, or her demands?
Was the rain still falling, or was I dreaming again? I tossed and turned between light and dark; seeing her first in one, then the other. Did I sleep, or am I still trying to? Can I wake, or am I just going to drift away?

I am awake, the rain has stopped. The storm has passed, but the grey remains. The spell still hovers, I am still groggy, she awaits in the shadows.
It is a new day, but nothing has changed, really.

'Guts'

Stumbled upon this short piece: Guts by Chuck Palahniuk. Its not for the faint hearted or squeamish, but its sickly brilliant. Sample this, though I am being kind with the extract. You have been warned.

Looking back, kid-psych experts, school counselors now say that most of the
last peak in teen suicide was kids trying to choke while they beat off. Their
folks would find them, a towel twisted around the kid's neck, the towel tied to
the rod in their bedroom closet, the kid dead. Dead sperm everywhere. Of course
the folks cleaned up. They put some pants on their kid. They made it look…
better. Intentional at least. The regular kind of sad, teen suicide.

update : Palahniuk personally knows of 67 people who have fainted during readings of this story. I think a reading might be a very different thing to handle than reading it yourself. Not necessarily tougher, but quite different in how intense it might be. Last night, I read this on my iPhone in bed. I thought I was starting a very short piece that would last till my eyes shut. Minutes later I was riveted. Some time more, and I realised I was reading it with my eyes wide open in absorbed disgust and amazement.

Flip

Have you ever thought about how insanity is so attractive to the insane?

Stretches

The hours, they drag. They stretch, though they can't; but my mind wallows in every moment, gazing at it, dully seeing it stare back. No expression, no spark, nor any intensity. Unless intense nothingness counts.

The days, they segue. One touches the other in a lazy relay of inconsequence, passing the minimal light of continuity out of some ancient sense of duty. Or some mechanical process of biology and nature.

I eat. I eat till I feel I could burst. I enjoy the eating, but I perversely enjoy the idea of stuffing myself. It is a dull sort of perversion, not the tingling rush of twisted enjoyment.

I blink but my gaze at life feels unblinking. The sameness, the immovable horizon that isn't even there, the monotone road that stretches toward it.

Alive

It starts to drizzle. Little drops of madness. The gentle pitter-patter of wanting. The breeze, content to play a bit-part thus far, fans the fires. His heart skips a beat, but the music matters little. The rhythm is altogether different, it comes from the drumming of impending doom. The beautiful, mesmerising kind of inevitability. This is the precarious yet terribly easy task of letting go. He doesn't resist, and realises he probably never meant to. This giving in, this delicious craziness, this thrill of succumbing... it feels alive.

And he likes feeling life thus.

Twisted Verve

The flashes, they swarm
poking here, biting there-
teasing,
taunting,
like street thugs with flair.

They smoulder, 'tis appealing;
yet they seem to burn me-
reaching,
clawing ,
like desire you want to flee.

I wander, search, grope,
my mind is stuck, slow-
wallowing,
waiting,
to embrace; to let go.

I am enjoying this; this
twisted thrill of the unknown
sizzling,
unnerving,
this morally mad zone.

11 year old passion

Hertbreaking piece. Reminds one that the bleakness doesn't go away, we just push it out of our lives to smile easier.

"When I saw him in the prison office which is now his cell, my jaw dropped. I'd been told I would meet a youth who had been arrested with a group of Taliban fighters – but I didn't expect the picture of apparent innocence that confronted me.

write to be

I am old and battered and bruised. I have here in front of me a letter from 30 years ago. It is an honest letter. Anguished and unfulfilled; looking ahead to life. A future that wasn’t to be even then, and wouldn’t be ever since. The letter tries, earnestly, to explain to me how plans were fizzling; in fact, how the agenda was increasingly blank. And being without hope or agenda- for love, or life- is beautifully, romantically tragic, but in the end, still tragic.

I hold that letter, I know why I wrote it to myself all those years ago. I understand what I was trying to do, but I know now like I knew then- the emptiness never goes away, it only swings between possibility and reality, future and present. It could come some day, or be right now, but emptiness will always be the same- unfulfilled, unknown, hollow.

imprint

Yesterday, I saw a man, with
Death tattooed on his neck
you could tell he wore it
proudly, defiantly
Yet it was not an effort
to deny groping, cold endings
but to embrace the warmth
of Life.

drowning

The skin sizzles;
naked bodies smeared
with rashness and hunger

Nothing feared, not
the hot writhing pain
of loving and bleakness

not pounding rain,
not the groping past,
nor the darkness within.

Not meant to last,
today is clawing,
for tomorrow to burn.

of bleakness

The bathroom smelled of clean fresh bubblegum.
I smiled, that was odd. But it was a weak smile, even fainter in my mind than on my face.

I think it’s the bleakness that’s refusing to leaving me. It was the bleakness that first assailed me when “26/11” began ; the one thing I have felt all through.

It is the bleakness of vengeance. Retribution has no home, no loyalty, rarely mortality. It goes on endlessly, finding new minds to sway, new people to harbour it. It goes on, self sustained, perpetuating itself with violence and madness. Where can it end? I can’t see that horizon. I can’t imagine a world where people don’t demand blood, where one death does not lead to the desire for another ten. I see the wheel spinning tirelessly, and it feels hopeless.

It is the bleakness of futility. When I saw young men, very young men, coldly & passionately killing random people, hopelessness took root. They might have been brainwashed, but how much can that term explain away? They might have suffered the horrors of violence when they were younger, but how deeply they believe the same violence will give them peace. They might believe they are part of a cause, something much bigger than their lives, but they cannot know what end that cause is heading toward. For, what cause can flourish on cruelty and violence.

It is the bleakness of opportunism. The time is ripe for people everywhere to make their voices heard. The hawkish voices are the loudest. The warmongering ones are the most dramatic. The sane are called weak, the fanatical hailed as patriotic. Different sides of the same story somehow have no common ground, the proponents single minded in their agendas. There is only good or bad, godly or ungodly, patriots or traitors, black or white. Maybe there is nothing new in this, it was to be expected, this is how they are and always have been. But if that is supposed to mollify me, it doesn’t. It scares me.

It is the bleakness of no end in sight. I try to take a slightly broader perspective of things, a so-called world view, however meagrely informed. It offers no solace. Around the world, twisted interpretations of religion and ideology are driving men to bloodshed. There is nothing in sight that leads me to believe that path will be abandoned. Death will merely bring martyrs and perverse inspiration.

It is the bleakness of naiveté- one’s belief that the basic goodness of humanity will eventually and always come through, and be strong and true and beautiful. In these times, it seems foolish, simplistic, naïve. But I can’t not cling on to it. Even though everything around me says that the way ahead is not simply through emotion and goodness and beauty, but rationale and strategy and policy, I must cling on to it.

loss

Yeah, sure, it was my fault, my carelessness ; but why did it have to be thus, when it could so easily have been salvaged, so easily not been this gaping hole of loss inside me...?

this day

I ponder cruelty. It fosters anger. The pondering, not merely the cruelty itself.
I host confusion. Can there be anything else? Is it not always inexplicable?
I fend off helplessness. Feeling the pointlessness of everything, and nothing.
I suppress regret. Noticing what was rather than what wasn’t, is better….no?
I reminisce. Just.
I notice fear. The kind that dissipates with time, but you could think it shouldn’t.
I condemn assumption. Telling myself never to take anything for….
I hope for realisation. Realising now is not the same as realisation.
I see tiredness. It remains.
I try to see that which I never will again. I really won’t.

update: I tell myself to hug gratitude close.

Choke

Suddenly I wanted to scream.
It was indescribable- mind boggling, unfathomable.

For those few moments, I could feel it. I was there.
I could see and I could hear. I could even think. But I could do nothing else. My voice stuck in my throat, my arms were suspended in numbness, the rest of my body had virtually disappeared, yet I felt imprisoned in a mass of flesh. I could not speak, write or gesticulate. I could not communicate. At that moment I was filled with an unmentionable fear of spending a lifetime like this.

Then a car whizzed by, the spell was broken, and I knew I was fine.
For those few moments, though, I had known what complete and utter paralysis would be like.