Crunch

# Cold cut chicken breast pieces (four or five maybe)
# one cup creamy mayonnaise or Caesar sauce splattered over its contents
# half lettuce head torn to pieces
# sliced tomatoes
# sliced red and green bell pepper
# grated Parmesan cheese
# salt,pepper and the likes.
I dug deeper into the my chicken Caesar salad. This was the first time I'd managed to get hold of a salad for lunch all by myself with my parents watching and not doubting my anorexic tendencies.'Healthy' was in. It was a substantial amount of salad anyway and as I toyed around with it I imagined the chef hurrying carelessly to gather the contents of it and then putting them together while other important dishes played at the back of his mind. My salad was not one of them, it was just another obligation that would win the restaurant another seventy odd pricey bucks.

And while our conversations didn't focus much beyond the unusual granite surface of the table, my career that was going nowhere, the elections and the unbearable heat of summer.. something that did capture my interest in the due course of time were the people sitting at the table to our left.
The table accommodated one man and seven women if I counted correctly.The slightly over dressed women with their hair oiled together and tied down by the weight of sweet smelling flowers,their bangles clattering against each other..they formed quite a chatty bunch.
(Now this aspect of being a writer I can never quite understand...ostentatiously elaborating things that don't quite get my attention or affection.)
What interested me was the diligence that the lone male entity commanded at the table.He reminded me of a king surrounded by eager wives trying their hardest to make the best impression.Ofcourse he wasn't king and obviously most of the women could have been his immediate family...but there was something so alluring about the awkward pride that he cultivated deep within himself.You had to see it to believe it.This odd mix of chivalry and gawkiness.
'These are my women...' I could almost hear him say..'They laugh when I laugh,they listen to what I have to say- it is important to them,and look how tremendously pleased they are when I address even one of them in public.'

'These are my women..' and the look on his face is even more interesting than the meek impersonation of a Giacometti painting that hung above him.
Giacometti and his remarkably twisted lonely figures.Isolated,oddly shaped,intense and anything but forgettable.
The immediate question following the work of of an artist that pops up into my brain dead head is..well..How did s/he die? I ridiculously can't stop myself from doing that or wanting to know that..I just have to know it.
Giacometti died of percarditis and chronic bronchitis. What were you expecting ?? Suicide??
Shame.That's all I can say.Shame.

'My women..' he still held his head high.
'Well..as long as you pay the bills..' I thought and continued to dig at my caesar salad for more chicken.

So I was browsing through the poetry section of the library the other day and this is what I came across..

Now it is important to know that these brilliant pieces are all by 'women.'
I suppose I have been evolving as a feminist.

Things
by Fleur Adcock

There are worse things than having
behaved foolishly in public
There are worse things than these
miniature betrayals
committed or endured or suspected
there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them
It is 5 a.m. All worse things come
stalking in and stand icily about the
bed looking worse and worse and worse.

Television - Anne Stevenson
Hug me, mother of noise
Find me a hiding place
I am afraid of my voice
I do not like my face.

Gray - by Alice Walker

I have a friend
who is turning gray
not just her hair
and I do not know
why this is so

Is it a lack of Vitamin E
pantothenic acid or B 12
or is it just from being
frantic and alone?

'How long does it take for you to love someone?'
I ask her
'A hot second,' she replies.
'And how long so you love them?'
'Oh anywhere up to several months'
'And how long does it take you to get over loving them?'
'Three weeks,' she said, 'tops.'

Did I mention I am also
turning gray
It is because I adore this woman
who thinks of love
in this way.

And this one's the best that I came across as yet.

Men, who needs them? - by Louise Hudson.

Now I go to films alone
watch a silent telephone
send myself a valentine
whisper softly 'I am mine.'

The funny man and his drum

I would like to comment on the title of my blog..not only is it reverting, it is also untrue. On second thought I wouldn't call the man funny and I am not really sure about the drum thing either.

There was a wailing down the street at 8 in the morning. It was one of those days when I forced myself out of bed,early on to let the refreshingly cool morning breeze do its bidding of clearing the clutter in my messed up head. The wailing alternated with the sound of drums and other 'beats' whose origin was hard to define.
'What's that?' I say.
'Don't look..' says Mam.
Obviously I do.
I sneak peak through one of the living room window's upstairs. A forty something ragged wretch doing his version of a jingle on the street, hair flared up like a broom on the loose and white streaks across his emaciated torso (which bore the brunt of his ribs sticking out) making him look like an indie photographer's flavour of the month.
To his waist hung last century metallic apparel that had lost both luster and sheen. His bare clothing included a disarray of not so enchanting colours.

I call him 'funny' because whatever adjective I would address him with wouldn't be of much relevance to him or rest of the folk around him watching him silently with faces that spoke of disgust and ridicule but eyes that couldn't conceal a hint of envy.
Envy? whoa where did that come from? I'll tell you why..its because apart from the momentary insanity that the funny man left behind, he also left behind a certain nakedness of facts. A nakedness of entire perceptions and conceptions that are brain fed to us every now and then. Stark naked..and this we as followers of humanity cannot define.

That was all that was left lingering on the empty street after he left - a nakedness of the facts which was disturbingly sufficient for you to question - all that you were doing, all that you did and all that you once planned to do.

And what's funny is this..it takes a semi clothed wretch doing a jingle on the street to make us stop and stare and look at who we are and our respective places on this planet.

In The End..

In the end that's all there is..
* you end up telling people you hate that they are not exactly 'bad'..(since everyone deserves to know and they just happen to be only ones listening..)
* In the end..you end not loving those you once loved dearly.
* In the end..you end up knowing more about yourself than you possibly could.
(...because it just happened.)

Darwin was wrong, it was much more than survival that crawled through the pages of the book of existence.

1.I saw a lame man begging in front of a knee joint replacement centre. He was more than lame. The lowest part of his body consisted of his torso. But he carried it with much pride, the same pride that a high society lady would carry her pearl necklace with. And to think that the two can’t even be compared. But here in this country they can.
They can stand next to each other and co exist like a slum shack and a Mercedes benz showroom that I saw moments later.

2.What was really disturbing about that street urchin was the way he could squeeze himself out of the traffic amidst angrily glaring lights and venture out towards the lonely and darker side of the city. This I have assumed could only come with grief. A sustainable kind of grief. But grief as such was hard to tell on his already damaged yet content and serviceable body. He carried a poster of an over dressed woman probably a dancer and kept shuffling it between his skinny dirt beneath the nail hands. He walked carelessly yet professionally avoiding gravel,stone and shit. Somewhere along the way when I suppose he’d thought he’d walked too much he dropped the poster right in the middle of the street and detoured his way through the nearby lane and left me wondering why he carried the poster all along the way when he was bound to abandon it. He headed towards the parked cars and peered in through each one of those misty glass windows to catch a glimpse of what lay inside that remarkable invention. He must have been eight – at the peak of his imagination while his feet held him sturdy beneath the ground of hope and desire.

“Is that how long you take to tie your wrap around skirt?”
“Yea..I’m retarded”
“Been that..man I need a new pen”
“I need a new bra”
Stops to look.. Continues writing. The virgin and the whore.
This is generally how our conversations surface on troubled water. Watch the details of everyday spring up, it always gives you something to laugh about.
Now thoroughly discarded I was a retard with a notebook. I sat through coffee shops and disgusting brownies and entire lonesome hours eating away at a notebook and swallowing my ego. I guess with the bigger things in life gone in the flash of a second I learnt to strive on smaller things.

The year that broke down

Morning came too soon. She would have loved to bask in the glory of a soulful sleep, slowly and eventually discarding the contents of the day. However with undone hair and a poisoned skin she forged on, listless and nullified. Sick of being conditionally tired she grabbed her gym shoes and ventured out for a nice walk avoiding casualties that stood her way (the cigarette shack). And then she gazed at how maliciously flawed this aspect of her life had turned into- an aspect where she could think of nothing beyond smoke. She walked through a brown sandy slit eclipsed by a refreshingly gorgeous green. She looked up at the sky hoping to absorb the enormity of it, she looked at the leaf hoping to memorize the texture of it and then she realized that she needed to shrivel up a bit before she could run and take a plunge into the hollow of her world. (Whatever they told us about black holes is true.)


The bark of a soul stuck out of the window, resting his hands on the cool, watery marble surface. The surface bore sufficient space to accommodate a delicately carved Victorian vase and a bland photo frame engulfing a picture of a few dearly beloved people who held a say in his life. The picturesque house lived on the basis of its own minute details and observations. They flourished in an eerie sort of way. They made way for things beyond themselves. He watched his blistered fate and the hands that shaped them. He waited for the storm to shape itself. He waited for her.
She arrived at half past noon. A Picasso painting greeted her on the way to the living room. A Picasso painting and the truth. Imagine...The distortion of a view, of something so bearably distinct – all rendered productive in the premises of a square or something close to a square. There it stood before you as you entered the house.


‘Do you realize that I am at my happiest when I’m with you? Why would you want to take that away from me?’ With that said she left. I had this image of her walking down the street after she said this. Hurrying up, distracted, ignorant of a rare zebra striped butterfly that passed her by, adjusting her bag time and time again, mumbling words of comfort to herself…quite seemingly the image of a well dressed schizophrenic. Do you really believe that a couple of words have the power to change the course of your life indefinitely? Precisely at this junction in her life she’d have liked to believe so. This particular junction where the streets ran into each other mindlessly. Disgraced were the clouds sharing her plight of inadequacy and dissatisfaction.


She was the savory entity of his life.. The crazed aspect of which he would have liked to and wanted to preserve. Sweat trickled down his chest that sultry afternoon. He woke up aware of what he had lost. Was she gone for good? He would miss those staggering “High’s and low’s” of her life that she subjected him to. Wounded pride- all in all a tricky affair. Perhaps he should forget- her peppery breath and the scar on her back, there she stood – his prized possession, unknown to the world and now gone in the flash of a second. Lost.
Take a peek at all the possibilities that lie ahead … they never seem to disappear.
The pickle of thoughts grew rancid with the passing moment. We are all lonely and at the end of the day she might have felt sorry for X had she known that X had crawled into her bed last night teary eyed and sullen. The guy on the phone was right. He’d told her life was beautiful. How? She must have asked him. Look around he must have said bemused and disgusted. Conversations were the castles she dreamt of living in, conversations that you could prick amongst a bunch of bubbly balloons – the bursting of which gave you a glimpse of glittering confetti now all over you shining like stars.


X was well versed at survival – that’s why she seemed so fake. Survival is incidental not an art to be mastered. X had empty spaces that Y chose to fill that’s why I hated Y as well. Darkness loomed over the city of X and Y, this darkness was the shadow I cast. It highlighted my arms, back, waist and everything I was ignorant about. This darkness was moving away. Y thought me to be hollow and couldn’t fill the empty spaces because he couldn’t and wouldn’t fathom the emptiness of the heart. This is when I realized that… men don’t see what they don’t want to see.