Tuesday, June 28, 2016

The hostilities are over and truth rings a bell

A bell rings
The hostilities are over
The numbers 
Creep forward with veracity

Inside the smallest one
There's a clear acrylic ball
With thin walls
Cellophane like

Inside the ball there's a clear acrylic wall
Invisible, only extending a little way from the walls

Between that wall
Existent and nonexistent 
Bounces the truth
Existent and non existent 

Its songs are sung in Tamil 
Its timbre is a Tamil cadence
Its replies and responses are Tamil 
Its bony bounce is Tamil 

The ball and its wall can expand
Or contract or deform
And the keeping bouncing thing inside

Human lives I guess
Or a semblance of truth
Draws an energy
Unbidden, unprocured

From the light and sound
That hit the ball from without
And the sound of a bell
That the truth itself gives off 

Friday, June 17, 2016

In a dream I was interrogated with a strange sound

I've heard this strange mg sound 
Where "ama" turns to "ang or "ong"

As in sarama turning to sarong
And somewhere in between there's

That momentary mg
Just a hint for listening

In a dream I was interrogated 
Nothing new in that

But every word the judge asked me ended in the impossibility of mg

Could you write it down I asked
And every word still ended in mg

That conjugation supportive of a structure of inner appurtenances 

Keep that rag. I have to stop crying

Did they chase his mother
He can't remember
Don't throw out that empty valise
You can fill it with rags or pages
Don't throw out that rag 
You can find an odor in it or soak it with tears or breath
Don't throw out that piece of paper
You can fill it with the memories
You don't have
Or you can fill it with the words she tells you
Carefully 

Is that a conch or a train
In the dark morning
Does it matter
What it says is:
Alert!
A time is breaking

Did they round up his brother in one of their roundups?
What does he think?
No one to tell him
No one to tell him what his mother thought, running
Down into a ditch
Thorny? Sandy? 
Her rubber flipflops thin, coming undone, slipping off
Thinking of the hate she felt for his connections?

Did his father drown 
In that outhouse in Mullativu
Or some village his mother says they came from 
Because he was sick and fell?
He doesn't know
Or did they throw him in
And he fell into that hell
Or are his suspicions 
Suspicions he'll never answer true
That 
Father was beheaded first
And lasting tale that he was sick
Lost his balance
Fell in
How do you "fall" into a squatter so narrow so that you drown?

What did his mother think
On the six day flight to Wattala 
Refuge with Colombo family a last resort 

The sound of the crows can't answer
The roosters won't answer
The Murugam Temple can't answer
The Pilliyar Temple can't answer 
The Kali Kovil can't answer
The speeding buses won't answer
Your own breathing can't answer
How about the groaning of your mother at night, or this time in the morning
Or the moan of the ponsala monks
Those orange robed chanting patriots
Who storm your place with their ownership 

I have to stop crying
It's not my country
Not my people 
Not my tragedy 
Why is it I feel so close?

Pour water over me like Hanuman

Pour water over me
Douse me with camphor smoke like the emerging can't yet walk monkey god Hanuman

Put a tail on me
Douse me some more with smoke
Keep me from falling backward like that Hanuman, that monkey god

The offerings floor is wet
The steps are wet 
The reenactment of Hanuman
And a hundred more reenactments

Are going on inside
It's a spectacle like we're a spectacle
With our light skins
But we've started to belong here

Leaving hurts us
And it hits you 
Hours of waiting and counting 
Make it sad  

There's fresh still air around here 
And dusty air coming in here on an insistent fresh breeze
Stronger than fresh 

For me it carries threat 
Don't ask I can't tell 
The threat of danger and impermanence?

The threat of disease and intransigence?
What if it blocks the sun when you say goodbye?

Tomorrow I leave, packed, racked, abandoned, abandoning
Insinuation and installation, investment and attention. Done. 

How do I leave?
Soldiering on? Picking myself up? Detaching myself? Erasing my time here? Plucking? Dragging? Extricating? Extracting?

More like scouring. Scouring the place of my ownership. Scouring the place of my ownership by occupancy. Scouring me of my ownership, of my occupancy. Of my occupation.  

More like sucking up the bits of liquid where they fell in a porous matrix, a matrix of lava rock or sandstone, or just screening

How to make this finality happen?
It will. No matter what I do. 
But I'm too soft too melted
Too absorbed and too absorbing 

It doesn't feel like time to go
It doesn't feel right to go 
It doesn't feel good to go
How about don't go?

Even a princess pie could remove itself better With less self-absorption 
More fairly distributing its pieces
More triangulation Less messiness. 

More good humor
More roundness
More crustiness
Sweeter


Shards of fright

You are still getting in my way
You are still getting in my way
You are still getting in my way
You fell in the light and absorbed 

You are still getting in my way
You are still getting in my way
You fell in the light and absorbed
And changed the energy 

You are still getting in my way
You fell in the light and absorbed
And changed the energy
And brought shade to the sunny ride

You fell in the light and absorbed
And changed the energy 
And brought shade to the sunny ride
And got in my way

Numbness that you held above me like a sieve
Exhales and takes in the dust of paradise
Trampled in broken shoes and greasy spit
Forwarding my mind to listen deeper

Comparing my mind with a mind that listened deeper
Trailing the arcs of balls
White balls
Against a black field 

Perhaps it's not necessary to keep track
Perhaps it's just a necessary evil
Perhaps it all about the way we stack
Our wads and piles and moats and coats 

Our silver heralded plates and chalices
Our piles of brick and wood
And piles of gemstones periwinkle rose and white
In sublime misunderstanding overcoming the shards of fright


Thursday, June 16, 2016

There are not always two sides to every story

There are not always two sides to 
Every story I can give you examples
Of where this holds some truth
Though you will disagree with
The viewpoint that I proffer where
One story must be based on hate
And anyway my story lacks 
The seal of approval of what we've 
Come to call political correctness 
Where political correctness 
Has somehow come to condone
You know what. Terror. 

Where terror is condoned by hate
And isn't that often or even usually
The case
Doesn't the hate have a life of its own
Outside the window of "story"
And in glorious 
Self rationalization may condone
Itself for rationalizing a "struggle"
To put it in the words of the 
Old revolutionaries 

Anyway the hating always hate 
You will not like the story I proffer
Or profess and you may hate me
For it 
And your disagreement may 
Outshine the small bit of truth
I try to present you with. 

It would be a present 
A presence 
A wholeness the story (or the two-sided story) Might lack. 
Why not give it a try?
For one thing 
It's a lot easier to say
There are always two sides 
To a story. 

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

There are not two sides to every story

There are not always two sides to 
Every story I can give you examples
Of where this holds some truth
Though you will disagree with
The viewpoint that I proffer where
One story must be based on hate
And anyway my story lacks 
The seal of approval of what we've 
Come to call political correctness 
Where political correctness 
Has somehow come to condone
You know what. Terror. 

Where terror is condoned by hate
And isn't that often or even usually
The case
Doesn't the hate have a life of its own
Outside the window of "story"
And in glorious 
Self rationalization may condone
Itself for rationalizing a "struggle"
To put it in the words of the 
Old revolutionaries 

Anyway the hating always hate 
You will not like the story I proffer
Or profess and you may hate me
For it 
And your disagreement may 
Outshine the small bit of truth
I try to present you with. 

It would be a present 
A presence 
A wholeness the story (or the two-sided story) Might lack. 
Why not give it a try?
For one thing 
It's a lot easier to say
There are always two sides 
To a story. 

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

The firebombing

After ringlets of fairest dew have frothed, then gushed, then flown, and then dissolved
Like a palm forest in balmy breezes, fairest breezes, its fronds giving an incandescent, incessant music, drone-like, shattering in glassy half notes and quarter notes 

You, becalmed, benign, relaxed tell me the most interesting story.

You went last night to the private hospital to see the neurosurgeon on a consult 

Why? Because you didn't trust our internet researches that said:

The half life of the sleeping pill you took too much of is "two hundred hours."

That is:

Half the juju from those pills you took a week ago is still floating around in you after approximately 8.33 days and nights

So eight days in you still feel like you have three full doses in you. Another week or so, one and a half sleeping pills worth of brain drain will still be hanging out in your fat cells, waiting to be metabolized. 

At least I had the possibility to live through it you whisper to me. Your thoughts these days are not yours. You're spacy and, more than usual, All Over The Place. 

I don't know what you told the neurosurgeon. 

He told you, and this is not what you'd go to a neurosurgeon to hear: That lower back pain is common in Sri Lankans. They squat, they sit on their haunches, and grandparents your age? They carry children in their arms. A heavy load. 

You carried some liters of water in your arm you told me. To water your precious plants. Maybe it was that, you thought in retrospect. Maybe some other too-heavy work gave you the backache. A pain you never had before. Had I ever experienced it? Anything so horrible? Hah! Count the times I was flat on my back. 

Keep this in mind. 

Your pain you called excruciating. Like a heart attack in your leg. You. In your seventies. Never had sciatica? It drove you so crazy you knowingly took six pills? You told me you knew you were taking them and you thought to spit them out but decided not to. 

Your neuro pal didn't bother, as we would in the West, to slip in a routine psych exam. Cuz they don't here. 

But he did approach the psychology of your pain, a pain like you'd never had before but like I said. We Get It All The Time. 

Excruciating, crucial, and here's the crux. 

We don't get our houses firebombed. At least not that often. You did. In 1981. The same summer as the Jaffna Library was burnt. I must memorialize here:

The small ghetto of Tamil public servants and professionals and business people, families whose houses in Bandarawela, upcountry, whose houses were firebombed that summer. 

You won't read about it anywhere. Ever. I must curate this fact like a diamond or a sapphire. In a velvet box. Because it is the rarest thing I own. 

That summer in Bandarawela? For the record:

Was
Two summers before "there are two sides to every story." Your innocent children were sleeping inside. 

You stayed with a doctor friend three months after the firebombing, then moved your family back to the relative safety, for the time being at least, of Batticaloa. 

Feel any pain after the firebombing? Or did you just soldier through? 

Who would think a backache could be so bad?

Is a glide enough to hide uncertainty?

Go to fill and fill up full
Barely coming to wander in fixed translations 

Park your bike at this railroad junction 
Barely aware of traffic on either side

Walk your fill in village lanes
Their berms and verges hidden 
Behind corrugation

Watch darkening porches shaded verandas
Setting up with seats for the afternoon's repose

Try me for telling. Try me for the truth. It isn't usual you'll receive my word. 

Tell me trying, why? Why watch a kingfisher on the lagoon? Is a glide enough to hide uncertainty?

Before their wives arise

Went onward
Into the land of the growing

Where so much sitting
Crossed my path 

Onward into the land of power
A set of mirrors strike the light

Onward where music's fables 
Guide a march of lift and effort

Struggling with impossibilities
Still unfound, still covered, still unspoken and unreflected

Under the territory of time's allusion 

Up past the Kali Kovil
Where destruction meets the watery waters
Lagoonish shade pleasant in its smell
Where early
Very early before their wives arise

The fat and skinny men, saronged but bare chested
Sweep sweep sweep sweep and rake their sandy verges

Less words

Extracting it seems was easier
When there were less words involved
It was the asphaltish odor that stopped them from talking
And so getting through and out of the day
Became a convenience instead of a burden 

Using coins that buried a wealth of stolen items
They found time. 

At railway bridges. 
At stops along the road where tables were greasy and covered with flies. 
At pauses in the music
That pelted, belted, besotted and trampled. 

This was good because of and in all this they uncovered secret chests and trysts that never would have been begotten 

Sandy places to do the ablutions

Dream, it's your dime
I'll keep writing till it makes me sick
I'll keep floating till they force me back to earth
I'll find water for washing 
And sandy places to do the ablutions
Until another bell rings
From another corner that says
Dreamtime done now
Find your moral compass
And act on it

The door of bravery

Tracing water when the flooding rains came 
We sloshed through sheets of water on the sand 

Braving serpents, snakes and insects
We followed contours of the land

It was short lived but violent, its force, its majesty, cliches that grow offhand

But seeing water gather from that streaming sky? Watching gutters burst? and downpour sounds? These are love earth gives, symbols we can follow to the door of bravery. 

Forcing soil to do your work

Forcing soil never seemed to be
The right thing in this part of the world 

Digging pits for rain or collecting moisture seemed to be a one way ticket to hell

Finding time to shore up your work 
In a climate that forced you, not the soil into indolence

Intolerance, irascibility, extenuating circumstances like exhaustion, heat rash, delicate skin

All these circumstances mitigated against calling to soil to do your will. 

With the state of orthodontia here, another story but the same, it was better to find beauty in that overbite

Than try to bear it away on your terms. This said, as they say, finding rest in times when you should rest, like midday? Is probably the best.  

What the poetess told him as they watched the village sun dim

I like to use poetry to capture, to loosen, to expand and to send to the remotest smallnesses, the poetess told him as an aside watching the village sun dim

I found it amusing she said to find people whose wading into this world found it like slippery tiles

It soothes me she said in a place where heated brains holding terribly bothersome thoughts, thoughts that upset their keepers keep bubbling up. They're a part of life. 

And he found the coolness of her words a softening, a repeated and repeating flow and flowering whose aroma was a balm

Roadside Witchstands

Entering
The 
Time 
Of 
Fullmoon
Rocks
So 
Round
They 
Stood 
As 
Faces
Painted
Dumped
And 
Doused
On
Roadside
Witchstands

Pooped dogs of Thiruchendur

Growing testy after verges, exploding open like the dead hard legs of crabs in a human maw

She wondered, when will this dust stop? Abate, conceal, assume proportions miniature, opaque

Fighting muggy sleep in the last hours before dark, her fan appropriated sounds of the outside

And forced its gently whirring symphony upon the restless ear it swung and shone in deepening distress

The morning horns and drums sounded and with them, the canned religious music, Tamil language

But indeterminate in timbre tone and topic. Falling birds and a salt in the air that stayed. Hot and caustic poring, suffusing

Arbitrary children's screams behind corrugated fences and outside in the sand? Dogs so pooped they curled in the heat. 

A Sangam poetess and a cloud of peace

Let a lucid breeze cover and convey
Let a cloud of ice settle in its verge

Let a can of music open in your heart
Let a leafy green follow wishing to go on

Let a motor sounding carry bobbing heads
Let a language tighten as it loosens its verbiage

Let a bell clang ringing from a kovil place
Let a bell clang ringing from a bovine face

Let a sangam poetess sing of village tanks
Let her pages rustle finding words that open chests

Let a graying sky find its beauty way
Let a swaying frond troop many with its kind

Let a forced exchange founder, filter, glowing in the deep
Let the information flow careless as a breeze

Let the lucid breeze follow, covering, conveying
Let a cloud of peace descend powerful and staying

To force even thoughts on a rocky pavement

Forcing even thoughts 
on rocky pavement 

Losing one concentration
not an acceptable outcome

in a situation where
Losing another concentration is the goal. 

Too much weighty stuff at stake
Too much worrying can break. 

In one day!
To see a baby eagle fall from the nest
To see a fat long rat snake sinuous in the sand

Breaking its cross across the crossing
Hiding low in the leafy bananas 
its tiny head terrifying 

Then later 
and far above
in the overheated sky
Paralyzed that snake
and caught by the eagle parent

And then far above still
And farther
the other eagle parent
Takes the other end gently

A space docking 

The snake is stretched like a line between parentheses these parents 
These parents pull on either end and
snake now a lifeless flesh enemy and meal for what eaglets lie still in the rough and twiggy nest

This aerie uneven
We can't see
This aerie
Floating in the tree
Above lagoon and shoreline waits
In sacred sun and torrid wastes

In fisher waters calm with fury
Tempered by the feathers furry 

To force even thoughts on a rocky pavement 
Curries concentration where concentration is to be had

Monday, June 13, 2016

Chicken sized problem

Preparing, promoting 
Isolating, balancing 

You wonder 
How this chicken-sized problem 

Wasn't solved before
Months or years earlier. 

How I embraced the Tamil lifestyle for my birthday

Begone money!
I want to be rid of these wads of rupees, whatever they're worth in USD

It's my birthday!
And I want to spend the day buying nice stuff for the people I love, no matter 

Lighten up!
I feel like lightening my load. Whatever it takes and whoever I have to pay

Send me flying!
Try holding me down with carats or grams on this sun spotted cloud spotted day

Change those rupees into gold
Into glam and bling
and things you can hold 
Change those rupees into charitable acts
Just do it. Don't ask 

I go and come on my bicycle
I celebrate with my own self
I trip through streets of traffic
I applaud the cows and taxis, the crows and dogs
The new kovil songs I haven't heard
The clank of weights at my gym
The sweat and subsequent strong
vibrations
of
harmony
There, I said it. I'm not ashamed to say it
vibrations
of
harmony 
If you don't like it tough. It's my birthday!

I wait I wait I wait I wait I wait

I'm so patient in my waiting
So eager in my waiting
So bathed with happiness in my waiting
So triumphal in my waiting

In sheds and behind sheds
On streets and on tracks
Barefoot and beslippered
I wait like I waited for this day
It's the day of gliding through
of playing through of smiling through of treating through

Treating my self
And treating my loved ones
And making pretense of surprise 
And making pretense of significance 
And making pretense of pretending 
And making a pretense of light and lightness 
And enjoying
Enjoying to the core
Enjoying fully and completely
Embracing 
Celebrating my world  

If you don't approve
And if you think there's too much
Too much ego
Too much weightedness
Too much making a big deal
Too much telling people days in advance 
Too much enjoyment when we live in such a hard world 
Begone. I don't care 
My job is done
I flared and fell and boisterously 
Reembodied 
My cheerful self 

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Jaffna and its soil

I find that Jaffna
That is I think that Jaffna
Will create new mines of thinking
Mines of dreams
Mines of aromas
Mines of noises
Mines of effort

Bringing forth 
Always bringing forth
Bringing forth and forward
Moving up through waters
Murky waters of 
Murky waters of time and emotion 

A space like a candle
A Nallur-like entryway
Its open temple jaws
A maw of time travel
Trancelike
If you go barefoot 
Trancelike 
If you go bare chested

Like the waters 
Of a place 
With no rivers 
Only limestone beneath the surface
Limestone of ancient seas
Limestone of ancient coral reefs
Sunken
Then buried 
Then risen

Then finding light
Hosting plants and animals
Pretending in a very convincing manner 
To be soil
Holding, protecting, hosting 
Crustaceans 
And civilization 

I did taste that soil
Like I smelled those smells
And saw the weirs that men built
To breed prawns
In a light light
Halfway across the lagoon
Going to a near deserted island 

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Dad taught me how to be a Man

It frustrates
to portray dust
just as crushed earth and bone 

It frustrates
to think of an egg
only as food

It frustrates 
to say
"Dad taught me how to be a man"

As it frustrates 
to believe
incense, when burnt, is just ash

Indian Ocean at Kallady, Batticaloa

Its flatness threatens and beckons
Its couplets roar and whisper

Its breakings are tidings 
Its distances are life dreams

Its greyness is character
Its blueness is reflection

Its greatness is individuality and spread
Its worry is staying in its container, its bounds 

These truths rediscovered 
Form a tablet to hunker down with