counting the dusks

" I've heard newborn babies wailin' like a mournin' dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love.
Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn?  "

And suddenly it all made sense - the senselessness of clinging to cocoons of familiarity, the coterie of compatriots and yearning after my lost grails.
       I'm loving the city more than ever, the ever-present symphony of honking cars and rumbling trucks. the curve of the bye-pass lights like a golden necklace that had fallen on the dark ground. torn from some ivory neck ...
       i want to read all books, listen to my infernal friend's poetry, eat at Mocambo and the dessert at Flurys (like the old days, remember?). talking glibly of guevara, Gabriel's Room and guernica. i'm remembering the two of you more than ever - in every scuffled tread, every dusty turn of the road and the pangs of solitude raked across the bared breast of a lucent evening sky. and others too...
the heady laughter that seemed to last forever, the thoughts that soared with the swelling tenors. the firm belief that i had only to spread my arms before the lusty wind to streak into the azure vistas. and of course lemon-tea had in the Messala-BenHur style.

 this is all about me now. as it well should be. i felt that by gathering the scraps of countless broken lives i would have a whole one to live for myself. As if the shards of a vase can hold a bouquet of faded lilacs wilting in this heat. i forgot - we don't get lilacs here so often.
    i have tried to live solely on the gasps of forgotten evenings and rare gusts of glory that passed away as swiftly as a high-school summer.
    i have aimed for the sky and now must contend with the treetops. Correction: i had aimed for all the skies in every world whose gloamings had warmed me.

maybe it was worth it.

   but even today . . . i cannot but feel a better man taking a detour through Middleton Row. a senseless homage to the ghosts of lost yesterdays.

"Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair.
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.
Come in, she said, an'
I'll give ya shelter from the storm. "

temples

she had made me cold coffee. while about the three of us fell the swift dusk of wintertime.
it had been excellent. the coffee.
now almost three years ago.

Flights of thought

There are many reasons to write.

  At times the soul bleeds itself into the words; a catharsis of sorts. In the pangs of a sudden dusk and the scrape of the wind over a deserted hearth. A time for the failed poets and stricken painters. Yes, I remember having written of them.
  And then you have those heady days when you're drunk on the rich red blood of youth. When the fires of life flare up at the myriad -isms (rationalism, humanism, socialism, secularism...) and ideologies. The old words mouthed by young lips.You look into the depths of an uncaring Providence and shout out the "I am here!" of Mankind. The fire of a thousand stars about to kindle the voids. Or so one thinks in the heyday of all those new dawns and glorious beginnings.
  The majesty of a sunset - as if a burning ship was carrying some mighty saga into the immortality of the blazing western sky.
 That strikes the flint in the mind and heart - to 'seek, to strive and not to yield!'
 There are the flashes of sunshine and the swift succor of raindrops. The true joy of relishing wild strawberries with fresh cream in the company of friends.

I remember having written on all these and more. In the numbness of solitude - the shambling walk down oh-so-familiar streets, talking in my mind to the ghosts of the past . . . living backwards to the best days that have passed us by. Through the world-weary pessimism of teenage ("pessimism is realism" and other such maxims, lol.), the biting sarcasm and humor of maturity . . . Musings has seen it all. From Dylan, Cohen, Dostoevsky to Pratchett, Gibran and Khayyam and to de Sica, Bergman, Ray and Kurosawa . . . the ideals that turned out to be childhood idols.

 Today ... today I write for the sake of writing. For the only sake that really matters - mine. To earn the respect that matters the most. Mine again. A mind wrestling with amendments, laplace transforms, blue eyes, fish eyes and the other beautiful names that have had me kneel at their altars.
   Everyone who walks on two legs dreams once of flying. I've fallen once, but I cannot resign myself to walk. Fly I will, for fly I must.
Soli bene gloria.

Summers that last forever

 The early morning is about the only time I can brave the terrace in summertime. Got up at 5 a.m. Presumably to get some work done but ended up playing Jedi Academy til Marka Ragnos' duel. So much for resolutions.

On a whim I unearthed an ancient music cd from the high-school days. "Best of the best" written with permanent marker in a schoolboy's scrawl.
The thoughts and images were always there at the back of the head; a sorta L2 cache.
Absentmindedly humming 'Seasons in the sun'. The tune, the cd and an undefinable something melting away the years.
  Xavier's Class 10 . God! An eternity and then some more.
       Shuffling through the songlist. The then familiar obsession with Dylan. A hard rain's a gonna fall. Following the Tambourine man through the smoke rings of my mind. The joy of a first six-string and of those summers that never seemed to end, of those that waited forever on Mama's porch.

 Westlife was a Xaverian favourite for graduation farewells. Since time immemorial. I wished our junior batch hadn't tried to be the exception. I can remember even now how we smirked and nudged in class 7 at "pretty girls are everywhere..." and thought pointedly of Middleton Row.:P

 The CD itself (like most things in life) has a story behind it. My fiery friend AT (&T) was wooing lady Silver with serenades (yes it came even to that). Problem: she didn't have mp3 playback on her cd player. AT had already burned the mp3. At his behest I made a couple of audio CDs out of the mp3 and kept the latter for my own.
    And it seemed then like we'd solved Schroedinger's equation or something.
   I'm smirking now. Sarcastically. Because that's the only safe emotion to let myself feel when thinking of the ghosts of summers past.
   And with the old songs bringing back old thougths, time it was for a long-neglected blog post.