Clouds

Oh! Thunderbird of Great expectations

Oh! Swabs of medical cotton

Oh! Wisps of old gandmother’s hair

Oh! Protector of Life, lush and green

Oh! Sweet foliage of Sky-ocean

Oh! Shaper of dreams and thoughts

Your patriarchal white cousin was

Immovable

Dense

Horizontal

Lipping the human horizon

He is gone now, quick, look!

Wisped or poured from a ghost vessel.

You morph ribbed roads and pelican wings

Claiming the dazing disc of a sheeny sun

You run unseen

Soft-hearted

Criminal

Who can catch you?

Not even the Sky on a clear blue day

The wind throws your torso in tumults

Fleshing you out, marble clay,

The wind raises you

Or drops your dead weight

Upon cranky shoulders of mountains

You charge in blind rage

Often a fat grey blur

The blackening eyebrows

Darkening halls and kitchens

Of your step-sons and daughters

You are fair today

Sweeping layers of smooth hairs

You are rooting out and fleeing now

There’s a shiny bald head now

With no hairs.

Her First Ball and Mine Too

Even though I am an Indian, the mention of white skin, fair hairs and coloured eyes makes me slightly heady. A tingling of the senses, a desire more so because it's forbidden by my history, my psyche's guilty pleasure. In fact I'd rather not touch, just bathe in the looking. How earth colours contrast rather than corroborate the skin, how  flecks spurt out of translucent pupils so beguiling to the montoned eye, how blushing is an actual reddening of the forehead or cheeks, how muscular and unisexual most white bodies are! They are fascinating because they are contrasting, alien, and yet human! 

Katherine Mansfield's 'Her First Ball' is in my Faber modern short story collection. The word 'Ball' sends just a pleasant, mild, familar wave through me, but a few years before I'd have had my hands clasped and begging to hear all about it. When I read her story I though of white girls, their porcelain beauty, their plenitude of color variations in dress, eyes and hair although much lacking in skin tone. Ribbons and gowns and satin footwear : this is the stuff of childhood dreams. A childhood sadly storied in a very ordinary house with drab cream-colored walls and nobody to seriously revel in the Occident with. My sister and I used to share about music and stories that had made their way to our country from abroad. We were very comfortable and pleasantly happy talking about Backstreet Boys, Celine Dion, Agatha Christie and Harper Lee but she was always traditional and it never got her the way it still gets me. I learnt their language pretty well, best among my neighbors and family, but am unhappily more ashamed of it than proud at this uncertain age of 24. 

Yes in the same way Occidents exoticize the Orient, the Orientals engage- this seems to be human nature. Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy makes the world spin like a disco ball. Desire is the flame of a wax candle birthing dazzling bubbles of gold and glitter, burgeoning fantasies. And so it happened with me also.

Although now I am trying to mongrelize. Talk about irony. 

The Floating World

In Japanese art, there are depictions of a world of perfume and subtle orgies. A sakurascape full of painted women, white faces and ornate obis. A pleasure dome to which the luxurious chain themselves, a nothingness in which they luxuriate. Not a crimson is out of place, carved carefully and falsely on thin lips. Not a stir among the leaves. Not a hair is frizzy or wayfaring. Have I, I wonder, been a resident of this 'abode'?
Pleasure, real pleasure can be felt only after pain. From pain. But a floater of the world cannot feel, can see, see, see without a strike to the chest, without the freeing of cogs heavy as muddy boots branded like horse hooves, burnt and aching from a red-yellow flame. The eye can see farther if you let it, but you won't because you're afraid. Tough bonds are braided from many many strings of rope. A single string if only you see and feel, is not sight or touch, nothing in compare.
The floating world is fashioned out of images and angles and shades. It is not a creation but an illusion beneath which is the colour darkish grey. Fog not blood holds it aloft. Like clouds which look solid but are droplets of water vaporized, the world of a thin mind floats and never settles into an emotion. Have I been plagued by a beauty which is a smudge upon the real, I wonder...

wait for me

wait for me
i know i've sinned
i know i cut and sting
like nettle

i feel sucker-punched
by every sweet-look
i don't take it well
my heart trembles
it swells and suffocates
me so i can't say
its stamp is a secret
i the lone collector
of creepy memorabilia

see i fuck around
when my head is fucked
by God's insane show
the spotlight be dim
come slow like sunrise
don't fall like velvet curtains
don't fall like an admonition
an indictment

come like a soft-hearted teaser
but stay fast so i can wrap
ams around you
in a bear hug
rather than a clutch
of desperation
steal slow my love
so i can feel you
so it's not always
felt, felt, felt,
forgotten felt
wait for ME
WAIT for me

Laura Marling is a Poet; She has a Demon inside her

MASTER HUNTER

Dont be Besties with the Beast

There are two beasts
Grumble, grumble,
Rumble, rumble,
Hoot and bleat and blare
Shoot and scream and stare
Tarring up these petite lungs
Fouling up the abode

The beast of burden
And the bigger beast
The beast of hunger
Plot and plunder
My stretch of days
Swell and shatter
The peace of sustained self
Of slow certain depth

I do not wish to be enslaved
But clearly I see it is so
I am in a blackened well

The Ring cannot be forgotten!
I wish I'd never watched such films
Only Mummy's silly-sally ways
Can cart these broad black beasts
OUT WITH YOU, OFF YOU GO,
SO LONG, GOODBYE,
AU REVOIR and don't ever come here again!

Mystique

Memory plays the best and worst tricks of all. She makes us think we forgot something when our whole life at that point is a testimony that we remembered well. She makes us ashamed of how we spent our time, throwing ourselves over personalities who hardly mattered in the long run. Then that trickster wench shoots us with little sparkly darts of pleasure at times spent with those now detestable creatures and makes us repent. She makes us think LIFE it's such a mess, then somebody grins a whole smile at you and it's all exactly right and perfect! Her blood renews the ash of our thoughts, colours it passion red and alive, makes past perfect. She dogs Future's treads and swishes her skirt at every bend, as if she were the mistress of the streets. She is hot and heavy like custard pudding, or like a tight slap. She is cool like mountain air. She is warm like beach sand. She is sometimes a miser and sometimes a whore we thirst after and sometimes a bitch to be spanked and lynched out of existence. She is ours, the 'we' of 'me', mysterious me, Mystique.