Letter to A

Dear A,

I would like to believe that like the lovely, flowing, starkly different notes gushing forth from an antique piano, love too, is not bound by uniformity, despite stemming from one beating muscular source- a tangible-yet-intangible source. And yet, no one object is more bound by clichés than is the object of love. Vision tinted by the calming essence of rosewater, autumnal leaves singing orange melodies, hearts pounding unto arrhythmia, vows of the hallowed ‘forever’, holding hands… is it possible that clichés are the undoing of your generation, a young generation, seeking true love?

One day, and maybe that day has come already, you will decide to set out on that lifelong quest to ‘be in love’. But I advise you to stop wanting to be in love. Instead, set your mind on understanding love, discovering it. There will be questions galore. How do you recognize love? How do you know you’re in love? How much is too much? When such dilemmas are faced, I recommend you resist the temptation of turning to one of those numerous badly-informed rulebooks which liken love to flushed cheeks and a wildly beating heart- if such is the feeling you require, a bout of high fever is what you need. These rules have been written by generations of semantically-blessed, lovelorn fools. And they are lapped up millions of lazy love-seekers who’re too lazy to discover the feeling for themselves. You must dare to be different. Learn your own lessons. Remember, there are no rules in love. If at all you need a rulebook, pen it down yourself, guided by your own experience. And if you feel your rules are nonsensical, tear them up, and carry on with your journey anyway.

You might beg to differ, because at your age you are no doubt highly idealistic, but there might be no such person as ‘the one’. Love is not about you or another person as individuals. It is about your dynamic as a couple, as a working unit. Yes, ‘the spark’ does exist, and you can find it with several people. But after a certain point, it boils down to how much effort you put in. Strive to better yourself as a person. Respect yourself and your partner. Sacrifice might be involved. Fight fiercely but sort things out with just as much passion. Compromise is inevitable, so be open to it. But if your happiness is being compromised too much, have the gumption to get out of the relationship. You will be doing everyone a favour. Be a rebel. Be a little selfish. Be a little selfless. Be practical. Be impractical. Keep with the times. Go retro. Move forward. Take a step back. Be philosophical. Keep it real. Trust implicitly. Be wary.

As is the unfortunate case with your entire generation, you too are matured beyond your age. So, I don’t need to stress on the need to be careful. Experiment all you want, if you must, without compromising on your ingrained morals, because that will kill your spirit one little grain at a time. You were brought up on the basic principle of ‘live and let live’. Never, and I mean never, attempt to destroy another for your needs. Never, ever cheat. Don’t go down the path of debauchery, because that is meant for the crude and sickly. Learn to care, truly care. Make your partner the most important person in your life, but don’t build an altar for him in the centre of your universe. Don’t make him your world, your everything. Have your own life. Don’t ignore your friends; they’re the ones who have your back all the way. Let your family have a say too, but no, theirs need not be the final word.

Love is not without heartbreak. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re human and you’ll get over it soon enough. Yes, people have killed themselves over heartbreak, but they were weak and lived for love. You mustn’t live for love. You must love to live, that’s more important. You were created so you could contribute some measure of beauty to the world, and you must do your bit even if it only requires you to be yourself. Have fun with life, with love. Keep smiling, stay in touch with your inner music and poetry cultivate the habit of laughing heartily. Chocolate helps too.

I can’t put an age to when one must fall in love. It comes down to maturity. I naturally still see you as a baby, and will worry myself sick and nag you till you tire of me. But, when you do find love, the kind of love that you believe is real, cherish it, nurture it, nourish it and most importantly bask in it, until you’ve tanned a content shade of scarlet.

Love,

Me

soul travel

As I drop down to my knees, my dreams rise above me, attempting to force-lift my captured spirit- carefully, letting not my throat graze against the shame-coated dagger of that dreaded, dreadful enemy- Surrender.

At that moment, when my spirit is mid-flight, my searching Soul looks within, into a miasma of past presents, presentable futures and futuristic pastiches. In this diaphanous vapor, quasi-illustrations of my life play out. They coil and recoil, fading down a path paved by a multitude of grand decisions- wise and unwise.

Past the haze of memory and yearning, Soul spots a great pool. One side of this strange lagoon is a bright turquoise blue, and is helmed by the mighty Foolish Hope, who has captured the Spring Sky to be his warrior in waiting. The other side, manned by a muscular Foolish Confidence, is a brilliant yellow, dyed no doubt by the essence of Sun- his trusted servant. The two liquid camps thrash and crash into each other, fighting as they always do. Foolish Hope has the unending sky on his side, but is crippled by the inane knowledge that sky is limit. Foolish Confidence, invigorated by the golden potion brewed by his magnificent servant, shuts his eyes and languorously splays his fingers across the expanse, marking his territory. And then, quite suddenly, he feels something sharp grip his fingertips, and realizes he has not been edging into Foolish Hope’s territory, but, in fact into the hellish, fire-ridden colony ruled by Cruel Reality.

Evaporated thus, by contact and association, the great dry basin now reveals a mass of soft, yielding sand. In it, Beautiful Temptation and Beautiful Deceit have formed a handsome tag team, and are flexing their chiseled muscles and issuing forth buttery smiles, seducing Soul to lie down, take a nap. My tired life essence is only too happy to oblige. But, the moment she touches the talcum totality of the expanse, she is sucked in by a powerful quicksand of Inner Turmoil. When she tries to lunge upwards, her conniving captors only wrap their sinewy arms tighter around her, taking her down.

Soul is convinced she is dead.

However, after a few seconds of sandy suction, she lands with a thud in a kingdom that has plastered all over its walls the rage-filled visage of Emperor Big Trouble. Into a tick-filled prison Soul is thrown, surrounded by Greater Wrongs, White Lies and Not Guilty. Things look up momentarily when the echoes of redemption breathe words of encouragement through the grimy walls. One night, with her three companions, Soul plans a great escape from the dungeon. They use a hammer called Resolve to beat away at the wall. Only the heavens bear witness to how they manage the feat. But they do.

Yet, Lady Freedom proves slinky and unwilling to be won over by mere criminals, one of them who now wields the hammer of Resolve, like a Thor in training.

After days spent in a dangerous forest called Terrible Confusion, they wander, quite by accident, into a peculiar employment agency. To Soul’s surprise, the pristine candidates, dressed in their Monday best, are waiting to be picked by none other than Soul herself. In line, looking eager and smart are virtues like Inner Beauty, Goodwill, Intelligence, Honestly, Temperance and Kindness. They vie. Soul weighs. But, without the employ of Clear Thinking, things are getting nowhere. ‘I want you all!’ Soul cries in anguish, Resolve starting to weigh rather heavily upon her shoulders.

‘Then, you’ll just have to choose me,’ replies the calm voice of Inner God. 

Running from thought

Thoughts swirl; twirl slowly, beautifully, poisonously

Coil prickly thorns of unrealised dreams

Around my throat

They smell of fragrant herbs, taste like unpolluted pain

Feel like the tears that might have been; had they not been sucked internally by the parched soul

Achy reflections chase the mind

Lassoing it with languid, smoky exactitude

In their clutches my essence lies, limp

Straitjacketed in the thick drapes of darkness

Loneliness, once an ally

Now, a folly

A moment of quiet

Is not to be

The mind rages with angst, yearning

Bitterness at the sorry, black pool

In which the spirit writhes like a fly drowning in snake’s venom

Longing for that calm

A dream that drifts farther every day

That dreadful orchestra of thought

Draws my core in, whole; spits it out in ravaged bits

The thick sap of contemplation coats them

A thin layer, for every passing day

Slow imprisonment 

Its amber my spirit will be, one day

Its slave in death

Rapture, rupture

Pluck at your hair with violin rapture. Sing-song heart belief. In the darkest night, the candle glows, the wind blows. Lighting those who go astray, shining the way for little children and skipping heart beats. Jump into abundant bosoms of joy. Capture the myrrh through yielding,

cushiony tissues. Enrapture, they are bound to. Monotonous melodies take on mutinous fire-shadows of pleasure in the vast volume of soul songs. They travel to your shrinking stomach, where they make itsy lace-winged butterflies flutter by, as if possessed by pirouetting particles of ecstasy. Glutinous membranes stick to your buttery fingertips, and leathery forehead, possessing the deep lines, soothing collagen to echoing emptiness. Jump to catch the fluffy cotton eyelashes swimming in the confounding heavens of existence. Take them to your eyelids, spread them out, gently. Caress them like you would, the inner thighs of passion. Open your eyes in slow, staged sonatas. See the apple trees in full bloom, waxing eloquent and plumping praises upon your handsome face. Take your potter’s hands to your face, dip them in the clay-pot of honey dew. Use the magic moisture to pinch the stories you want to tell, onto the jagged perfection of your countenance. Smile, the grasshoppers need you. Conduct their flight with a correct cantata. Soar above dithery thoughts. Rise to rose essence-filled water balls. Poke at them, drown in hints of poetry and tints of prose.

The church mouse and the God

We took off, the two of us. Hugging my back was a battered, brown leather bag, inside which rested in a comfortable tumble, my toothbrush, notepad and pen. He came empty handed. He would borrow my toothbrush he said; the rest he had little use for. I dressed in my toughest jeans, an old shirt splattered with ink, and my worn-out trekking boots. He wore dungarees, paired with an immaculate white t-shirt, dark glasses and impractical padukas. The writer and her handsome, rebel muse.

We were going on a dangerous adventure. He had read about the divine light at the end of a certain tunnel that seemed to exist merely in the map he had tattooed on his forearm, all the way up his shoulder. As good sense goes, I was mad to trust him, but his animal charm was not something my fumbling soul could resist. I was but a lowly writer, in search of a muse to worship, and my unlikely God I had found.

We travelled on foot.

Every time I asked how far away we were, or indeed if this blessed light was to be found on our continent, he simply showed me his arm, and said, ‘From here to there is where we go.’ When I did get a little restless, I took my notepad out and started sketching. A sharp paragraph for his profile, a little limerick for his adorable nose, a sonata for his lips, a poem for his gorgeous hair. He held my hand, guiding me around puddles and pebbles, whilst I scribbled away an ode to him. He pointed out, at that juncture, a glimmering speck in the distance that was our hallowed light. We hurried on. But when night came, we settled beneath an apple tree, huddled beneath a single wrap of muslin that he conjured up through a needle stuck in his dungarees. Weakened by the presence of this peasant God, I felt my legs turn to colloid. And he told me stories that seeped through the little pores on my goose-bumping hand, and coiled their through my blood stream, to my brain, from where a bunch of little warriors threw spears at my beating heart. My heart bled a black ink, which stained my pages boldly. We woke up when an apple hit my head, and he was cross that the apple chose to fall on my plain head. He stalked off and I scurried along. We reached a river, on which he walked without creating a ripple. I almost drowned in that reptilian pool and he didn’t care. The shimmering speck grew bigger. It looked like a mystical orb now. And when he turned to look at me finally, the orb made a halo around his head. So awed was I by the vision, I was caught unawares when he hurled a heavy rock on my being. That night, under a wise Oak, I wrote a letter of bloody pain on my notepad, as a purple-blue song wrote itself upon my tender bruise. The muslin, he kept to himself.

He soon grew tired of me, I could see that. He held me close, even as he inflicted deep cuts on the tips of my fingers and drew my soul out, with some potent form of black magic. It was then that we saw people down the road. He threw me by the wayside and made merry with the bunch over a bonfire and bon-bons with naughty gifts. That night, the white sap from the rubber tree wove my despair upon the dark, starless skies. The morning after, we were only hours away from the light, and he walked ahead with his bunch. I hurried along as fast as I could, the church mouse scurrying to keep up with the God.

And then we were there. The light. A nasty smell tickled my nostrils, and stung my bruised being. I walked a little closer, and there I saw a radioactive heap of poisonous intent. When he turned to give me a smile, it was evil…as revealed by the waves of noxious energy. In the radioactive light, the map on his hand was nothing but a pattern depicting the mouth of hell. At the centre of the light was an isotopic pool of death.

I turned, I left. I walked, sore and serrated, till I reached the apple tree. That night, for the first time, I took the pen out of my weathered bag and wrote, of my own volition, ‘Goodbye.’

Dear Huge-Bosomed Female Reptile From Hell’s Smelly Belly

That gauzy veil you tra-la-la behind; it makes you look ugly. It brings out the enormity of your nose. It accentuates the pockmarks on your face. Makes the grey in your hair look like it was sewn from all the ageing maggots of the world. Most of all, it makes your insecurity stand out in high relief- even a starved Somalian kid’s ribs seem inconspicuous in comparison.

For the very fabric of that gauzy veil was steeped in a deep vat of pretense.

And then brushed with grimy dots of cheap glitter before you wore it upon your being, so excitedly.

You smile so widely for me- but all I can see is your big nose. You tilt your head in impossible angles and act coy- but all I can see is the disgusting disproportion of your nostrils. You wear all those tight clothes- yet, I can only see your face fading in the horizon, so pathetically behind your nose.

You say black is back. But you still drape that smelly shroud of deceit upon your adipose-infected self, to cover up your darkness. Do you not think black is a desirous colour? Why do you have a wardrobe full of miniscule black dresses? If such is the shade of your heart and mind, why won’t you showcase it? Barbie and Ken look happy in pink- but don’t you see? Ken is gay and there have been no summer rains in Barbie’s dry, cold world. Pink is not the colour of the season. No one cucking fares.

The human soul is black. Every single soul. But even black has different shades. Who is to say black can’t be pure? Why do you assume it isn’t the exact shade of innocence? Have you proof that it doesn’t incite passion?

There is the black of the night. The black of being consumed. The black of pleasure in pain. The black of current, and that of currant. Of Sabbaths and Bettys. Birds and Velvet.

Your black is just as unique perhaps. Just perhaps. But you choose to camouflage it and bite from behind, catching people unawares. But don’t give yourself credit. You aren’t rabid, not that powerful, no. You don’t kill. You just bite, and people exclude you from the radius of their existence after that.

Dear, Cellulite Bottomed Girl. Instead, why don’t you occupy yourself with thoughts of velvety cakes and Jim Morrison in tight blue velvet? Of days in Oktober Munich and flowers drifting in the nippy October air? Of Mary Hopkins’ voice and the voice of your heart’s reason? And if you absolutely insist on being just like me, why don’t you just shuck the fut up and observe from a corner?

Why won’t you be real?

Or if ‘real’ is an alien concept in your ammonium-sulphate filled world, here’s a better idea. Get out of my face.

No love and looking forward to the cessation of your existence,

Me

28 years

To be able to live knowing that life was a short, sweet melody, and not a long-winded song. A snappy vignette of the best parts. No flim flam. Boo hooey.

Being able to indulge in shameless debauchery, knowing you didn’t have to preserve your body, for use beyond those splendid 28 years. 28 years spent in some sort of quarter-coma and bursts of prodigious lucidity, wafting about much like the fragrance of a lily-of-the-valley. Riding along on substance and liquid alone. Wearing otherworldly psychedelic sunglasses that tint the present day, a colourful shade of the past. Bearing only netherworldly intentions.

A rebel without a cause. Without disguise. Without guile. Just all the bile. After a heavy night with the effervescent golden gods. Waking up the next morning, to the sound of the gods hammering away at your medulla. You acquiesce them with hair of the dog. A peace offering. All you care about is going higher, hitting the zenith of madness. Hit the road Jack. Remember all tomorrow’s parties. Remember little else.

But what would I do if I could count my days to the last breath? Would I play pretend? Would I theorise and philosophise, the possibilities of life in a different era, while I dedicate the present to impious indulgence? Would I make my life an ode to megalomania? Or perhaps a tribute to wasting? And wasting away? Would I sell my soul to the Devil for a lifetime of evil pleasures at my beckoning?

In a life that would end before responsibilities began, in a life that would end before true love’s honeymoon came to an end… I’d surrender to life.

To risks. I’d live recklessly, fearing not the dreaded tomorrow. I’d take the plunge. I’d taste things the way they’re meant to be…without trepidation coating my taste buds. I’d love like there was no tomorrow, because there would be no tomorrow. Glad to meet you; it was my pleasure and all pleasure. Free-falling. Free of the thought of failing. Songs to be written, poetry to be experienced, verse to immerse in. With a peg to nurse and a pug to pet. All the sleep to catch up on. So much of it. Without the ink of bad memory drawing out a detailed pattern of insomnia. No more skeins of stress staining my sleep. The forty winks that only a man with no time deserves.

Days dedicated to getting intoxicated on the sublimation of self. Notebook by side. And warm candlelight. Thoughts that wax eloquent on sufficient lubrication pour forth onto papyrus. A legacy in a thousand letters, with nary a fetter. 

There’d be too little time. And yet, not a minute in surplus.

The End would come at the 28^th hour of the 28^th year. I would wait with my suitcase, stuffed with words and worth. Life would be snuffed out in an instant. I'd play my part dutifully with a few snuffs and puffs. A few hours of messy heaving. And then dry heaving, when little remains but the spirit…readying itself for flight. In the arms of an angel I'd go. 

Far away from here.