tonight a girl stands on a bridge.
the midsummer breeze dances around her curves.
it begs her to come play.
her heart beats steady.
her gaze is motionless.
the changing air steals a whisper.
"we are moving into the house of Aquarius"
under the bridge a man sleeps.
in a few weeks he'll turn fifty-eight,
but he doesn't know that.
he hasn't had a birthday celebration in years.
he hasn't had anything to celebrate in years.
the bridge is home now.
above  him,
a girl is rediscovering herself.
a girl is rediscovering her fear of heights.
she looks 25 light years above her, at Vega.
in a way, she thinks, she is like this star.
she is about midway through her life expectancy,
but her light died a quarter century ago.
the man sleeps soundly.
a smile is spread across his face.
he is dreaming of his dinner,
a footlong sub.
extra olives, just the way he likes it.
it was his first meal in several days
but tonight, his stomach is full.
he has come to like the grease on his face.
it shows he has survived many challenges.
the hardships have only made him wiser.
the girl, she minored in astrology.
she was fifth in her graduating class.
debt lurked deep in her mind.
it polluted her every thought with
reminders that she was not in control.
now, she tries to justify her current position.
on the bridge.
looking out at Lyra, partially hidden by clouds
"nothing I do will matter."
she reconsiders.
she recalls an anecdote she overheard
on the subway, or somewhere:
"when you're dead, you're dead for a looooong time"
she smiles. kids say the darnedest things.
tonight she curses her 'lucky stars'.
nothing the girl does will matter.
tonight she will become a woman.
tonight she will give  herself to the wind.
the man will find her in the morning.
the man will chuckle to himself.
"they always make it down here,
one way or another"

I lost myself in boredom
Lost myself in the bitter and sour patches of life
Ripping myself free from the death grip of the vines that hold me down
I can see the sun shining through the leaves and thorns that cover my eyes
My sad, torn aching flesh screams out as the rain softly falls on it
Stinging the gaping open wounds as I search for reconciliation
As I slowly stumble back into my reality
Rediscovering my inspiration, surprise and happiness
I have come to my crossroads once again
Not looking back, I proceed on my path of hope
Living like I am dying and regretting nothing I have done
I may be scarred from my battles but that does not mean I have lost my virtue

The clock gets me.
It comes to me in the middle of the night
Pulls back the sheets and says, "Hey fucko."
Then it lifts open my sobby wet sand-encrusted lids,
It knows when I'm trying at sleep, pumping quarters
Like I was swallowing yawns, sometimes I try to squint
Harder and take a dream to the next level, whatever
The next level is. It's like Friday night when I wanted to go
Out to do something, whatever something is.
Because I know that if I don't I'll miss that thing that's so
Important that if I were to miss it the clock wouldn't come for me

Again.
And on Tuesday's when I'm knotting a dream around 2 o' clock
In the morning, my web-footed adventure, say, killing your

Boyfriend, say
Fighting the Nazis, say,
Rediscovering that you sent nudie pics to
That rando guy we met in that club that lives
in Prague-
I throw the clock at the ******* wall.

Because who knows, I make the bed wrong
Or maybe I don't cook right, or look right, or
Smile the right way at the right

Time. And you start thinking that I have to die.
The bane of my existence is an imagined feat in your
Walnut-sized brain, slowly numbing us while we're
Supposed to be, say

Listening to the rich, Oxford voice of
David Attenborough.

Instead you're thumbing through that index
of CVS cashiers, just trying to find a scruffy face
To flip your digits to, your homemade justification. It becomes
A feat, an unjust cause of mine to

Get it right, that imaginative and artificial bit you've
Been sewing up Monday twilight.

That's when I go out and jaw your sister, somewhere between
A smirk on your face and a bit of anger at the end of your sentences.

Packetfuls of some morning long gone
Celebrations of some relations long lost
Appraisals of youth long withered
Dying of some laughter long forgotten
Yellowed photographs newly rediscovered.

As if after the hesitation of two decades
They’ve resurfaced out of a rusty old box
Freshly etching old patterns, repainting innocence
A revision of life… what if….what if not….
Some strange spirit of myself smiles back at me

“Is that me?” leading on to “Who am I?”
Existential discomfort set alight
The sleepless questions- twisting and turning
Memories in my head- swimming and swirling

- Vijayalakshmi Harish
     16/06/2007
Copyright © Vijayalakshmi Harish

When you break five beer glasses at work
do not berate yourself
imagine yourself as a young child
she is with you for this instance in your life
would you be as cruel to her as you are to yourself?
You have as much right to let thins shatter at your feet as she does
Do not take this as a mistake
Take this as a subconscious act against the addiction that held you parents in its ugly hands for years
2. If you want to find your joy in speaking to strangers
then allow it
hang out with the boy in Hawaii at 3 am that you just met
discover that his leg resting on yours feels like the warmth of the island
even in the depth of the night
realize that you do not have to miss the cold skin of the boy who was your first everything
you are a girl who needs warmth,
and you are a girl who can find this warmth in others
3. I’ve learned in the past month that the best way to figure out who should be in your life is to love yourself harder than you ever have before and watch for who resents it.
4. Do not apologize for your emotions
You are human
Do not allow someone to tell you that you are lesser because you are angry
Because you are sad
Because you just don’t know
5. Teach people the acceptable way to treat you by reciveing nothing less than what you need
Wear your self-love for all of them to see
Scream it from the rooftops
You are a goddess
You are not to be underestimated
Sharpen your eyes so well that a look will keep them in line
But do not forget to keep your softness as well
Do not harden your heart
Just because they fear your fire does not mean you should douse it
Do you not realize how many other people it keeps warm?

this is how it is.

lover of the moon, red nail polish, and my body
poetry passionate
anaemic
patient listener
book worm
creature-infatuated
exotically home made
gutter-student
in-toe walker
ignorant genius of nothing and everything
insignificantly significant

this is me.

I love to look far in the distance
to discover new things in existence.
Exit my own body, my life.
Fall prey to rude world.
Gaze upon myself.
Graze my wild imagination.
Dwell into darkness, find the light
and rediscover my life.

“You betrayed me, Darling” Jack said quietly. She had seen that look on his face before, it was a shocking sense of...disappointment. “Betrayed you? What are you talking about Jack? I love you, just you, ALWAYS you! You know that, what’s wrong with you, love? What has made you doubt me this way? Who has put this into your mind?”, Samantha was shocked that her husband would be so easily swayed from thinking that she was the perfect woman that he had married.

“What do you mean WHO?” his voice shook with barely controlled rage, his voice raising by the second, “You are that one who made me think this way! You've been withdrawn SWEETHEART, you don’t love me like you used to. The only explanation is that there must be someone else.”, Jack sounded as if he was so sure of himself, he had such conviction in his answer, and he did not expect the incredulous snort that came out of her mouth as her temper finally broke and she began to yell.

“ I've been withdrawn! I've been! What about you, DARLING?”, she spat out the endearment as if it left a sour taste in her mouth, making it sound like an insult, a curse. “ You've been so distant these last few months, Jack! You thought I wouldn't notice! You thought I couldn't tell! I could SEE it, in the planes of your face, in the way that you looked at me. No longer with adoration, but with calculation, or with consent, as if you simply are required to love me! Jesus, Jack! I’m not BLIND!”

Her husband sighed heavily and rested his head in his hands, “Please stop talking, Sam, please. I can’t bear to see you this way. You’re doubting me, even when I've been nothing but faithful to you.” his voice was barely a whisper, throat hoarse and raw from the screaming match they had earlier. She gasped, both at his words and his tone. She tried to keep herself from flinging herself into his arms and apologizing, trying to keep from seeing his side of the story. She knew what she had seen, she was not blind, and he knew it too. He had always been the rational one, always able to talk her out of her anger, and he knew it too.

“**** it Jack! I can smell it on you! Don’t tell me it isn't real!”, she paused to incredulously shake her head, “I can’t believe that you would lie to me”, Jack began to notice that her anger, her passion, her fire had faded. She sounded sad, defeated. like she was...giving up. “What do you SMELL on me, doll ”, when she didn't answer he began to get angry and his voice began to rise. “Hmmmm? What could you possibly smell on me? Be quick to answer”, she shook her head and clenched her jaw. Her answer seemed to be hissed out from between clenched teeth, “I smell whiskey, I smell smoke, you know what I smell most though? Perfume, it came from her, didn't it Jack? Because I’m sure as hell that it didn't come from me.” Jack shook his head and continued to be adamant in his denial of her claims.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about Sammi! We’re fighting about nothing”, she began to sob uncontrollably, Jack was heartbroken by her sobs and tried to pull her into his arms, but she wrenched herself away from him, “Nothing, Jack? NOTHING! Be honest with me, how many are there? Three, Five, Twelve? I don’t even know you anymore, you aren't the man I married, you aren't my Jack. My Jack never would have done this to me! Who are you? Why do you want to hurt me? What’s happened to us, Jack? Sneaking behind each other’s backs-”, Jack’s head snapped up as he cut her off, “So you admit! You have been sneaking!” Samantha slowly shook her head and sighed in frustration, “**** it, Jack, that’s not the point! Do you even love me anymore?”, he didn't answer, her anger was blinding and she was so close to crying, “Do you! Is there any part of you that’s still mine?”, He frowned.

“All of it! All of me! I’m yours Sam”, she shook her head as she walked out the door, “No you aren't, Jack. You aren't mine” Jack gently put his hand on her shoulder, turning her to face him and stopping her from exiting the room, “I am. I’m yours!”, even he was close to tears now, the quiver in his voice was clear. Samantha shook him off her shoulder, “Then why did you cheat, Jack?” Her cold stare focused on his face, he looked at her and he was crushed. He looked heartbroken, but she answered her question with one of his own. “Why did you?” She shook her head and the look on her face changed from determination to disgust.

“I didn't! God, Jack! I loved you faithfully, fully, with no regrets, NONE! Guess it wasn't enough was it?”, He sighed “Give me another chance. I really do love you, Sammi”, He used her old nickname, hoping that it would rekindle a little bit of the old affection between them, no dice. She looked at him freezing him in place again with her cold stare, “Love is a game, games are for kids and whether or not you are one, I am done with this game. I forfeit, you win. Congratulations, you lose everything. Hope you had fun playing. Playing me just like everyone said you would”, Jack looked wounded his eyes filled with sharp pain.

“Please sweetheart, a second chance?” He was crying now, his tears streaming silently down his face. But she didn't turn to look and her response was curt and final, “Second chances are for those who deserve them, and don’t ever call me that again”. As she began to walk away Jack grabbed her arm and pulled her close to him again, “fine, no second chance, aren't you going to tell me that we can still be friends?”, Samantha shook her head in disgust and pulled her arm away from him. “Let’s get something straight Jack, we are not friends, we are not acquaintances, you will not speak to me after this. We don’t even know each other. As far as I’m concerned Jack, we haven’t known each other in quite a long time. Find someone else to ruin Jack, I’m already broken beyond repair. Goodbye Jack.”

As Samantha left, the tears streaming down her face were mirrored on his. However, their relationship, like Samantha, was broken far beyond repair. Even with time it will not heal as most things would. But instead, might fade, leaving both with an empty feeling that they will try to fill in their own way. By indulging in vices or rediscovering themselves, but at least then, there would be no pain. There was no doubt that that this was a good thing for them, because it was the time for it. Samantha remembered reading somewhere that there was a time for everything, and leaning against the closed door with her tears silently streaming down her face, she had not a doubt that this was right. They were not meant for the forever that they had promised each other. So each would have to find a love that was.

Have our Scottish hearts
Shrunk in the fields
Of foreign rule
Are we not greater
Than the fears
****** on us
Have we become mice
That scurry and hide
Only tempted out by cheese
Laid in many traps
Are we content
To live in the shadows
Of our neighbors ambition

I am not saying
Lets bury our minds
And drown in an
Optimistic ignorance
For we are all grown up
And know the risks
Are our abilities so short
And our hearts so weak
That we may be bold
Over so easily
Can we not find the strength
To fill our wobbly knees
Yes we all carry fear
Like all free men
But like William Wallace
We are not defined by our fear
For we stand tall and proud
And our honest hearts
Speak to us of Scottish potential
Much greater than fear

Do we not under estimate ourselves
Have we forgotten our heights and depths
As Scottish potential lies
Imprinted in the skies
By the Scottish highlands
And our emotional depths
And resources remain hidden
Undiscovered  in our many
Silent locks scattered
Throughout our land
And is not our toughness with an
Almost stubborn hardiness not found
Abundantly within our  heather
While golden eagles glide
A silent over seeing eye
Who breaths a Scottish clarity    

For I cry as rich men
Still seek to steal
Our many golden eggs
From the governor of the sky
Our most gracious Golden Eagle
So let all protect
All that is precious in Scotland
And let us cleanse our
Minds in the clear highland air
As we purge our hearts
With Scottish beauty
And release the stags
That will drive out  the
Many money lenders
That stifle our being

So let us all join together
As we are bound in the eternal
And not by pen or sword
And as we rediscover ourselves
We find our united voice
Of Scottish freedom

I scribble on
With a half lobotomy;
A radar seeking Hell by looking up
And another dictionary
From another time and place;
An alternate timeline
Reaching right and left
As well as fore and aft;
The beard of a ******
And naïveté too;
Undiscovered depths of emotional manipulation
Unseeing, unthinking,
A new old structural familiarity
To abduct and probe
The time-honored, vacuum-sealed
Ineptitude of ideology
Whose meat is sweet
But suits the skeletons of standardized educational theories
Like a pair of jeans at age eleven that you expect to grow into;
In hope of justifying
Overuse of monetary resource
For the sake of bonus states of mind;
Scouring the depths of discarded everything
With hooks catching on to all the similarly forgotten names
Who live in fear of obscurity
Clinging, not unlike insects
To their sixteenth minute of fame;
Finding in myself no way but out
To understand that which lives inside;
With disregard for any thread which weaves past me and takes no hold,
And loathing for the ones that do but unravel before the eyes;
Lightheaded, ending any sense of continuity
When, prostrate in the comfort of another tapestry
I stand abruptly, let my dreams be drained from me through tendrils
Like the passing of a temporal existence;
Drinking in the dust and glue of crowded bookshops
In fear of losing inspiration
To the insatiable jaws of my consumerist natural state;
Rummaging in a bargain bin
In search of someone to tell me, “Stop!"
With heads in clouds and bodies in ice trays,
Stealing lines of logic and lyric,
Throwing down and hacking into
Elemental bits which fit into my own vernacular
Sacrificing beauty for originality and vice versa;
Choosing idols idly with the tides
Of knowledge and of art
Rising and falling without fail
Never apparent and never blurred by motion;
Searching for a style like an odd-numbered jean size;
Finding greater inspiration in waves of unopened mysteries;
Following examples laid by unsuccessful fictions;
Learning ethics only from the prologues of ****** novels,
Unsuspecting victims snuffed in interesting and lurid ways;
Letting technological distraction detract from the projections of psychological complexity
Which I, from atop the high horse of my own pretensions
Pretended to embrace;
Committing massive acts of thievery, fraud, and infinite lethargy
For the sake of juvenile, illegitimate art forms;
Seeking other seekers who exist autonomously
For the sake of personal independent credibility;
Leading unsuspecting, overreaching, overeating, understanding, undemanding,
Too forgiving, not forgetting,
Victims of domestic warfare
To a loveless watery grave
For the sake of my own loneliness;
Patronizing every segregated buffet
With courage enough only for a small taste of everything;
With the flavors of the day swirling around
For me to shoot them down
And pin their carcasses to elementary school walls
And Mormon tool sheds
And nature centers
And all the forgotten places of summers past
In the hope of rediscovering
Some old buried treasure
Be it wondrous or worthless;
With the uneasy insincerity of a rodent who pretends to understand a city;
With adopted methods
And repeated thoughts
And ideas which came to me in waking dreams of my own retirement;
Sharing, for a captive audience,
The formidable giants which
Inform our common denominator
Searching through myself for only the most indecipherable
With the fear of being understood
And the fear of being ridiculed
And pretensions of some preternatural predetermination for greatness;
With acceptance of predisposition for obscurity,
The cost of the inundation of the new airwaves.
The series of tubes that feed us intravenously
With information, information, information,
Having killed God and left material validation in His wake;
It could be that new gods are born in the minds of the innovators,
Those wonderfully wealthy
Whose social structuralism
Was a beacon to us all;
In the darkness of an architectural anomaly
Where lights extinguish as my body lies dormant
Alone and abandoned
Only by my own subversion;
Confined ever to a convolution of passages
While above me all my peers still carry on;
Overstaying welcomes
And letting emotionality
Color conversation
A sicklier green,
A green of a tree only just sprouted,
A green of a new recruit,
A green of an inexperienced schoolboy
Faced with the daunting and timeless act
Of copulation;
Somehow taking in the sights and sounds and smells
Of advanced mathematics
Even occupied, as I am,
With explaining my actions
Most eloquently;
Devoting myself to another cause,
Another, another, another
Always relaxing my grip by losing focus;
Desperately hoping not to let my fellow travelers
Lose their innocence
While I reluctantly, dogmatically
Keep mine on a leash;
Always keenly aware
Of the universe of worlds
Beyond my control,
And even my understanding;
On the increasingly frequent
Intrusions of risk
Into my significant reality
And the iota of explainable truth which guides the motion of my body but most frequently my mind;
Questioning the meaning of all words
Without thought or coordination;
Considering another restful journey
To clear my mind of human language
And in its place acquire thoughts and emotions from the street;
Without foreseeable direction,
Malice aforethought
Or noticeable signs of critical reaction
Giving birth to litter
Forgetting articles
And floating my sense of time up the Ganges;
Taking only seconds to counter the possibility of
Accepting more responsibility for myself;
Complicating matters with an interesting or bitter goodbye.