Dragons and the drunken Soul

That thin layer of lace that separates my hand and your heart

I will stand snickering, as I will return with a battalion to tear it down;

For I am a fighter, in my mind a fire igniter, but now the calm before a storm;

So, I will speak in allegory and conquer the seas only in metaphors.

Let me tell you of my rage inside, before I spew it in blood;

This thirst for the world started when I found I had a choice,

Oh how it grows ever so ragingly inside my fragile soul

I could not distinguish failures from fallacies shrouding my way, I wage wars of truths.

The nuclear reactions and quasars inside me fool you for the sun;

Light and dark go hand in hand, you will see that playing out in my eyes,

For I hold hands out of impulse, I kiss as keepsake but run when you hand me your heart

Don’t mistake me for a sprinter, dear, I want to stay even the winter,

But its your heart, its scorching a trail across my skin.

You are asking me to just stay, we can build camaraderie, you say.

Oh my silly dear, I have read Kafka, lived on Neruda and breathed in Bukowski

I know “only camaraderie” doesn’t escape into your broken soul through the crevices

So, lets stop calling it names, for I cannot name my feeling,

I cannot fathom the pleasure of seeing the lights hit your face slipping around your lips  -And resting there

When I think of that later, when the stars are high, I curl at the corners and lose my senses

Just tell me, love, what should I call it when it wakes me up like the hand of destiny

My drunken soul is asking for more, but there is lace

I can see your smile touch your eyes, I can see the arms which will house my dreams

But the stigma of the lace is profound and its breathing fire

Let me be my knight and slay my dragons, till then hold on to your heart for me

When I come home, hold me gently for I will be scarred

Lay your heart across mine, for now I will be as strong as your heart demands

Till then hide your heart with your smile and call my name in the dark

For in the dark I am drinking light and slicing demons; when I hear my name I will know                   -why I am fighting

 


photo courtesy: Viria

Deliverance

                   One minute you are working on that report you were supposed to do and the next minute hysteria grips you in a choke-hold. You have lost all sense of reality and you fall into an endless abyss of denial and self-loath! It feels like the worst ache you have ever come across in your life. You want to scream in pain but your vice goes mute.

                   Every possible failure, every possible mishap plays out in your head. You feel the ground trembling, in front of everything you love, you stand for shakes. All the dreams, hopes and ambitions that you built over the years are fading away like the castle in the waves. You can never be that person you want to be, you can never know wat it means to look at a mirror and feel content at the person staring back at you.

                   You want to rage quit this life. You want to end it. You think of all the reasons that makes you want to quit! Failures and mishaps! Ignorance and people stampeding over you! Insecurities and the unending sense of being inept. The battles fought inside oneself, the fake smile that is plasters on and the quintessential humorous trait which comes as a side-effect of bearing a demon inside! Sick of everything!

                   Sick of all the cities you will never see, sick of all the coffee that will never be finished by you, of all the songs that will mean something to someone bit not you. Sick of people and their sheer existence and non-existence! Sick of the grand plans of the universe which seem to make you the terminal miss-out or the scapegoat.

                  That’s it! You decide to stop it now! So during the last minutes, you close your eyes and think of that one person who you leave behind and then the words you want to tell them, your mind blurts out ”Don't quit, keep on fighting” you open your eyes with a start!

                  You want the person, who has stayed by your side through all the insanity that life spews at you, to never give up! You don't want to see them letting go; you don't want to see them back down from life. You want them to win. Wont it be bashful if you assume they didn't want the same for you? Wont it be double standards if you let go now?

                  Then at 12:23 am, by the light of the glowing laptop and the sound of your favorite band screaming “ We are the jack-o-lanterns in July setting fire to the sky” knowing that things get scattered to remind you tat they need to be unscattered by you. Only you can be the knight that slays the dragon or the heroic dragon that saves you the boy from the treacherous wizard or the wizened wizard who does magic to make children happy! In that moment of realization, you find your deliverance.  

The Quest

                         

He always believed he was a poet caught in the body of a cynical misfit who had no guts to shout out the words to the world. So, the era of the poet either never begun or was extinguished as soon as it sparked. So in the noisy room where the lead singer was crooning malleable poetry as punk-ass rock he belonged just for an instance.

                               So this guy wearing a bleached jeans, t-shirt that says “Vagabonds don’t eat breakfast” and with disheveled bed hair was the poet who never lived, one more mosh-pit away from being a hostile punk fan! His hail smile touched his eyes, makes you wanna kiss his upturned lips said the girl who left him for a member of a band he took her to see!

                               So now you know he has loved if not loved in return but he did love! He had tried writing verses which he thought would go well with the way light touched her auburn hair while she slept. He thought of writing a thousand line ballad highlighting how she smelled her coffee, how she never let go of the song she caught till the day was done! But instead he put those ballads to sleep and rested his lips against the nape of her neck. Now she was gone. He had mourned, now he does not need a third shot of tequila to forget her, she is gone with a flick of his memory’s hand!

                               So in that darkened room with jeering music with people rocking and gyrating according to the sound that seemed to swallow the air, he sat with a pen the quintessential heart attack inducing punk rock was his word awakening melancholy. He thought to himself to love an existence with the every fiber of his being, with the burning song was the way he loved and it rested so sweetly and addictive against his heart but to be loved back with the same ignited conviction, now there was his drug! So the port at last penned

“My secrets are burning bright and its blue

We’ll find each other through these mazes, I know I see you”

Acknowledgement : Thank you Viria for that wonderful picture!

He brought hope and She made it last ! - a tribute to The Avatars

                                        As a kid watching The Last airbender was all about the fun. yes, watching bald-headed kid with a Hermione like girl and funny as frak brother travel the four nations was a delight. Then the show disappeared in the midst of all the noise of all the other new shows and an obsession with football. Years after, when the engineering mathematics was too much to bear and when everything around made me wonder if I'll ever find my way I rediscovered Avatar!
                                       As I watched that show everyday,the bald-headed kid was now Aang the Avatar who disappeared hundred years back, The Avatar with mild manners and an unbreakable will and heart! The Hermione like girl was now Katara, one of the most talented waterbenders ever. The funny as frak guy now the hero who didn't need bending to be terror of the enemies! Toph, the blind bandit who did not let being blind stand in the way of being world's meanest, the world's badassiest earth bender! Zuko who taught our honor and redemption lies only within us and it is our own right to choose the path to follow and that past is called so for a reason!
                                          So, this is what the first team avatar gave me! They gave me hope, a reason to always believe in myself, the wisdom of Iroh! They taught me even in the midst of all the chaos you have the right to let yourself go and have some fun! The phenomenal struggle Aang has with himself as he weighs the things he was taught as a kid and the actions he must perform as The Avatar! Katara finding the effects of vengeance, Sokka learning that the minute we decide to outgrow ourselves we start to become powerful! Zuko learning to just let it go! Toph, well Toph is boss as always!


                                          All simplistic lessons we learned from these people, the times when they rose they brought us up with them they stood as guardians! As Aang found his purpose, he actually found my hope locked away when the strange came knocking! Thank you Gaang :)
                                         To know that Aang lives on in the next Avatar, wow that was happiness! Aang, a quiet air nomad boy with gentle manners and spirituality imbued within him was reincarnated as Korra, the ever restless soul with an innate urgency to move forward. patience was a virtue far away for Korra ! Now a teenager, Korra sets out to republic city where she is thrown pits of hurdle after hurdle! Transformation of kid into the woman who is the Avatar is spine-chilling. It was the duty of Korra to maintain the peace and order that Aang brought to the nation!
                                          When she battles Amon she conquered over the division and discremination. when she conquered Unaloq she did the unthinkable and bridged the gap between the worlds , When she brought Shakeer she conquered anarchy! When she conquered kuvira she demolished tyranny! This was not a walk in the park for Korra. Korra was practically destroyed and was forced to rebuild herself from dust, which she did!

                                          The Legend of Korra showcased one of the strongest women ever to be portrayed on television! Lin Beifong, Kaaya, Su Yin Beifong, Asami etc., The treats that The legend of Korra brought with it speechless!! getting a glimpse of the "Gaang"!, the Sokka vibe of Bolin! The actual complicated love web of Makko, Asami and Korra!, getting to see the first Avatar ever, special visits to the spirit world, life lessons from Iroh himself!, getting to see a dragon again! to top all of that all the new bending actions(real world out, four nation in)
                                         So wrap it all up what can I say about The Avatars who lifted from purgatory and gave me hope? what else one big thank you Aang and Korra! Now I know guys. All the good times I had with you guys I never stop reliving it! Because friendship lasts more than one lifetime, I don't see why not!
                                           
                                                       

Word Bender

                                         I shift words around and juggle them into place, wondering if it would make any meaning, wondering if it would be even close to the catastrophe I have brewing within me. Every time I seem to ink down something they are smothered with the same sense of insanity as I suffer from inside. I tried to hide them. The words started getting shrouded by denial and dipped in falsity. So, now I fall back to my insanity to bring back those days when the pages were drowned with the echoes from the place I never called the heart.
                                        Dirty inked hands, hair I let get ruffled by the wind because I am wind within too. A soul that sings fortissimo when you are an arms-length away. My mind always wanted to write your name down on a paper and let the paper drift in the wind, free as your heart, but I never got the details right, you were always hiding in the spaces I left between the letters out of habit.
                                        So, now every night I end up writing pages and screaming on dim-lit stages that You are the melancholy of the beautiful book endings that burn before you finish them. You burn the nights to day.
                                        I fill You up in the cracks and crevices of my broken existence. In the cracks you explode like you hold a million stars alive within you and I hold you in my eyes. I am the fading light up there in the forgotten window, You act like I am shining a beacon to pull you home, but the truth is without choice or regret you will always be the beacon drawing me near. As I play with words now, as I twist them in the air, set them on fire and watch them go aflame I say, "I will not promise to travel light, I travel with a baggage hard to comprehend but for you I will always make space! I will crisscross paths with a million demons again to find the spot beneath the veiled sky in the vicinity of the heart I heard miles away!" You hear every thing I
have to say and as a smile curls around your lips and kisses your eyes, You turn away and murmur "Word Bender"  
                                        

Roar

                                    Small town kid, doesn’t know the city tricks; Called in late from the bench for all the matches in the academy he plays in because he is a newbie from a deadbeat town. Called 'Spaz' because his boots are old and he sometimes seems cold.  Every time he eyed a mirror he seemed to stop and stare, not that the kid was narcissistic, he was looking at the image he was becoming. Hit after hit, rejection after rejection, he had grown accustomed to fighting his way out. The kid was all game.

                                   When he was there out in the field nothing else in the world mattered, it was the ball and the air around him. He played as if the ball at his feet was his heart beating within. When he fell, he rose up even stronger. He ran miles every morning with music in his ears. He passed people, restaurants and cafes. All was a blur to him. He saw something that was invisible to them. He kept running towards it. Sometimes he could see it slipping away, but he couldn’t see himself giving up. He accelerated behind it. He kept it in sight, it helped him take insults and kept him awake at night. This was his destiny.

                                     His alarm blared him awake, it read 4:30, it was dark outside but he couldn’t sleep anymore, he could not think of sleep now. Today is his day, today is the day he showed the world how much he loved this game, it is the day he owns the game, this beautiful game. He put on his sweatshirt from home and headed towards the academy. Everything from then on was a fast forwarded scene his mind kept shifting to the game he is going to be playing, to the chips and crosses, to his goal and to the cheer that will erupt from the crowd, to the surging sense of addiction he will feel towards the game!

                                     The referee blew the whistle for the start of the game, he snapped out of his fast-forwarded dream. He sat in the dugout, substitute he was but he could not take his eyes off the ball, could not stop formulating plans for getting the ball past the defense. He swayed impatient he wanted to be there making the play and grooving the game to his will. But he waited. Then, his time came.   

                                       His coach looked at him and said “you go in 28”. There it was the day he was waiting for. He shook his head and started warming up he denied to speak even a word. Inside he kept playing the match he lost back home again and again like he usually did before he starts to play. The hundred other ways he would have won the match, the thousand other strategies but it was the past he thought, today, he will not let that happen again. In the field he will celebrate the game that helped him survive, that gave him hope and life. Then the substitution was made.

                                            There he found it. In the centre of all the chaos, static and clashes, he found his place. His heart and mind had become one, it saw only the ball and nothing else he ran towards it. He was open ready to make the play. His team-mate passed him the ball. Then, it was a dashing with the wind. He did not see who stood before him, to him they were walls ready to be brought down now. He broke through the defense and advanced this was his day! He kept looking ahead, he didn’t notice the attack, and they stole the ball!

                                            He tumbled down but it foolish to think that he would stop! He moves on again from square one. He did it once he can do it again. He can do it and take the tumbles again and again till he got it right! So, the kid again started to move again. The minute he stole the ball again he was aflame. He was not giving the ball up this time. He slipped past the attacks and cajoled his way through the defense! There it was the moment he waited for! For years this scene he had created in his head and replayed it along with failures and mistakes the way he taught himself and pushed himself. It all came down to this, he took in a breath and crossed the ball towards the goalpost. He stood there watching the football come alive! He watched as the goalie struggled to stop his conviction, years of sacrifice and dedication. The ball was inside the line, it was safely home for him. The kid had no celebration to make. He just pointed eastwards, which was homewards for him and continued to play. He played in silence but to those who watched him he roared!