Sometimes serious

It is perhaps perverse. With music, we can believe things much worse  than we would otherwise once it's sung we sleep, cry often deny the earworm that feasts upon thought overwrought inscriptions of ancient memories rawest feelings you ever had just live on with a tune It is perhaps perverse in its being a symbol for nothing. In itself, standing for nothing representing nothing its parts mean whatever we please based upon when and where we live An impostor, music To be consumed as you like. It is perhaps perverse enough  that you should create limits. Don't sing Malkosh at night for the fear of Djinns. Don't sing without faith for god, just give in. Don't play things on instruments that can't be sung Don't disrespect the masters - watch your tongue Best of luck if you've written a ninth piece will music save you from disease? Will you be able to turn 28 music will write your fate. This is if you're lucky not to have bee...

It is only months later that i realise How long i have spent without hate for myself for long and how it felt to forget that. I now see a cold oily skin sallow red eyes hair i don't even like automatisms that i walk in and out of all day and all night a stodgy body and a walking style belonging to a sailor. i had learnt earlier when things looked like this that the pleasant fuzzy optimism of childhood was a false lie. I know. How it feels to loathe where i have brought things to be how naive and enchanted i'd have had to be to have been saying and minting positive feelings and optimism about a decidedly bleak future that stares down when i look at sparse basic abilities coupled with a lack of hard work. How intoxicated i'd have had to be to convince myself of deserving pleasures that fell upon me by a sheer combination of luck, coincidence and proximity. There was nothing i had done to deserve fragrance. speed. music. Here they st...

Music found in lifestyle magazines Lifestyles of blind beggars on local trains Playing prayers on old harmoniums suspended Lifestyles of instrument merchants and makers With nobody left to buy what they make Lifestyles of the kamchi iktara maker Selling ten rupee instruments every summer Lifestyles of Kirtankars and Priests Making prayers possible for unrelated people Through the beat of their word Their repeated insistence on blurring phonetic and morphemic boundaries channeling play between words and feelings and actions and their empty entry points. Words. What does this have to do with cash. Fashion. Electronic devices and consumption. Fame. Why is Music is featured in lifestyle sections in newspapers Next to jewelery and diamonds Next to white truffles and fine suede Next to celebrity.

"What are your insecurities about, even? I just don't understand.", my grandmother yells at me just the same as everyday - trying to get me to open the windows and doors of my room and let the air come in. It happened everyday. I used to latch all glass windows and put on thick grey curtains so that no light or fresh air ever came in. "You like to suffocate yourself", she used to say, trying to folk-psychoanalyze me. I was an angry teenager who didn't want to meet anyone at home - just stick around in my room, latch the door and sit right inside the huge blue steel almirah that was in my room. I would sit under the bed for hours sometimes until my grandmother used to 'sweep' me out with a broom. Sit inside a small window with glass latch doors. But the almirah was my favorite. It was a scary thing to do - if i couldn't open the latch from inside, it would be a really scary situation for my parents. But there, I could hear nothing and nobod...

I don't know how my body reacts to my own mind. What was once an action and a cause is now a stream of events that looks like a habit. What was once an action and a cause no longer stand today as individuals that are reasoned by their existence and are enough. This is the time when things change for the worse And you see not only your skin harden some bones stick out some toes dry faster some nails grow slower some energy is lost, but the drying of your errors your fears sticking out innocent choices like mistakes form like inadvertent habits. This is where your neutrality is banished all things that are past are now personality simple trains of thought and seasons rush at the speed of a blur. This is where it is too hard to see whether your errors are from complicating or simplifying things from keeping them light in your eyes or being too serious from compromising too much or being too stuck up from refusing to change or forgetting yourself....

I try to read feminist poetry. A crater of a volcano having no height without depth makes it visibly female. They say. They talk about breasts being the bellies of small upturned sparrows of a woman being the fire of loins merciful and mighty sensual and slight Women - the sisters of mercy making beggars of lovers, and kings of toads I've heard a woman say the only love she has felt is for children and other women and the rest just lust, pity, self-hatred, pity and lust. They said we tied our feet with the lead of love and burnt love in our ovens every night and stitched and pottered about in stuffy homes spending time waiting around bedsheets and detergent and knives. Wrapping and cleansing. It's being able to create another human being they say, that drive your compassion and bigotry your heartache and your poetry they say we have trained love to our walls like ivy branches and that this pain is unwarranted and artificial, and if only there...

Wouldn't it be nice to be a poet My words trickling down the spine of today tickling it into a quiver Maybe just a singer living an unknown existence as a nightclub template a concert instrument feigning experience and feeling in a musty recording room with other stringed instruments. I could be a communist with a book and a belief A practical philosopher overlooking embedded paradox Maybe just a desk worker begrudgingly finishing every day until sleep. I surrender, fighting against a mob of mediocre abilities but a belief about being nobody and nothing. If i could call myself by any name to aspire to be it maybe i could tame this lop-sided freedom unaided with hope or desire like an angry animal ravaging in every direction in space To be - as Adrienne Rich said - be as without movement.

You show me pictures of you, engulfed in the arms of your lover only a small window to you removing from your memory all men you have ever known all the things you have ever done that don't any longer seem like happy memories. That was then the best you could do and once - the most, and the happiest you could make yourself Now you convince yourself that they were all steps of a staircase. And these new leaves too will fall and this place too would be fit for erasing. one day And another place would seem like the happiest you could ever be until you stop trying to go for a long walk or drink tea late at night and stop trying to get warmth from any other person anymore. Make your own bed stop trying to reach meaning with the help of dialog meaning from the crevices of a ceiling fan, meaning from an anthill like an anteater meaning in the dust of everyday. One day there will be a frozen happiness, you would eat it up before it melted and stained...