Dissolve

I am Al-Kahira, the comparer of nonsense and flowers.

I am grateful for my stupidity, admitted easily, yet I am concerned with specific details of style as I sit here in rags.

By circumstance not by choice this shrub has blossomed: by choice and not by circumstance this life has been kept plain.

I made an effort and found stuff to ignore, leaving rusty strings unstruck.
I neglect the spectacular and overlook the apparently important with deliberation.

I've waited aeons for the reversal of my interests: Now life has become the joke and the sweetness and hilarity of my own thoughts have turned into a point of fascination for me.

No matter what anyone tells you: I don't belong to any creed or sect, culture or race, nor to any period in history.

My only qualification is the age of my soul: I own three hillside palaces of quiet pre-dawn moon sound.

Humiliation is my clothing that I wear to sit and bark with the dogs. I disconnect like dusk and most likely no one will bring flowers to my grave.

I am ardent without deed and I am information zero, unimportant iridescent: Grand Palace of Mercy.

Till now I stayed in one place not avoiding you: now that the traditions are beginning to dissolve, I put on my winter coat and walk away. Business done.

[This is one of those unforgettably beautiful posts I've ever come across on a blog. Yes, the post, I am saying, in its entirety. The choice of words, the language, the emotion is already replete with beauty and poise and the picture chosen by this blogger has made it perfect for me and I am not going to make any amend. Although I've read it in other places, this is the real one for me : http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2007/10/walk-away.html]

No feeling is final

"Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final"
- Rilke

"Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Hobbes, do you think human nature is good or evil? I mean, do you think people are basically good, with a few bad tendencies, or basically bad, with a few good tendencies? Or, as a third possibility, do you think people are just crazy and who knows why they do anything?

Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson

Where you have landed, stripped as you are.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

- Adrienne Rich, 'From an Atlas of the Difficult World'.

Tribal workers

"The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined, for as long as possible, to minimise personal commitments in order to maximise the options open to them. One might see this as a sign of extended adolescence.

Eventually, they will be forced to realise that living is as much about closing possibilities as it is about creating them."

- Thomas Barlow

An extremely pertinent thought, put into words, meticulously so. Shared by a dear friend, Madeeha. Read the full article, here:
The Financial Times : Tribal Workers

I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.

- Jorge Luis Borges, “Boast of Quietness”

"You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement"
--- Roberto Bolano (The Savage Detectives)

Colors

When your face

Appeared over my crumpled life

At first I understood

Only the poverty of what I have

Then its particular light

On woods, on rivers, on the sea

Became my beginning in the coloured world,

In which I had not yet had my beginning

I am so frightened, I am so frightened

Of the unexpected sunrise finishing

Of revelations

And tears and the excitement finishing

I don’t fight it, my love is this fear,

I nourish it who can nourish nothing,

Love’s slipshod watchman

Fear hems me in.

I am conscious that these minutes are short

And that the colours in my eyes will vanish

When your face sets.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I am Right Here, I am With You, and I Love You

I'd come across this Post title on Asha's blog : 'While there is still time'. Although it was about something entirely different from what I had expected it to be, the ring of the title gave me a strange and peculiar sense of security. Maybe in another mind I'd dismiss the 'cheesy-ness' but from where I am dangling now this is what it seems to me like : Three sets of words. Easily conjoined. The sheer simplicity pleasantly warming. Where has simplicity gone? Why are we so afraid? Of so many things? Of so many such simple things!

"Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them."
— Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)

It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not.

Jean de la Bruyere, essayist and moralist (1645-1696)

The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

I need not go

I need not go
Through sleet and snow
To where I know
She waits for me;
She will wait me there
Till I find it fair,
And have time to spare
From company.

When I've overgot
The world somewhat,
When things cost not
Such stress and strain,
Is soon enough
By cypress sough
To tell my Love
I am come again.

And if some day,
When none cries nay,
I still delay
To seek her side,
(Though ample measure
Of fitting leisure
Await my pleasure)
She will riot chide.

What--not upbraid me
That I delayed me,
Nor ask what stayed me
So long? Ah, no! -
New cares may claim me,
New loves inflame me,
She will not blame me,
But suffer it so.


- Thomas Hardy

Unfinished autumn

I'll help the roving eye,remember:

Its one colour
After its soul is scattered-
Distilled into heavy orange
Deep lake-blue
Then , uninterpreted,
Still, darkness.

Until I open, helped by dull landmarks,
Like a street - Gravel, mud, concrete,
Sometimes bougainvillea on the sides
Or plain endlessness without a chance for a detour.

The trapped-song of that bright green tree
Bustling in the crowd of its own leaves
While others melt into elegant gold flakes
Obliging, without the music.

That it was I, a terrible conflict called 'us'
Who lived.
And then stopped .............
......................................
[Awkwardly]

Upon us all a little rain must fall

This is the springtime of my loving - the second season I am to know
You are the sunlight in my growing - so little warmth I've felt before.
It isn't hard to feel me glowing - I watched the fire that grew so low.

It is the summer of my smiles - flee from me Keepers of the Gloom.
Speak to me only with your eyes. It is to you I give this tune.
Ain't so hard to recognize - These things are clear to all from
Time to time.

Talk Talk - I've felt the coldness of my winter
I never thought it would ever go. I cursed the gloom that set upon us...
But I know that I love you so

These are the seasons of emotion and like the winds they rise and fall
This is the wonder of devotion - I see the torch we all must hold.
This is the mystery of the quotient - Upon us all a little rain must fall