Poetry

[Here's the piece of poetry I promised in my last post - written at a time when I felt really, really poetic. Hence, the topic. At that time (i.e. 1999, aged 13), I felt it was a very novel idea to write a piece of poetry on poetry (I was young, you see) - hence the topic!]

One day I asked me -

"What is the topic on which you'd write?"

"Is that a problem," answered I,

"Where there is a flower or a birds cry -

"A rising sun, some shady trees:

"A flock of geese, or some sea breeze?"

One day I asked me -

"How good would you write?"

"It'd be good," answered I,

"As good as good as can be;

"Yet I know not it'd satisfy you or not

"But I'm sure it'd satisfy me."

One day I asked me -

"How long would you write?"

"I do not know," answered I,

"And yet I write, and write, and write.

"And write I will till the last breath -

"But then, what is life, and what is death?"

Yours sincerely

Jude

Emphatically Random - First post

I have seen it so many times, this page. Yet, why am i always scared of it? What is it that pulls me back? i cannot say for certain. i could, as a matter of fact publish anything here, for there are no visitors. I could reveal my darkest secrets and yet sleep sound at night, for noone would know. I wonder why exactly google affords to keep this page up. Its perfectly useless, to say the least. I mean, its not that people do not appreciate what I write - far from it. I have one maddeningly beautiful girl who's made one of my minute and a half pieces of poetry her status message on gtalk. Ain't that something? I could live my life for that glory, indeed. For in this way I am not exactly paying my respects to the girl in question, but to the creator supereme, without whom i am supposedly devastated. This is what I simply cannot understand. What is His role in terms of me? He must be so supremely clever that it is impossible for us to fathom his thoughts. I mean if you are a software engineer like i am, and working on a particular layer of a piece of code, how on earth or heavens could you understand what goes on in a layer abstracted from you? Now, abstraction is one of my words. It just about defines life, to say the least. I mean, there are stuff that keep you happy, and you're proud to have knowledge of such stuff and share it accross your circle of friends and acquaintances. Then, there are stuff you needn't know, too. I mean, I love the Sherlock Holmes-ian approach to the workings of the human mind - the mind is an attic - but people forget that it does not have elastic walls, or something to that effect! Now, I sometimes feel the need to know, do people die of complicated thoughts? Can people collapse simply because some thought or idea they have triggers off other thoughts, that in turn trigger even more, all recursively, i assure you, and then die in what we lowly software engineers term a 'stack overflow error'? I do not know, but sometimes i do believe that that is possible.

Its like this idea that I sometimes have - this whole idea that is highly redundant in all the short stories I have written till now, that the being is not contained in the dimensions of the body - incidentally, did any of you notice that? I wonder exactly what a good, robust idea is made up of. Is it terms of materialisation, then? I do hope not - for in that case, its toodles to Jesus, Buddha, and the whole lot. I wonder, would they feel sorry, or ashamed to see us the way we are now? I sincerely hope not, for then it would cast that shadow of doubt over their intelligence that I do not simply like.

I cannot stop today, not just yet. I have let the pen do the talking, or rather the keypad, for I am quite as techno-savvy as all the rest. So, I am waiting simply, for the storm to pass. The uploading bit is just an addiction. nothing more. I mean, I wouldn'y want people to catch me red-handed as this. I, too have principles and a face, not a very bad one at that - to save.

There, you have it! A straight confession from the bowels of a narcissist. I wonder, how come the ancient world did not lay a greater stress on the importance of the bowels. For me, I strictly feel that the bowels rule the human emotion. i mean, i am simply so happy on the days my bowels are happy! What would you? And yet, they continue to write about the heart! I assure you, if I see a beautiful member of the oppositte sex around, I rarely feel anything of the heart - its more of a churning of the bowels - and its logical to. For its the bowels that are closer to the 'heart' of the matter and not the heart. But, there is also the head. I wish I'd read more into biology - that way I could have understood why exactly the brain is considered the centre of our intelligence. Maybe because you get a splitting headache after concentrating on something very hard! And yet, I maintain - that intelligence is a distributed thing. There is a great deal of it in the brain; but, there must be some part of it in so many other places, too. Maybe quite a bit of it outside our body. Who was it who said that we only use around five percent of our brains at a time? If that rings true, there's still a lot left to imagination and idle speculation.

Incidentally, i have been reading since last night, and but for the solid nine hours or so of sleep that I managed to catch up on, it being a weekend and all, I have been reading something all day long and my eyes are burning as if from onions. So, its goodbye for now. I am publishing a very old poem I wrote many many years ago, in that golden age when I was thirteen. I hope you have the bowels to enjoy!

The Other Side Of Nothing At All

[Written exactly in a minute and a half]

Nature - lonely, violent, stupid:

Can't seem to get in to

Where I am this absurd night;

And weird noises it does make

Pattering little tippity-taps on the

Windowpane of love; Oh, how I miss

You of all people should have

Been here to see the night through.

Tomorrow I'll be gone, and

So will the sun shine on

Me and you - as drifted apart

We stand on the threshold to the

Afterlife; We hold no clue

As to what stops us from

Jumping straight through to the

Other side of nothing at all.

Yours sincerely

Jude

The ballad of you and I

When I met you 'neath skies of blue
And nature all aglow,
The bluebirds sang, the church bells rang
And time did cease to flow.

Then spring came by to you and I -
Your perfume filled the air;
Some silent song kept ringing on
Like the answer to a prayer.

Now you were gone one summer morn' -
The skies had paused to weep;
My soul did sigh a lullaby
And put my heart to sleep.

I walked alone, still holding on
To dreams that were denied.
Some pretty dame without a name
Did nurse my broken pride.

But you came back - all out of luck;
I'd had my sweet revenge.
We'd lost our youth, forgot the truth
That we could never change.

So I spun about and walked right out -
You never turned your gaze.
In our heart of hearts, we knew our parts
But the play had left the stage.

Now we are old - Let it be told
I can't deny the pain.
But if you're there, Lord I swear
I'd live it all again.

Yours sincerely
Jude

In the night

The lights are low, the curtains down -

The day is set to close.

Quiet, as the scurrying mouse

Comes a moonbeam on tiptoes.

The wind is high, the night so clear -

The plants are all aglow.

With minds at ease and hearts at rest

Their heads swing to and fro.

There I sit and hum some tune;

My eyes are opened wide.

And dream a dream of carefree youth,

And the joy that is denied.

Yours sincerely

Jude

Fallen hast thou

Fallen hast thou, my faithful friend -

Thy bountiful heart laden with grief;

Seeketh thou what thy mind knoweth not -

Mine eyes, oh, a river they weep!

Answered? Nay, thy mendicant prayers

Knoweth no reason nor rhyme.

Thy gold, thy silver, all thy pride

Lay a-beggin' in the grime.

No more thou kisseth the summer moon

Nor the silvery waters below!

Behold, the lonely bluebirds shed

Blue teardrops in the snow.

Whither art thou, my angel bright?

The silent hills implore;

The tide is gone, the breeze is low -

This ship canst sail no more.

Fallen hast thou my faithful friend -

Thy tales them children hear

And for all the joy it bringeth them

T'is more than I canst bear.

Yours sincerely

Jude

The Day of The Black Balloon

[On the 29th of October a fest had been organized where I was undergoing my on job training. In that I won the first prize in short story writing. The motive was to write a story based on the following three keywords - road, balloon, and newspaper. The allotted time was half an hour. But all that I got was 20 minutes because chronically with me, a pen is never to be found when you most need one. But anyway, all's well that ends well and all that. This is what I had come up with in that short span of time. I have tried to reproduce it verbatim as far as possible, but some inadvertent discrepancies must have crept in. Oh, and you had to write the whole thing on only the two sides of an A4 sized paper. I'd never written a short story that short before. ]

Larry would always remember it as the day of the black balloon. Not that the balloon itself was black or anything, in fact it was of the brightest shade of red he’d ever seen. Rather, it signified the color of the cloud that now loomed over Larry’s life ever since that fateful evening with Samantha.

Larry and Samantha had been spending their evenings strolling down the village roads ever since the two names had been placed together in a single sentence. On that particular evening, Samantha was telling Larry all about the party her aunt had thrown in their garden the day before (to which of course, Larry had not been invited). She’d got to the part where Mrs. Miller had accidentally spilt some black pudding over Mrs. Peabody’s bodice when she all of a sudden stopped in the middle of the road as if struck by lightning. Larry followed her gaze but all he could see was a small child holding on to a string from which was suspended a red balloon.

“What happened?” Larry asked. She did not answer. He asked again, louder than before – “What’s wrong with you?”

“Oh, nothing,” was all she said as she turned her gaze downwards. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“But something’s the matter, Sammy. Tell me.” He’d grabbed her by the upper part of her naked arm as he said this and could feel the heat rising.

“Why on earth are you so insensitive? You see that child there; see that’s beauty, poetry, sublime. But you, you’d never see any of it. All you men are interested in only that one thing. You’re such a pig.”

Later, he confessed that it was the pig bit that had hurt the most. “But I’m sensitive, too,” he protested. “Tell me, didn’t I risk my neck trying to save your kitten when it climbed up that tree?”

For a moment it looked as if she did understand. Her gaze turned moist and she looked at him intently. But the very next second, he made his second mistake for that evening. “Just because I don’t go all potty over every human-ling in diapers does not make me insensitive!”

That did it. She turned on her heels saying, “I have to go. My aunt needs to take her medicine,” and stomped her way back to her aunt’s place. He did go to her place once or twice after that but a week later he was told that she was off to the city to look for work.

It happened a year later while he was sitting at the local tavern. He’d already had a few more beers than what would have been enough to lay him out cold but he’d held his ground. All of a sudden his gaze fell on a small article in the newspaper. The headline went – “Penguins perishing in Antarctica. Scientists fear they may be extinct in the next twenty years.” As soon as he read it, he collapsed on the floor blubbering like a baby. The kindly old gentleman on the stool beside him tried to help him up. Soon a small crowd had gathered. “I’m sensitive, too, you know,” he kept saying to each of them, “See, I cried for the penguins. Come on Sammy, I dare you to be quite as sensitive as that!”

Yours sincerely

Jude