Weekly Bliss- one out of a collection of my favourite poems

What I Understood

by Katha Pollitt

When I was a child I understood everything
about, for example, futility. Standing for hours
on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls
I'd ask myself, how many times will I have to perform
this pointless task, and all the others? I knew
about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children
are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants
the dignity and shame of solitary diners
disabled me, and when my grandmother
screamed at me, "Someday you'll know what it's like!"I knew she was right, the way I knew
about the single rooms my teachers went home to,the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,and that there was no God, and that I would die.All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.
the only thing I didn't understand
was how in a world whose predominant characteristicsare futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.This year I'll bethirty-nine, and I still don't understand it.

Book Review : The Household guide to dying - Debra Adelaide.

For a long time I was filled with that arrogant confidence of youth the conviction that you are desired as much as you desire.
- Debra Adelaide.

I absolutely loved it.At first I was vary of reading it in the presence of unbookish conventional company because the title of what I was reading made me look deplorable...but as I sunk deeper into it I cared less of what others had to say.
She reminds me of Atwood and Enright.Sudden,yet precise.And yes..very very obsessed.

'The prospect of death was like a fabled land,a place of griffins and hydras too bizzare and remote to be seriously considered'

I've always hated the way they portray dying on screen..the bright red blood (darker these days),talking in between gasping for oxygen (all the while people continue to crowd around the dead man to be and suffocate him further..) and having to say something important at the very last minute and not being able to say it (worse) How dearly I hate 'incompleteness'.
Debra Adelaide makes dying seem effortless and yet heart wrenching.
Delia is a perfectionist and she is dying of breast cancer.She wants to do this right.
We then travel down the memory lane and glance at the not so perfect events of her life that finally moulded her into the person that she is now..
The haunting memory of her lost son and her exhausting search for the woman who now has his heart beating inside her all the while juggling her time in between two precious daughters and a loving husband and drafting out the perfect words about the unusually perfect death.

(Did I just ruin it for you? My sincere apologies)

Life's a smoke and waiting's a dick..

'If only I had the perfect journal to write in..'
I knew what I needed wasn't the perfect journal- it was the perfect moment.
And it came to me sometimes - in between absorbing city life as I walked past crowded streets or in between enjoying a stimulating cup of wicked, undiluted coffee in the wee hours of the morning when no one was around - just me and my tranquil state of the arch being, staring at my disllusioned self in the mirror, while a twig ruffled outside the window and the leaves did their hitch and no, I never noticed because I could never take my eyes off the mirror,couldn't take my eyes off what I've become.

Punch drunk Ascent

Froth glistened on the surface of a rock.The vines were mist laden and sublime.Far below people erractically dug into their freshly blistered salty corn and generously sipped some scintillating coffee.
I am starting to tire of X but then again I have nothing to hold onto. Waterfalls are grand, even grander when the force of the water is unrelenting. I verge upon one rock at a time with bare feet and a flood of caution.The wet moss turns to dangerous slime.
'Don't be foolish..hold my hand.'
I pretend not to hear her.Shaky and wobbly I grab the underside of the rock above me instead- the one I have to climb next but have absolutely no idea how to proceed as yet.
The grandeur and beauty of the waterfall now forgotten I trudge on with the prospect of just getting through the damn thing without cracking a few bones or breaking my camera. (Ps not mine afterall)
'Are you absolutely sure you don't need a hand?'
She was a feet or two below me and her sisterly affection was nauseating.I haven't felt this nauseated since gulping down neat unadulterated vodhka last week.Don't you vouch for adulterated stuff at such times?
Adulterated love,degraded, depreciated stuff.
'I think I got it..' I yelled back.
But I didn't get it ofcourse.I never did.
Even if I did it was vague.

Days of our lives..

"I'm dying," she must have whispered into his shapely and well proportioned ear on a rainy day (when the lower part of the window fogged up and the upper part of it was mist laden and sublime) or on a not so rainy day (when the sun stood on the horizon inches away from sinking into it,weary,after having witnessed rumblings of an entire day beneath him.Yes it was a 'him' because he only felt tired in the evenings and called it a day.)
And then their lives must have progressively shattered there on.I stood among the remanants of what must have been a warm and inviting abode.From where I stood I could hear the distinct hum of the church choir.The dying tree and the dying house sucked the energy out of each other.They formed a strange sombre pair.

If your life was a newspaper what would the headlines be?

Someone died.The weather blew up in your face.Sordid.The party scene next door got uglier.A crash and then glass fell apart..someone stepped on it maybe or worse fell on it.They'd found a stash of dope stuffed away in his pockets.He was going to die anyway.Trains go off tracks.The swine flu masquerade party might be over but people are still dying.Only that now there is no fuss about it.Only one teeny weeny question that splits open every now and then.What if? What if the flu gets me? What if the flu gets my family? My son at school? My man at work? What if's are such diggers.They could ascertain a variety of catastrophic events that run along the longest coast of the sea.Once they get to the coast they start drifting into the sea.Deeper and deeper in between bouts of nauseatingly salty water.
With that said I'd say some people do not realize how lucky they are. I should be generous enough not to name them.I just wish they knew.I sometimes wish I knew too.How lucky I was
- to have a heart beating inside me,to be able to walk and stand my ground, to be whatever I want.And yet these things, these majestic essentials are overshadowed by those vexing details of daily life.I just wish we all knew.
But we don't,do we? And it takes fleeting images of misfortunates sleeping on roadsides or the failing health of someone very old even worse someone younger to bring us one step closer to reality.A reality that is overpriced,taxed and levied by routine- most ordinary and most obvious.

Something I'd read over and over..

Summer in a Small Town

by Linda Gregg

When the men leave me,
they leave me in a beautiful place.
It is always late summer.
When I think of them now,
I think of the place.
And being happy alone afterwards.
This time it's Clinton, New York.
I swim in the public pool
at six when the other people
have gone home.
The sky is gray, the air is hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses
so completely it leaves my heart empty.