#prose verse

[navk]

I remember when every breath in your presence seemed like unloading a confession, a ceremonious procession between just you and me and our numerous lessons. The shadow of our adolescent past lingering upon the path, the happy and sad, the good and bad, all swirled up in a mixed bag. We were strangers and lovers and strangers again, and I swear I would sooner call you my friend than never call you at all. Don't get me wrong - I don't need you to cushion my fall. I just need to know that you'll pick up, that you'll sit up and reach across and reply. I'm not saying that without you I would die but without you this life gets a little harder to live and there isn't a thing I wouldn't give to watch you smile the same smile. But even my rhymes are lopsided and I've been trying to keep rhythm with my feet. I always feel like I'm running out of time so these days I'm a little off-beat. Everything is a lazy hazy Sunday and some days I'm confronted by the fact that we had so much to give and still so much to lose. We're often fine with the choices life presents us with, all but when we actually have to choose.

[navk]

That which ails us pales us, rots the insides and fails us. As incessant thoughts work to derail us. Distracts and impales what cannot be measured on a scale. Dreams are that which have us teeming with pride and are sure to cause a certain glint in the eye. But once forced aside something within us has died and the infection spreads to every organ inside. Madness demands madness like a fist demands a foe, and sadness commands our demons so steadily an army grows. With senses dulled and weapons sharp we let loose that final thread, that separates the present from the past, as we tread an economy of the dead.

Nav K

[anchoredinchrist4ever]

anchoredinChrist4ever:

Trusting <3

[kafkaesquedreams]

For You.

When I saw his face flickering on and off like an unchecked light bulb, when I saw his body move up and down, heaving for breath like a ship caught up in a heavy storm, I knew it was his time to go.

I turned twenty yesterday, and I already feel so old; I know that this isn't about me but the day he departed was the day I was born. And I'm glad for it. He will always be in my heart now, so intricately associated with my life, like strings attached to a puppet. 

There were no candles, no cakes, just his pyre. Just him, burning. But he was long gone, anyway. His body had forgotten how to be human, his mind no longer associated the name 'Dr. Dibya Deo Bhatt' to its lost body which in turn had lost its soul.

On my 20th birthday, he breathed his last breath, I am grateful for his freedom, I am grateful to have aged another year as he left his suffering behind.

                                 Part One:

He flickers on and off,

as a light bends to and away from him

like a broken light house,

his body, his ship is guided

towards the storms

as he moves up and down.

Heaving.

Turbulence.

His pressure is on the low side

but it's nothing too alarming.

Stable.

His vitals are stable

But stable isn't always good and healthy.

                                                            Part Two:

I know that he had opened his eyes

At least Once before his death.

I know that he saw my mother,

so brave and bold and beautiful.

Orphaned from the world

but she holds God close.

She doesn't believe in an afterlife though.

                                      Part Three:

The Aryaghat is a strange place,

I felt like an alien crash landing at

a distant planet.

My breathing- erratic

My chest- hurting

My stomach- nauseous

My eyes- sore

My being- exhausted.

This is where everyone comes to die.

And death is the leitmotif of  all life.

What's so leit about that?

Was he bald or did he have some hair left?

Does it matter?

I only remember his eyes

that sometimes seemed to remember me.

                                                         Part Four:

I will always remember how cold it was,

the coldest it's been yet

I will always remember how warm it was,

the pyre kept me warm,

the fire burned

and I cried sometimes

and sometimes my stare was fixed,

not an emotion in my eyes

I will always remember the day I turned a woman.

Twenty years old

and knowing that

I, too, would die in a Paush

like Hajuraama had

like Hajurbuwa had.

But perhaps I wouldn't have the blessings of an auspicious Monday

floating through the air in the form of Bhajans and Dancers.

Perhaps.

[kafkaesquedreams]

I am standing on the precipice of assurance. I have spend years wandering on in an endless vast abyss that to my tiny, insignificant self looked like the prelude to infinity. But now,  I see a light flicker. It is bright and unknown. I know, I've finally got everything sorted. No matter the past, no matter the withering flowers, and the blunt knives. The future is here, and it is here with an audible sigh of relief.

I go on.

But I was too lost in the light, in awe of its existence. I walked on away from the edge; I forgot that there's no ground below my feet.  In my idolism of everything that's good, of indemnity; I forgot about rationalism.

I begin falling, as if something was pulling me downwards with all their force and hate. All the darkness in this infinite universe cannot stop my screams from echoing to every dead star out there.

Dying is audible, it is vulgar. Death, on the other hand, is a frail creature. It is silent. And here I am; never dead, only dying.

Dying.

I'm dying.

I've been dying for so long.

The darkness.

Everything's dark.

The light that flickered, it's not there anymore. Stars die too. Lights die too.

But here I am.

Dying.

I'm dying.

I've been dying for so long.

The darkness.

Everything's dark.

But here I am.

   Written by: http://kafkaesquedreams.tumblr.com

Artwork by: http://ksaurus.tumblr.com

[dagwolf]

NaPoWriMo #15

[I am working with this bit of prose verse. I wrote some of it awhile ago and am working with it and some other bits that came from it for my novel and so it's going here, as #15 in this month's 30 poems in 30 days. If you've read my work over the last ten years via blogs about poetics, the market, aesthetics, politics, you'll recognize within it common themes that pop up in my work all the time. So forgive me the formal slip into prose form here--anyway, I think it belongs.]

Persistence in spite of myself Once upon a time, we walked together hand-in-hand or so I would like to write about a moment we spent walking holding hands. Our walk once written is, now, not simply an act about which I can tell a story, construct a narrative, or produce a tone--“one sunny walk” riffed into sound--it is our walk written as a potential for a series of possible walks forming a permanent recollection-record and an image that has a concrete body and implied mind by an author who must either be inserted or removed from the walk before it can be seen to have been walked, before it is permitted a position within a discourse of other similar and dissimilar walks.



We may have experienced a walk, you and I, but I am only a stand-in for a process comparing our walk to others and then always already together moving into the city and its ambivalently twisted avenues forced into perpendicular streets.


Once upon a time, we walked together hand-in-hand. Our walk is, now, not simply a walking but a writing about the walk and the writing means much more to other authors who have a stake in how my recollection should be represented justifying not walking nor recollecting particularly remarkable walks nor even my claim to authority but their own use of walking for all tomorrows’ walks. And beyond the possibility for our once ordinary walk together under a blank November sky, their potential remarks sit clumped together matted about a body of decomposing works outside of which a young man sits picking out the most interesting, like-minded dags of memory's maggots. He determines and examines not the walk, day, or unique perspective but the similar, recognizable, even trite bits of content that narrative matter elutes from any walk to become a determined walk and time to become a memorable time—that day to be not one day contemporaneous and intended alongside all others at some time but a day similar to all the days occurring at that time and the next and that time again.



I tap about our walk suturing in moments only we shared, resisting nostalgia. But there it is already: a desire for authenticity leads to recording already shared moments as renewable moments. We read the walk as a stand-in for a real walk, as a pleasurable and interpretable text with no need for an author, to be experienced only as it is read, known only as it is pulled out of forgetfulness into common knowledge, as it is compared to a formal walk, all explicitly refusing our one seamless blank November sky.



Our walk sells the idea of a walk. A walk would be nice, wouldn't it? The setting sells the idea of a real position. Let's get back to that place where we once belonged. The time sells the idea of a particular time. That day changed everything. And the fiction breaks down into structures of language and the authors work to find meanings in phrases and the critics derive meaning in purposive translations. The only boundaries: the margins and persistence of historical artifacts that remain disordered and overwhelming before me giving them over to words. Yet, I endured a working out of our walk, your hand in mine slightly wet and an approaching night stealing into the sky from under a white autumn day. And I remember your calm response to my eager question, Still.

[text-onlynopromises]

floorties

i often wonder, my dear, how simple the world might have been if everybody bowed to each other as we passed by.

i suppose that would make it a little like 90s japan, but appearances can't be helped. just imagine; you're cycling down the road on a little red bicycle, with your arms to the wind, and everyone bows down to you as you pass.

of course, if you happen to stop because the drizzle is turning into the faintest inklings of rain (and it's cascading down your top which is white and therefore turning a sodden clearish fabric) then you'll have to bow to everyone who's come crowding to see the cyclist cycling against the flow of traffic

without a care in the world.

but the sun came out - look -

so it's time to cycle off again, and bask in the glow of everyone bowing to you, until you're safe, at home, and on the news, where the cameraman took a brief peek at the floor before showing you, your hair on fire by the sun, arms spread out like the posing poseur eagle pursuer, legs a blur, feet a blur, cycling madly down the hills and streets.

(somewhere in their heart, everyone will claim you monarch, too.) (butterfly, vain that you are.)

there's always beautiful drawings on the floor. there are weird people after all, who spend more time looking at the floor than up at the world. but no one castigates them for it. after all - everyone has experimental phases, right? (but of course there's a little discrimination, a little prejudice. it can't be helped. people who like to stare down are just born that way. unnatural. witchcraft. floorties.)

so, monarch, will you forget about your friends, the floorties? who gave everyone who bowed to you beautiful pictures to look at? maybe you can decree that the discrimination might end. or maybe not. humans are funny, that way. (they might just auction off your little red bicycle and your hair, like fire, and toss you into the dumpster with yesterday's fad.)

[dagwolf]

dagExcerpts: Moving To, Moving From

Of Tulsa I remember most about the house June bugs clapping against our small front porch, our cat Stubs snapping them into his greedy mouth, and the Arkansas River lapping at our door during a grotesque flash flood.  I remember, too, the apartments before the house and a smiley-face yellow plate with mac and cheese one night, carrots or peas the next.  I remember our pets, all strays.  Five years ago I would have told you I remember my first kiss, getting hit in the mouth with a baseball, a broken arm, and tornadoes.  Ten years ago, suspension chemical imbalances rebellion swimming pools.  I recall not memories but conjunctions—movements and homes from Connecticut southwest to Oklahoma without apparent strategy yet simultaneous, similar, and concurring threads all wrapped up struggling to get me to where I am now to keep me put.  Conjunctions  because copulative—a large family, ritual, religion, late-emerging masculinity, girlfriend after girlfriend, submarine to first house.  None of it my own.  All of it shared.

(2004)