Gloom

Learning alone is no fun. I miss classrooms.

Naked

Naked, you are simple as a hand,
smooth, earthy, small. . . transparent, round.
You have moon lines and apple paths;
Naked, you are slender as the wheat.

Naked, Cuban blue midnight is your color,
Naked, I trace the stars and vines in your hair;
Naked, you are spacious and yellow
As a summer's wholeness in a golden church.

Naked, you are tiny as your fingernail;
Subtle and curved in the rose-colored dawn
And you withdraw to the underground world

As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores:
your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,
And becomes a naked hand again.

Pablo Neruda

Maya Angelou

1. Refusal

Beloved,
In what other lives or lands
Have I known your lips
Your Hands
Your Laughter brave
Irreverent.
Those sweet excesses that
I do adore.
What surety is there
That we will meet again,
On other worlds some
Future time undated.
I defy my body's haste.
Without the promise
Of one more sweet encounter
I will not deign to die.



2. When You Come

When you come to me, unbidden,
Beckoning me
To long-ago rooms,
Where memories lie.

Offering me, as to a child, an attic,
Gatherings of days too few.
Baubles of stolen kisses.
Trinkets of borrowed loves.
Trunks of secret words,

I CRY.


3. Touched By An Angel

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.


4. Rememberance

Your hands easy
weight, teasing the bees
hived in my hair, your smile at the
slope of my cheek. On the
occasion, you press
above me, glowing, spouting
readiness, mystery rapes
my reason

When you have withdrawn
your self and the magic, when
only the smell of your
love lingers between
my breasts, then, only
then, can I greedily consume
your presence.

Upturn

I haven't wwritten for a long time. As in...written about me and what's important right now.
Academics and intense studying going on. I'm enjoying it. I haven't yet reached the stage where the world is blurred and only the monotonous, photocopied sheets scattered around me have significance, but I'm getting there.
I'm learning to appreciate poetry and prose in a disciplined way, reading 50 page essays on why poetry is the best form of art/expression and all else sucks, trying to learn the form, function and meaning of verb phrases, draw tree diagrams and cudgeling my brain to absorb the 'supersensuous world' of Philosophy and Religion.

I've also been partying, getting to know some really nice people and getting over certain relationships.
Personally, I am in a bit of a situation. It's been discussed and mulled over so much that I don't know what to write. It's at the stage where I'm hoping for a response, for personal conversation. It's also at the stage where I am having to show restraint, which is a tremendous struggle for me.
I am a very bad flirt, I've realized, being entirely without arts and graces. I look, I like, I leap...that is my motto. And I love it.
But...this little in-the-pipeline-relationship needs brutal discipline and hard work...again not my strongest areas.
In the next few weeks, I'm going to be honing all my latent resources and faculties towards it. Figure out how important it is. And no my exam prep won't suffer because this relationship is intimately entwined with sincere study.
It might be fun. As Holly Golightly would say,'Of course I'll be hard-working and diligent. I've never been hard-working and diligent before.'

new

Blog set up for Dad's 50th birthday party prep.

www.bhepus50thbirthday.blogspot.com

Wonder

Intimacy is tough to write about. One ends up being didactic and preachy, albeit ever so slightly.
Also, to scrutinize intimacy and write about it in a systematic, concise way, is to limit its scope.
I like the term, the concept. I like how it feels on my lips and tongue when I say it. I like that I smile when I use it.

But what to write about it?

I ask for the freedom to be intimate. I ask to have the choice of not saying 'yeah whatever' to things. I would like to care obsessively.

Is it intimate to run to meet someone with your hands outstretched? To hug your teacher because he/she makes a brilliant point and is in love with the classroom?

What if I walk barefoot on wet grass and stretch my body with pleasure? Ask my dad for cigarettes?

Can I maintain eye contact with everyone I talk to? Tell people I stammer so that they can get over it? Would you be afraid if we had a conversation based entirely on the first things that came to my mind?

Say I touched the hand of an unattainable man...one I could never have...
What would they call me?

I read love stories and the ocean makes me dizzy. So....

It's all questions and never certain.

Intimacy?

Love

This was recorded in Savera, over iced tea and cigarettes. The Professor, sitting across from me, in conversation with an ex-student sitting at the next table.



Ex-student: Sir, are your classes over?

The Professor: No.

Ex-student: Oh...when are they on till?

The Professor(smiling and glancing towards his Honours students sitting inside): Till whenever they want.


Not 'till we finish the course,' or 'till the third week of March,' but till whenever his students want to be with him.

There was no pushing back of hair, he wasn't even talking to me....but I don't think I've ever wanted to give anyone a bigger hug.

A Call from Cochin

Dad: Are you studying or maroing adda?

Me: Neither.

Dad: Are you on the pot?

Me: Geez! I don't ask you what you're doing! How come you get to ask me??

Dad: Because you're the daughter.

Me: I'm also the only equal you have.

Dad: Hmph! You need to know how lucky you are. Yesterday, I was at your uncle's place for dinner. D(his daughter) asked him if she could go for a concert. He said she could go if eithet he or her mum went with her. She couldn't go with friends. And the girl's 18 years old.

Me: I know I'm lucky, Dad. I've cutsie parents!

Dad: I had visions of what would happen if I told you such a thing.

Me: Oh? And what vision was that?

Dad: You'd ignore me!

Laughter...


The dear man doesn't read my blog so he doesn't know how often my gratitude appears in writing :)
Lucky.

And I never forget it!

When I think about it...

....when your mum and dad are the coolest people you know, when your heart is wrapped around a cuddly seven year old with big eyes and a fast mouth, when your first ever boyfriend's birthday message reads, 'happy birthday +1, my love' because he's a day late, when your friends buy a can of really sticky confetti and spray it all over you in the middle of the road, when half the Philosophy department spontanously start singing Happy Birthday at the Main Circle in your college, when people you don't expect call to wish you, when you're not too sure where you're heading..but that's ok, when your stepmum buys you totally sexy underwear and your brother refuses to buy you anything that costs less than a 100 bucks, when you, when people tell you your writing makes them feel light and happy, when your head's been blown off by a mad Doctor of Philosophy and suddenly all that's important is that he looked at you over his shoulder....twice, when a friend you thought was lost returns to you..and he's grown sweeter and more affectionate, when your Boss is a best friend, when you eat chocolate-dipped strawberries with Mascarpone cream, when you're planning a second birthday party for the weekend, when you feel full of space and completely filled all at once...

...well, twenty-three looks pretty good...

Variations On the Word Love

This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.


Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.

-Margaret Atwood