Redemption

You do not talk about things
You only glance at words
And let the minds of men
Draw what strands they seek

In the cold damp darkness of being
Wherein there is stillness of inaction
Only an abyss of thought
And of periodic motion driven by gravity
Towards the nothingness of fantasy

Sometimes windows appear - to what life
Could have been, should have been,
And sights and visions cloud the darkness
Transporting the self into realms
Of possibilities and empty actions
(Because they are empty as the abyss itself)
But then they throw the self back
Back into the abyss - the self never leaves
The abyss - because the self is the abyss

Good - Evil are but the same thought
The same emotion - flipped over, drawn out
And strewn in front of the world
And logic and illogic meld together
In words spoken and words heard
Wherein the mind sees not what is there
(For what is there truly but the mind)
But what the mind can bear to see
Can want to see, Desires to see

But what about that canker that gnaws
The heart to emptiness and implodes
Everyday under the debilitating burden
Of Self pity, self hatred, self love and self pride
What of the self that consumes itself
Each moment in drawn out epochs of
Pride mired in loathing and love drowned hate

Light snowed down in abruptness of dusk
And lights of the world dim in the end
To welcome the darkness of the night
Where the gaze cannot see and therefore
Creates a world that it can bear to see
And in that bearing it must find its redemption

Because there are no messiahs, there are no realizations
There are no epiphanies, there are no truths
There are no commandments, there are no traditions
There is only self - that gnawing, loathing, pitying, dying
Yet living self - the only redemption, the only salvation

Punch Drunk

Your head goes round and round
Snippets and flippets crowd your head
She said she said she said something
Something about being friends, staying friends
Something about not thinking about you like "that"
What is "that" - thats what you want to know
Why is he "that" and you are not - you want to know

Again your head goes round and round
I am disappointed in you he says
His large big swelling head
I expected more of you says that large big head
Clothed in white - that large big head
What are you who are you?
Man who says to you about disappointedness
Why is he disappointed in you, you think
Oh because ... you remember, you drunk piece of -
You do remember and then you laugh raucously

Again your head goes round and round
You are sitting in an empty room
The low hum of water surrounds you
You close your eyes and let your thoughts wander
What if everybody in the world has suddenly died
And you are the only one left - you would still sit here
For an hour and then go out only to find everything
Everything empty, everything gone, nothing
Nothing there nothing no more

Your head goes round and round and round
Round and round through your life
Your true life, your imagined life
Your dull life, your cliched life, your boring life
Your fantastic, phatasmagoric, phlogistonic life
Your life, nevertheless - you would live it
A thousand more times if possible.

Inaction

Sit still
Sit very very still
And feel the throbbing of you heart
That constant, periodic, dire throbbing
That irritating pulsating life force of humans
That drives them onwards and forwards, to go on

Speak not
Speak not any word
And ask not why the reason
That irritating croaking voice of yours
That rasping, roving, rearing, fearing tone
That drives me insane each time I hear you go on

Lie down
Lie there and don't get up!
And forever sleep in that thorny bed
That bed of futile dreams woven in sterile threads
That bed where all your wishes lie strewn like prickly thorns
That prick you to draw your dull cold red lifeless blood off you still mind

Inaction
Stillness
Vacillating
Time
Stopped

Essence of things

What lies beneath those sounds
Those streams of pressure waves
Through the air through my ear
To my head swirling through the
Billion neurons in my head
Where they collapse into that
Pulsating whole - and transport
Me to a universe where
Things are just right

Muddles

Last night I dreamed
A dreary, confused, bright dream

They say that dreams
Are a confused recollection of the day
Or of memories of past stirred
By words, thoughts and flavors of a time gone by

Perhaps they don't say it at all
Perhaps that is what I think

But my dream was a confusion
A rush to go somewhere - a destination
Where I forget, perhaps it did not matter
An unease of leaving the place where I start
Perhaps that "where" too did not matter

I stood with six friends
Six separate friends, friends who never
Knew each other

I do not even remember who they were
Only that there were six, six of us
And all of us were headed
To the same destination
Yet all of us were headed in different ways
Where, again I do not know
Perhaps it does not matter

I was unsure though
I was unsure of my journey
I was unsure of how I was headed
The where did not matter
I asked each of them
"How are you going to go?"
Each smiled and told me
Why they could not take me with them
Each time I smiled back understandingly
With that slight (ever so slight) resentment
Of me not being included
But each time I smiled
That understanding smile that we give
All day to each other sowing little seeds
Of resentment

And then
I walked away
Or did they all walk away first ?
Purposefully on their ways
And I remained standing

But finally I walked away
I walked through crowd of faceless people
Towards some path, something
That would take me to my destination
Where, it did not matter

And here is the part I remember the most
I passed by them, those two, on my way
They never turned, they never noticed
But I passed by them - I saw their faces
She looked good - thinner, more graceful, restrained
He was smiling, more mature, restrained
I did not hear what they were saying
But I could see that they were not in love any more
They were talking like friends who crossed
A boundary and then walked back
And now they are unsure of each other
And are civil to each other
"Civil" how painful that word is
To use for lovers

I hope it was just a dream
I hope they are still together

Life, Broken

A life, broken
Suddenly stilled
Amidst the tear drops
Of love and sorrow

Where endings begin
And beginnings end

And the silence of action
The cessation of motion
The pithy, disgusting
Sight of self-pity
Fill our lives with
Unending meaningless words

An unfolding drama
Of pathos and bathos

A life, broken
Suddenly stilled
Amidst the tear drops
Of grief for tomorrow

Trips

It starts with a mild throbbing in my head. The throbbing is sickening, I feel an urge to vomit. But I don't, I know there is nothing to vomit, I have tried before - it only makes things worse. My Quack says that cerebrospinal fluid has lumps in it and that causes pressure in parts of my skull. He doesn't know what causes the throbbing to start or stop. Damn those quacks - they never could do their job properly. When these lumps aggregate into big lump - the throbbing starts and then - the madness. They breakup after sometime - ironically the pressure of the skull breaks them up again and they disperse waiting for their nest mass meeting. Sometimes I feel that they are like union workers trying to revolt against my body - they have a secret agenda and they will keep putting pressure [sic] till my brain accedes. However I'd be screwed if I know what they want - maybe they want me to die

The throbbing increases slowly. I have to stop doing whatever I am doing and go lie down. I don't even know what is going to happen - the lumps congeal at a different place every time so its a new god-damned all expenses paid trip for me every time. The only thing common is that after every trip I am left with vivid memories and killing headache.
There are special straps on my bed, they can be used to bind my body if it go to spasms - one of the particularly violent trips had seen me to go on a murderous rage and trash both the orderlies at the institution. Normally one of them - I don't know their names, both of them are big huge hulking bodies that are called in when some guy goes berserk. I had broken the hands of one and the nose of another. Finally they had to use elephant-sized dose to tranquilizer to get me to sleep. I had spent the next six months in solitary - self imposed according to the institution but I knew better than to be around those two guys when there wounds were fresh.

I lie down on the bed and press the red button - some orderly will come in soon and strip me in - these steel fibered straps - ordinary nylon straps are too weak to hold me me if I go into rage. I close my eyes and try to ignore the throbbing, I try to think of something else - that busty nurse who comes in on Thursdays, she is quite a tart that one. She wears that sort skirt and sometimes she flashes to me. I wonder what she wants. Maybe we could get into some quiet corner and ... .

Damn the throbbing is too strong to ignore, I always forget that it becomes this strong. Its like my whole brain is being pounded by jackhammer. I am already firmly strapped in - the orderly must have done while I was thinking about that nurse. Damn! Damn! Damn! Soon I will pass out and it will be black till I wake up. Then I will remember this trip - slowly but vividly.

I pass out

Why do I write things in a blog?

I guess sometimes you have to be honest to yourself. You have to ask why you are doing certain things and if you understand yourself completely when you do those things. So well this is not compositions (to my non-existent readers)

Well for one why do I write this blog? One generally supposes that blogs are mean to share thoughts with other people and given the traffic to my blog the only one sharing my thought is me and that's really not a lot of sharing going on is it? Of course I vaguely remember trying to search for an easy but permanent repository of my compositions and when I learnt of blogs (Hey I am young!) I thought "Hey, that's the best way to do it." I won't deny that I harboured some vague notion of becoming a popular and well read blogger (well I am yet to find a writer/poet who thinks that his/her compositions are not good ) but well my main objective was still to use this a repository of my thoughts, in fact I often read up my old works and try and think what the hell was I thinking when I wrote those!
So far my dreams of popular blogging haven't seen any light yet but then I guess I am too proud (egoistic/narcissistic) to even try anything to make that happen. I guess there's stuff that you can do to make your blog more popular - leave comments on other equally desolate blogs and ask them to leave comments on your own - mutual back scratching or something similar. Of course there are other oblique ways, I could join forums for budding poets and writers and try an see how the people there react to my compositions. But well I have not done anything to that effect yet.

Which brings me to the moot point, am I afraid of criticism? I have asked that question many times and more often than not my behavior says well yes, I am. Unfortunately that does not seem to bode well for my career as a PhD student. As far as I can see the best way to improve in academic circles (and I guess most other places) is to jump in the fire, burn a bit an d come out a whole lot wiser. Seems like I am the kind of person who stares a t the fire a whole let, sitting on the edge but never jumping into it. Okay enough of that extended analogy, anyway analogies stop making sense after sometime. So the question I guess is how do I deal with it. The fact that I wrote this whole thing down in a public blog readable by anybody - I wonder If I understand myself at all ?

Anyway some events in the near past have made me realize that while all this dilettante-ism is all very good but if I want to express myself properly I need some sort of training, formal or otherwise to make myself heard clearly, perhaps even to myself. So there that's said.

A concluding thought. I write these things in a blog that nobody (or maybe a thousands of people who read but never post comments) reads and it seems that this is an ongoing dialogue with myself - some sort self motivated and self generated catechism. I wonder what that means.

Questions?

Sometimes you should ask questions.
But questions get lost in the effort to rhyme
(A pandering to simple brains?)

Then I won't write a rhyming line
Not by intention or effort at least

Then you may ask me why call it a "poem"
Why call it a "verse" (there are types - open they call it)
I don't call it "poem", I don't call it "verse"
They are just my thoughts, expressed the best I can

Some use color, some use the stage
I chose words. But I digress.

We will ask questions here.

Of Dragons, Dolls and Divining Dandelions

Did I dream last night?
I don't know, I don't remember my dreams.

Perhaps I dreamed of dragons?
Fire breathing, terrifying, big-huge dragon
A dragon that ate a virgin every month
And then roved around the forest
Terrifying small animals, fighting large ones
And maybe visiting his old pals up the hill
To have a nice chat and drink

Where do dragons go when they get old?
When their fire is quenched and teeth weak
When they are no more limber to catch
That mischievous running doe
Dragon's Sunshine old age home?
Perhaps they sit there all day long
Complaining about the cold and fire
Reminiscing about all the virgins they had
And how the young generation is not fair?


Perhaps it was of dolls?
Big, huge, dominating yet unalive dolls
Small, evil and crazily laughing dolls
A scepter of stilled human form
The dolls that lay in a line on the room wall
Staring at the space with their unmoving eyes
I wonder what they think, these dolls.


Or maybe it was dandelions.
Dandelions the word, not the flower.
Yes, I also dream about words (not the thing)
Da-n-de-li-on-s What a beautiful word!
What beautiful harmony, what smooth sounds
What mysterious voice of human mind
Speaks to me through these words?
What is it that I can divine from these
Mellifluous, harmonious and cogent syllables?

Da-n-de-li-on-s! Dandelions! Dandelions!

How was it that we created such a word?
That to me surpasses the beauty of the thing itself.
What lies hidden in those minds
That coined these words, to me they are
What the thing is meant to be
Not what the thing is.
A beauty that resides in our own minds
A beauty beyond compare,
A beauty unexpressed, a beauty so rare

Perhaps that is my bane,
To see the beauty of words, but never the thing itself.

A Haiku

Words with rules
I write them because
of the sound

Numb Epiphany

Its a numbing feeling.

Something seems to be missing from your body. Maybe your lower jaw. You move it, its there. But when you stop moving it, the numb sensation takes hold of you again. It is, as if the feeling temporarily receded when you acted but then it came back, flooding in, taking hold of your face, your lower jaw to be precise.

The sensation is that of disorientation, of a feeling of dislocation as if your own self is displaced from the body. Its not completely within the body but its there near the body looking out at the outside world from a vision displaced from the actual position of your eyes.

But you are aware of the other parts of your body. Your stomach (rumbling with suggested hunger), your heavy legs and your cold feet. The self and the body are together below but its only in your head that they are displaced from each other.

But the head is the seat of your consciousness, so this disorientation extends itself to everything you do. You look yourself at the mirror and you see a stranger blink back at you. Then you can't look at the mirror any more. You stare at the screen as your hands move automatically over the keys of the keyboard and you feel as if somebody else is typing it in. You are just a mute spectator to a body that has its own intelligence and drives towards its own goal.

But the uncertainty resides in your head, at the center of the brain between your eyes. This is because you feel that inner most part of you (your soul?) moving and acting. Are you the body, the brain or the soul? Or are you tripartite split occluded by perception.

You feel no realizations, no light at the end of the tunnel, no bash of drums, clang of cymbals and divine revelations. There is only that numbing feeling.

Night

Darkness ...
Towards an idea of thought
Towards an idea of existence

Lights
Small bright spots of light
Lights that brings about
Shadows

Shapes
Moving, shifting, changing
Growing, flowing, devouring

Mind
That which cannot stay
That which cannot silence

Silence
In the end there will be


Silence

Boy, going

The road was his friend.

Sometimes he thought that the road was his only friend. Everyday after coming back from school and taking the late evening lunch, he would sit down to complete his school homework. After completing his school work he would take out his battered old bicycle and go out to the road. And then he would roam around, alone.

It was like a ritual, not the doing school homework part, he did that to appease his parents, but going out on his battered old bicycle on the same old roads in his same old locality. He felt a strange sense of freedom when he was on the road, a freedom from his house, his school, his parents and from his myriad of other responsibilities. There was he and there was the road and thats all that mattered. But even then he knew that he was never quite completely free. This was because more often than not he tried going around the houses of his friends hoping that somebody would stop him and call out his name. Then he would go into their houses and play. He never played in his own house, because there was nothing to play with. His house had books lots of books, and all the books he had read twice, thrice and sometimes the fourth time. Now the house only had ghosts, ghosts from whom he had to run away.

But he enjoyed that roaming around part the most. He knew that because sometimes even when somebody stopped him, somebody called out for him. He politely refused and kept on cycling ahead. At those times he did not understand why he did that. He knew that he wanted to play with those people, not because he particularly enjoyed their company, but because they had things he did not have. Things that he desired but perhaps was too proud or maybe too afraid to ask for.

But the road was not for asking, the road was for journeying on. And he liked that part of the day the best, the journey, his small journey away from the confines of his home, away from the ghosts that haunted his house to the big,wide,bad world where he could loose himself.

Often after he had come back, listened to the daily rants of his parents, watched some television and done some more school work (again to appease his parents and also because he was afraid of his school teachers) he would lie down in his bed and think about the road. He would dream of being small, small but indestructible. Perhaps he would be riding one of those miniature cars he had seen in somebody's house. He would become small and get into one of those cars. That car would have infinite fuel and very high speed (given that it was small) and he would ride the car out of his bedroom, leaving the ghosts behind, across the patio down through the frontyard and into the road again. He would drive on the road in his small car passing by giant houses and giant vehicles and nobody could see him. But he could see everybody. His car was indestructible, huge giant cars would go over him and their tires would roll over his car and go on but his car would unscathed. And he would keep on driving, on that long tireless road, forever.

Descriptions

I am sitting on a red-white patch work sheet. Its a picnic sheet, the one that mothers take to a picnic. It even has an old stain at the corner, a reminder of more boisterous times. She sits next to me. I close my eyes, I can smell that faint fragrance, her fragrance. I open my eyes, and turn round. Her profile is silhouetted against the sunlight, her deep black hair turns golden in that evening light. The sun rays to sculpt her face out of the darkness. I turn and face ahead. I smile again. I am happy.

The world changes

We are sitting on a table outside the restaurant. She is staring into the space, with that dreamy look in her eyes. I look at her eyes, the eyes that could hold the universe for me. She is thinking about something. Soon she will turn to me and start speaking. And that mellifluous voice will float though the air towards me. She will tell me about something funny that happened with her and then both will laugh. She will laugh that soft beautiful laughter and I will laugh with her. She is turning to me now. She starts to speak. I am happy.

The world changes

She lies in the bed, naked in my embrace. I feel her skin against mine, her soft breast on my chest. I close my eyes and try to stop all the senses except touch. I become aware of her body as it lies on mine. I close my eyes and block all my hearing. Now, I can only feel her body against mine, flesh against flesh, soul against soul. I float into a void,a void where there are two bodies, mine and hers and we are entwined into an eternal embrace. A void where all my senses are lost and my existence is derived from the touch of her skin and her existence is derived from mine. A void where we are together for eternity. I smile. I am happy.

The world changes

She lies in the bed, pale and wan. The fever has sucked most of her energy out and she is very weak. She is sleeping now. I sit next to her staring at that beautiful face. I stretch my hand forward and pass it through her hair. She is a hot. Perhaps I should bring a new cold compress. My hand moves down to her forehead and then to her cheek. She opens her eyes as her head turns sideways. My hand is now embraced in the warmth of her cheek and shoulder. She smiles weakly , I look into those eyes, those beautiful eyes that could hold the universe for me. She keeps on smiling. I am happy

The world stops

Her deep black hair, her silhouette, her eyes. They are all there. I see them there. But they are descriptions -words of form.

She doesn't have a face. She never has a face.

Words on a screen

Its easy to laugh

The mind is lies there, trapped
In the fantasy of those dreams
Where the universe stands still
For a single eye's glance

Its easy to cry

The road, its hard to walk on
The people, they are strangers
They pass by, in their own dreams
But the road still goes on

Unconnected phrases?

Is it the seed of unformed thought?
Raw, base, rough and shameless.
Or is it thought at its purest
Where words are the mere shell

Unwritten meanings?

Is the word that is written, the meaning?
Or is it the word not written down
But which exists, subtle graceful
Floating in the meanings implied

A judge?

There are no judges here
Only you, only me, only these words
You are the judge yet you are no worthy
But so am I

Little Bug

Little Bug, Little Bug
On this big huge Floor
Where do you run?

Little bugs, so many
Red, Green and Blue
White, Magenta and Mahogany

I walk down the floor
A big Huge Giant
On this big huge floor

Will I crush you?
O little Bug
Walking on this big huge floor

Road

Everyday I walk the same road. That road across my house down the elevator, out of the elevator on to the blue carpet across the glass door, across another glass door and on to the pavement. Sometimes I meet people on this way. Sometimes I smile at them sometimes I don't. Sometimes they smile back, sometimes they don't. I walk down to the pavement, sometimes I breath in the outside air, like some prisoner tasting the fresh smell of freedom. But I am no prisoner. Sometimes I stare out at the sky, a sunny sky, a gray sky, a blue sky, sometime its even a cheery sky. Then I look across the road. I see people in closed metal boxes being transported from one prison to another. But they are no prisoners. Then I look to my left and wait for the traffic to lessen or the lights to turn red. Then I cross the road. Sometimes I walk, sometimes I jog and maybe sometimes I run across the road. The road is my first crossing to the outside world.
Then I walk on the pavement of the triangle of grass that faces my apartment. Its almost a right triangle and I walk along one of the shorter sides. I often pass by people here. But I never greet any one of them, they never greet me either. Both of us are imprisoned in our thoughts and minds but we are no prisoners.
As I reach the end of the right triangle, I keep walking, sometimes there is traffic coming ahead of me, sometimes there is not. But I never stop walking, I cross the road as soon as there are no cars that are coming towards me. But I never stop walking. Theoretically, I could keep walking down the right triangle across the road to the next pavement (actually a grass divider) and keep walking till I reach the corner of the Museum and the College. Perhaps on that day there would be an unending stream of traffic coming down that road I cross everyday, perhaps it would be a funeral procession of some very rich, very beautiful lady and the procession would have those long black cars, a steady stream of long black cars, each belonging a admirer of that rich, beautiful but dead lady. There would be steady unending stream of those cars and I would not be able to cross the road, and I would have to keep walking on the grass divider. I would pass the hearse that holds the body of the rich, beautiful, dead lady and my distorted, shortened, fattened reflection would momentarily shine on the window of the long, black and sad hearse. And I would keep on walking on that grass divider, till I reached the corner between the museum and university.
But there's no such steady stream of cars, I always cross the road before I can step up to the grass divider, the traffic always stops, I always cross the road. Perhaps the cars are also prisoners. No, the cars cannot be prisoners

I cross the road and step up to another pavement. That pavement of concrete, blackened by years of smoke by cars and buses that imperiously speeded by this blackened concrete pavement. I walk down this blackened concrete pavement. Sometimes there are people here, people who are walking, sometimes faster than me, sometimes slower than me. There are people who jog by me there ears stuffed with thin carbon sheets that vibrate sharply to create pressure waves in the air. Perhaps they can't listen to the cacophony of this world and that is why they have those tiny sheets of carbon that vibrate to the electric signals creating pressure waves in the air. Sometimes, as they jog by, I hear a snatch of what they hear. Sometimes I don't. Perhaps the sound is their prison. No, sound cannot be a prison.

I walk on that blackened concrete pavement and I finally reach those glowing red/green lights on the corner of the Museum and the university. I stop here, most of the time. I watch the metal prisons whizz by, people lost on their dreams, people lost in their realities. People who will drive away never to be seen by me again, people who will never ever in my lifetime, see me again. I wonder when the light will turn red. Eventually it does and those metal boxes stop, purring and humming like some monsters, caged only by the foot of a prisoner. I cross the first road and then I wait.
The next road is tricky. Its tricky because it does not have glowing lights to tell the monsters when to stop. I have to wait for variable periods of times here. Sometimes, just when I have crossed the first road, the monsters are far off and I can safely cross this next, tricky road. But sometimes they are too near and I have to wait till that steady stream, that constant line of monsters has crossed that bend in the road and I can safely cross the road. But the crossing is not tricky because of this, its tricky because of the fact that it is a 'walking person' crossing i.e the metal monsters are supposed to give way to the walking people. So theoretically I should not stop walking and metal monsters should slow down to let me, the walking person, pass by. But I don't trust the metal monsters. I don't trust the people in the metal monsters, the people who are lost in their dreams, people who are lost in their realities. So I wait. I wait for that steady stream of metal monsters to cross over and then I cross the road. Sometimes, very once in a while, a metal monster slows down the person inside the monster waves at me. I cross the road, sometimes I wave back at them, sometimes I don't. I often wonder who slowed, who stopped the monster or the person.

I walk across the road on to the pavement to corner at Museum and the university. I start walking up facing a small hut. Its a small hut, a hut made of colors gray, white and blackened like the old broken blackened concrete path I have walked on. Sometimes I wonder who lives in that hut. I actually know what is supposed to happen in the hut. It says the name on the hut. But what if that is a lie, a clandestine cover up for something different. What if it is actually fast food place run by Martians and actually caters to the planetary migrants who have settled on Earth unknown to us. Perhaps they use holographic projector to cover the actual superstructure that serves as a makeshift motel and fast food place for those inter-planetary migrants. Perhaps all the people who go in there are actually aliens in disguise. Perhaps, its possible. Maybe I am prisoner of my own imagination. But isn't imagination supposed to set you free?

I pass by that hut, I never go in, I never feel like it. (Who knows, maybe the aliens have mental projection devices that make sure that no non-humans ever cross the door to inside the hut) I walk along that hut leaving all its mysteries behind me. I walk up on the path made of hardened tar and pitch riddled with broken glass. I often wonder whose broken glass it is? Which glass, broken by the child who was crying after being beaten by his mother because he wouldn't eat what he could get and he couldn't get anything more because he couldn't earn anything more. They are standing in some dark house facing each other, that scene frozen in time, the child's eye are red, large huge drops of tears are flowing down his cheek and yet he continues to stare defiantly at his father, those huge drops of tears flowing down ever so slowly at those eyes blinking slowly, that mouth pursed into a expression of determination, his face red, his cheeks burning by the slap his father gave him and he keeps on staring at his father who is is staring back at him, he doesn't know what to do, he stares back at his son and he remembers the instant, the instant before when he lost control and his hand, his foolish hand swept across the air and hit his son on the cheek, his hand is burning not because of the pain but because he hit his son and he doesn't know what to say and he stares back at his son, his son whose eyes are red and pouring down those huge drops of tears and the thousand broken glasses of the bowl that had the cereal from the supermarket. Each of those glasses reflect and distort that frozen scene into them and now when I cross that speckled path of pitch and tar, the scene flows out of them and into me and I am in that frozen scene. Perhaps each of those glass pieces are prisoners of their own stories. But stories are no prisons.

I keep moving walking on that speckled path of concrete, pitch and tar with glass pieces, each of which contain in it a frozen scene of humanity. I walk by that hut of alien dreams and I crossover to place surrounded by tall spiked iron bars. This is the place metal dreams, a place where imagination has shaped metal and thought has coursed into the grain of hard metal to shape it into figures of worship. Sharp shapes, glowing in the sunlight glint all around me as I look forward, they are different monsters. They do not run over people and then pass the blame to their prisoners. They are thought frozen in time, they are figures of dreams birthed into reality. They are unnatural progeny of the human mind, they are brooding sentinels of thought that course through our minds. To me there violence is massive, a huge lumbering behemoth of though stopped in time and painfully coursed into the sharp shapes of human dream.

I walk across that forest of frozen human thought and into the university. I always walk by two big green trash cans, the refuse of human refuse dumped into those tow big green trash cans. I wonder when they are emptied and where they go. But I do not stop, I go on.

Empty Happiness

My words? They come out only when I am sad
But I am happy today
Its an empty sort of happiness, an alyrical happiness
A feeling that won't let me get me my rhythm

But rather words that come out are
Like an expression of uncontrolled joy
Yet lacking expression
Till the habit of writing kicks in

Giving it that old rhythm
Of an old hand to its bonds
My bane, my curse
My very own words


Empty Happiness. That's all.

Vacation

Lenny looked out of his cubicle snap. They were playing "Happy Sea" again. The stock was probably not doing to well, so they wanted the workers to be more active, more productive and so more "happy". So he could see a gaily sea shore with people sun-bathing and children playing in the waves. Of course he knew there was no sea, there was no shore and definitely there were no children playing in the sand of some beach (how dangerous and more importantly how wasteful!) but well the human mind works in interesting ways. It had something to do environmental adaptation. People who saw happy things were generally happier, he remembered that from some old wave somewhere. Anyway it didn't matter now, this was his last cubicle day and soon he would be "free".

He looked over to his screen, the system seemed to be working correctly. All the system detail bars were at correct levels, no alert prediction required his direct intervention as of now. Habitually he ordered a system check, it was unnecessary and probably in some small way wasteful, but Lenny didn't care much, he was going away.
He had seen this system grow with him, he had grown older but more experienced committing less and less mistakes and the system had become better and better, going less and less out of the acceptable range of functioning. Sometimes Lenny felt that he knew the system and he could see the system think as the various control meter values change based on inputs. There were days on which the system was cranky and sluggish even to his inputs and there were days when Lenny didn't have to do a single thing. As Frank, his lunch-buddy, often said the technician and the system started different, became one. Lenny knew that Frank was right. He often browsed other system screens (it was required as social-consciousness measure - but it was just and excuse as the Corporation 3 gave extra credits for any technician who could give improvement suggestions i.e point out mistakes being committed by other systems and their technicians - "Divide and rule") and he could see that if Jane came in cranky today (maybe her pleasure-globe misfired!) that her system would get cranky pretty soon and if the system was cranky, needless to say, its technician wasn't going to have a good day.

But all this was going to be a matter of past. He was going to leave all of this behind - his last vacation. And Lenny was happy and sad. Sad because he was going to miss his system , he was going to miss the familiar patterns of growing and shrinking color bars and how he fantasized that he was actually talking with his system. Often he could swear that the system reacted properly even before he started punching in the commands into the console.
Lenny was happy too, because he was going to have his dream time, finally. All that he worked for and in return, the final return was the vacation time, the repayment of his whole life work. Lenny had no direct family. He had maintained relationships with some women but they had been strictly pleasure exchange agreements. He could never get himself to think that he could actually spend his whole life and raise a family. That was for farmers, he thought. But he had done his bit, he had given his sperm to the Corporation 3 bank. It would be used properly to produce the next generation offspring and he would have repaid (in part) his debt to the society. ad now it was time for his payment, his debt to be paid by the society.

He looked into his personal visi-screen. It showed a beautiful landscape - "The Venusian Beach" it said. The artist had rendered to perfection what the Venusian landscape looked like or actually should have looked like. Lenny had seen that actual visi-scapes of planets. They were no good - most of them as bad as Industrial Disaster Areas on Earth. But that did not stop from the vacation teams from dreaming up scapes of what could have been. And Lenny agreed to that, he wanted to live in dream, he had had enough of the reality.

No more daily hours of System screen (there was a pang of sorrow), no more ritual bar drinks with people he hated until he had drunk enough. No more of all that, only his dream, his undying dream.