there are no metaphors left now
for love. everyone has had a share
from the local policeman in his uniform
to your parents and the little girl
with plastic shoes who disturbs you
in your contemplation of this

when i approach you my mouth
is filled with this emptied word
when i open to say it the darkness grows
inside me are spaces vast and forlorn

from nothing i articulate something
this is the last metaphor.
from being to non being
i give birth to love
every morning as you rise
as soft and as quiet as a star

you are scared that i will lose myself

in a monotony of hours and tea cups

like a shell of a leech i will tumble

in the wind and never find repose

you ask me where my day goes

my day

i wash my underwear

i watch blood pool between my thighs

i eat a plate of chicken

my mother betrayed me

my mother saved me

my lover called me a liar

my day was full. 

i have not lost myself.

i know i have of you left three hundred and sixty five
odd days and nights in this city to retrace my steps
here where my body has been watered and the hot sun
long has folded up inside of me

and other things too such as the traffic which always
frustrated you and the death toll which is rising and the
number of deaths i could have had hit by a blue hyundai or
a shabby toyota pick up truck

i am as at heart with this city as the orange men collecting
its grime and language that pounds its way into consciousness
i inhabit this city as loved furniture in an old home, a chair
moved from one room to another restless and returned
with every new season.

i inhabit this city as those things broken. toilet bowls and
transformers toys. inconsequential and severe.

eating jaggery after many years

i would like to embrace you with my mouth again
when everything is burning, this moment is a window
to a time when my mother would say there is no peace on this earth
and i would respond you would search heaven no longer
if you could have one taste

he sold it in mounds the color of my skin
he heard the sound of my heart and the beaded gathering
of perspiration beneath my arms
for one taste my body would bloom.

on a road my fingers would taste as warm as the sweetness of tears
the reluctance of money with the sun at its brightest
you dissolve on my fingers.

my mother would say it will not always be summer
again, again. for now my mouth is full and my senses rapt
i will close my eyes. rekindle my blood.

i am certain my heart was misplaced
that the clouds spanning the skies are my membranes
that airplanes in their certainty carve lines of despair
over the landscapes of my tissue

i am sure that one day a tornado will arise
from the grim city and its populace below
and funnel my flabby heart into cotton candy
which children will eat, smacking their lips
and swallow with decision

i am certain there will be nothing else of me
but a sticky sweet fragerance which they will
carry steadily into their future.

i have your books and their pages
which means i have your fingers
and their hands

i have one nose happening in your ear
which means i have every word
you can ever taste

i have in me a wild throbbing
which devours me at night

i have not you. man who has
never seen me

you: a ship setting sail
portentous with soul
scattering recklessly
over a calm sea

this ship with white sails
relieving the dark water
from sullen night
pricks of starlight

in a lighthouse somebody stirs
eyes heavy with ocean
and familiar hands

do you remember that day when

beside the beach you showed me

(and i showed you) and later we

sat by the waves and your nails

were that pink color you paint

only when you are in love-- well

cameron, today you died in a fire

by the beach and i watched your

house go up in flames and i promised

to myself that i would write to you

every day and every day until you

hardened at the center and in years

two boys would play in the sands

and find the shell of my words

which kept you alive like this

imperfect and round like your elbows

like all those features i will never

touch again like this hardened

and gentle and perfectly white.

medusa's laughter

i have five heads five minds

i am a tree from a seed

that fell out of a dirty mouth

i have five mouths

five heads five minds five mouths

five eyes i have one hand

and five fingers

one finger to scratch one head

people must watch me as i walk

down the street with all those legs

and all those heads and all those

mouths

at night i cradle the smallest of them all

i whisper stories to her and tell her to sleep

nobody can quarrel with you today

i tell her with my third mouth

while the second licks her hungrily

she falls asleep, they all do

and i am alone.

i dream different things

i dream a feast with bright lights

jellies and wineglasses

and five heads

on top of five plates

blind man's meal

i've found myself wondering about the sensation of indulging in the most sensual experiences without the power of sight (from 'baser' things like bodily expulsions) to eating, listening to music, and so on...consequently when i stumbled across a picasso painting the other day, i was moved and found myself returning to it again and again without a clear reason why..

of course the painting is problematic as it may be romanticizing the austerity of a blind man's life, most probably inflicting his own feelings of what blindness may feel like, yet i think the beauty of the image is, despite the artist's inflicting what he feels blindness feels like, that his vision of it in itself holds something important, some kind of romantic excess and fullness of experience. for example, the wholeness of the bread in his hands, these objects, the water jug become all encompassing, the bread is not a brown flaky spongy-looking thing but rather a solidity that occupies a space in his mind, in the same way, everything is assorted not by sight but by feel, by the innerness, essence of it. and there is something so large about this, the concavity of his body expresses this, as though the weight of the world overwhelms him in some crucial way ... and the juxtaposition of that with the meager bread and water and the concave shoulders, it is an underestimation, a retraction, a withdrawal of the blind man because this superfluity of feeling can only be expressed by the sense of shrinking away from it, keeping yourself guarded against the awe -- and watching, the onlooker, the painter -- he can only see the shrinking because that is how he feels ...and that is the only way in which he can express the magnitude in these colors, on this canvas.

traveling

i find it impossible to prepare for a trip all at once. i need time, long lengths of it, give me a year, tell me we will make a trip in a year and i will spend every day of it, learning to leave the place i am in, so that i will have made the trip already before the trip has begun, so that i am always traveling, so that i don't have to begin traveling --

how is it possible for a place to invade you? i can picture the landscapes of bangladesh in my eyes now. the cold sweaty windows, the hordes of people, my quiet relatives. my cousin with pale skin and dark eyes and a disapproving mouth. my little cousins who have grown up to become strangers, the suitcases we will take with clothes which i don't normally wear. there is such a nakedness in traveling, an absolute vulnerability, to be exposed to some place so entirely new that it becomes like a sound reverberating in the hollows of your ears, so full like a bite --

every moment has a different texture. waking up to a different sunrise, to different sounds. every moment is so pregnant with the alterity of the life i normally lead, the patterns i have learnt to sway with.

yet when i return, everything will taste brighter and sharper. all this dread, and all these words will have shrunk into wisps of smoke, like a dying fire, full with secrets of the burning.

memory

more and more with my struggles with memory (some one who does not think she has a bad memory but will tell people she does because it appears she does) i wonder if forgetting is some crucial ritual that humans find themselves perplexed with. of course there is so much which burdens a human being (language, time, other humans) but memory might be the one most devilish gift-curse. i saw a film today morning (wild strawberries) the protagonist can only live when he indulges in his memories, but in order to indulge in them he has to make a point to forget them in his daily life, to live austerely and remember them, all at once, in dreams sharp and potent. it is strange that i should see portions of perfect sense this week as well, which deals with a deadly contagion which robs people of their five senses. it is only when they are about to lose a certain sense are they overwhelmed with the sense - for example, before losing one's sense of smell, the characters are flooded with memories sharp evocative - memories which are triggered by smell.

it's such a cliched topic i think, 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' or 'hunger is the best condiment' but there is something so intrinsically paradoxical and truthful about it - forget sadnesses in order to Live, but one can't Live unless they have experienced the sadness. and how can the act of forgetting ever be on purpose? or can it be? your dog dies, get a new one, knowing that you are doing it to forget therefore you aren't really getting a new dog but getting a new-dog-which-isn't-your-dead-dog -- and perhaps, then, you want to make it clear to yourself that it isn't your dead dog you see in your new dog and so you recreate the feeling of missing your dead dog, so you look at pictures to remind yourself -- and then consciously 'forget' it again as you play with your 'new' dog. such a delicate and tricky balance, remembrance/non remembrance in the same breath. or it is all a giant puddle of memories, and the human brain as they say can only hold 7 things at a time -- knowing you can only hold 7 things at a time therefore you are holding far more

i was trapped, too (the way you might have been, reader, reading this last paragraph) with the old professor in wild strawberries and with the two lovers in perfect sense. it is most obvious that the deadly virus is no more than some psychological construct (metaphorized as a deadly contagion) but more importantly, it was self inflicted, it has to be, one has to create this feeling of knowing that all senses will be gone in order to appreciate these senses, and yet yet all of this is shown with the utmost incredulity, shock almost that the senses are going -- and it's this shock that is fabricated in the same way that getting a 'new' dog is fabricated, it needs to be play acted in order for the game to work, in order to really feel sharply, feel strongly, appreciate senses, or whatever it is that you can only appreciate once you have lost it (be it your body for an aging person, so on)

and even this, this old man in wild strawberries looking at this picture you can see how infantile he looks on his arms and knees, mouth slightly open in a garden (a symbolic womb perhaps) revisiting his childhood because to have reached this age, every other sensation has been experienced and re-experienced to the point of numbness and he simply wants to feel it all over again, feel it newly, he must now (symbolically) return to the womb, be born again in order to experience.

where does that leave us - self conscious human beings with something as slippery and monumental as Memory in our palms?

a new year

-i've begun to collect my hair in a box named Paul. the box is cardboard, black with golden lettering and used to hold colorful macaroons...they were immensely sweet and decorative. my hair looks wispy and uncanny clumped together in there shadowy like a bird's nest. it occurred to me that if there were a fire, i might not save anything in the house but this box of hair. most objects are just as fleeting, just as perishable in the long run.

-i'm speechless and wordless. language can become such a tricky monster, and allows me to reveal only the most petty information, what i ate and what i wore and what i plan to do but nothing else. not what there could be, not the thoughts at the second layer, that part of the mind. that he holds tight, indulging in my thoughts hoarding them for his private uses. for the time being i will assent to my tongue not being mine.