After reading/listening to Rochelle D'Silva's "There Will Come A Time"
I woke up to a dream,
which we call reality,
eyes wide open, senses intact,
But who can really differentiate?
I opened my wisecracking eyes
to a photograph of father
grinning so wide, I mistook him
for an uncle I thought I’d forgot.
Prints of the past are like
yesterday’s prints of stale newspapers,
you don’t hold onto newspapers for the news
you hold on them to clean car windshields
and protect shelves from grime,
for chat-pati namkeen and peanut containers,
and then you thrown them away,
which probably get recycled;
but the prints of the past stick, no?
You cringe at the things you said
to the right person at the wrong time and in the wrong place
or five other permutations of the three.
You close your eyes hard
and frown while remembering the times
that you slipped your tongue mispronouncing
words which are in your second language,
or said things that you thought were funny,
but no one laughed.
Prints of the past are like laptop kept on for days,
just because you’d opened some tabs days ago,
contents of which might be unnecessary now,
but your mind’s stubborn to read them all.
*
Poets love the past,
it’s the foundation for words,
pain and agony, and also love,
probably forgotten in those browser tabs.
Without eyes looking out far or behind
without a past and a future,
we might feel hemmed between two walls
closing towards each other at the speed
of retracing your steps back towards
where you’re now, in the present.
What now?
When prints of the past and e-zines of the future
come to seize the end or even the journey for that matter,
when you find yourself extricated from the
vicious cycles of love and lust and and pain and hope,
when any ideas or thoughts seize to entice you,
you resort to memories that don’t make you shiver,
a delicious rub against a sack cloth to relieve an itch.
The crash of the milk bottle racks on early morning errands,
the shutting down of back doors of the bread vans,
or something out of time, something that is funny
and embarrassing that you can’t broach about it.
How seeing someone snorting back the mucus and then gulping it,
makes you nauseous but when you have cold,
you do it yourself, because the handkerchief is far,
and you'd rather not use your hand, "Eew!"
Or memories of an old friend, which is a song
by Angus and Julia stones, but also a song
of blissful senility, it’s been so long,
that you don’t remember her face,
but you still remember what it felt like
to play outside, hand in hand, panting.
Home is where the heart is, heart is remembering.
Or instead, you look at things with a blank slate,
where there’s nothing to left to think about,
you shut your eyes, get lost, probably get found.
By someone on the roadside, staring at you with concern,
perhaps that person is you.
Repeat the vicious cycle of cob webs -
love and lust and pain and agony, hope and thought,
intermittently, and then find words to write about it,
before you can’t anymore, again.