November dust

Pardon my dust

this evening, my

dear.

It is late autumn

and those ancient dreams,

childhood hallucinations

have been waxing,

winking, causing

chaos in my darker places

The leaves, 

brilliant red

are teaching me to 
be enchanted 

by bare November days

again

On August

August could never be a good parent. Too many mood swings for someone so old; too hot one day, rainy the next, windy and cold the day after. August could not even pick out it’s own clothes. August stayed in bed for far too long, self indulgent in a way that can only spell disaster; ice cream for breakfast and concerts at dawn, nights out in the town and marijuana on weekdays, missing work because it was gloomy at 8 in the morning.
August was one half terror, and one half exhilaration; searching for a grand way to live while writing throwaway poetry. August wanted to be a thing of fevers and enthusiasm, but couldn’t help reaching for the nearest cliches. Always arrived with good intentions, arms loaded with self help books, to-do lists and neon highlighters for each day of the week. But August was a compulsive liar and a stress eater. August cheated, on more days than it was allowed. The sheets were soon on the floor, the dish pile growing taller on the kitchen top. August was the first detected, labelled case of bipolar.
Lived in a house where the floorboards creaked, unsteady on it’s feet and weary of being fragile. Clutter was not fertile ground. Told to be stronger, grasp a firmer hold on reality; it went looking. August started digging, tunnelling its way to the core, expecting to find its promised piece of gold. But August is gone now, lost in the depths of oblivion, it’s spirit stifled. And we keep visiting its grave, year after year, returning to make the same mistakes, looking for the famed treasure; find meaning where perhaps, none ever existed.

A private thunder

As the speed meter shot over 170, she noticed a storm brewing on the horizon. There was a particular shade of gray, gainsboro, that never failed to take her back to memories of road trips in another time, another season.

They would have been driving for hours but as soon as the sun was shrouded in the shadowy affections of big, dark clouds, playing hide and seek with tall, dense trees; she would stir in the back seat, head resting on someone's lap or the other, and sit upright, delighted. She loved those road trips to distant places for the mystery of these moments. She loved to imagine the car with a flat tire; rain pouring so hard, it got difficult to drive; a fallen tree trunk, a blocked road - any number of reasons that would leave them stranded in the middle of nowhere, on narrow, dusty roads without any end in sight. When she would voice these fanciful thoughts, the fellow passengers would laugh nervously, for a moment playing along with her little fantasy, and light heartedly threaten to stop the car and let her out. As dutiful parents, they would follow the drill of questioning her on how she'd find her way back home, make her recite all the emergency numbers they had her memorized; never asking 'if' she wanted to be found. Maybe this was for fear she would reply in the negative, and they would have to ask themselves what they could have possibly done, to have raised such a curiously morbid child.

Twenty two years, later, some deep part of her soul still rumbled at gray skies and the pitter patter of the rain against the wind shield; her vacant emotions clambering over the ruins of loud car rides, the nest of dawns that had flooded so many mornings, unfiltered and reach the place where the sun had no business in the sky. She would find herself jarringly, ungovernably emotional yet again, a deer in headlights. Such was her wasteful, indulgent relationship with the battered, terrible sky. The seductive allure of getting thoroughly lost, making the familiar strange again and walking on forever into the horizon.

“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.” 
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

A wasted ode to hope

I have been trying to write about the kind of book I want to write. I want to write about a certain type of girl. She has such high hopes from me that everything I try to pen down about who she is, seems like a lyric disappointment. I have waited too long to bring her back to life through my words, in the naive assumption that some day the black mantle of silence around her entire being would lift of its own.
She requested me, you know, after the systematic disintegration of her thoughts; the slow disempowerment of her perception.
I have no choice; I hope you will bear with the limitations of my language.

I know that she wants to write stories about the hardest things she's re-learning to say, leaf by scattered leaf. She sits down in a chair that faces the sun. But it's the time of the year when the sun still feels too cold, and she clicks her tongue at the passing day; disapproving even while a funeral pyre burns in her mind. I know she's a sad girl and I want to give her a story that fills her wheelbarrow with all the joys a girl her age ought to have known. She grew up faster than I intended her to.
It's the 13th of the month; (it takes a while to persuade her from her moods) and she feels brave this particular Monday morning. Brave enough to let me welcome you, my make-believe reader, to her empty estate. The call of the void; pick any seat in the shadows and they will whisper to you their histories.
In the daylight, she is an echo of a long forgotten memory. She is more blue than orange, she speaks in season. But on afternoons like these, when everyone else prefers to stay indoors, I let her conquer the narrow streets. On days like these, I let the poor child howl.