tres cosas sin que no puedo vivir yo

collecting poems

Maintenant

Summer Wine

Waiting Inside, Hoping For The Rain To Abate

I love the monsoon
- don't get me wrong -
but waiting inside, hoping for the rain to abate,
I can't help but dread it sometimes.

I can't help but
stand still in fear and awe of its mighty force,
or sulk at its persistance
while simultaneously begrudging it the welcome
it so unnervingly well deserves.

It's been pouring and raining
and falling buckets of water -
as if the lady upstairs were washing out her window grills with a vengance
(she tends to do that every morning
even when it's already raining and pouring outside)
and the verandahs are so full of water by now,
that I wonder what the inundation must look like
on the tracks at Dadar station or
down at the local subway.

People must be cursing the rain, I think,
because these fair-weather folk
are like fish out of water in a flood.

You would imagine that they could be better equipped for a downpour
(seeing as it rains like this every year)
and would be carrying the latest trenchcoat fashions in their briefcases
or even wearing neat wellingtons Made in China,
but the truth is,
that even in July,
the poor souls manage to survive water cuts on their kitchen taps,
only to be swept away by the tide around their compound walls outside their modest homes.

It's an ironic, evil, adorable little jester this torrential rain,
and it's already made a fool of most of us today,
although waiting inside, hoping for it to abate,
I can't help but wish that it would let me stay in
just a little longer.

Expressway Watercolours

I've picked up my watercolours again.
These are from the weekend in Khandala

11:47 am/pm

July

the monsoon makes a certain habit of me.
like a sunflower that follows the likely daily path of a star,
the rain in july
resounding in the music that crawls into my digital player
around this time of year
is incredibly light,
entirely frail
and when it finds its strength,
beats down a sloshy track to the door of my wood-panelled room
which, in between the pensive prints i've collected over time
and the neat grids of calendar art,
looks like its been through a lot.

I've such relics jammed into the corners of this space
that, swelling in the humid moisture of the month,
they fall out of place
and tumble into a neat file standing on the edge of my softboard,
trying to dry off and dust away the flakes i've let them accumulate
as punishment for giving me so much grief
and so much more silence to anticipate.

july is always like this:
a shaking, twisting, awakening mass of memory
that comes out of hibernation just to remind me
of everyone I used to know
and everything I couldn't be.

Silbador

My dad whistles,
so I whistle.

I whistle when I'm home,
just arrived, freshly exhausted,
spent -
after a day's labour or emotional dive
into the depths of some dark,
awkward place
infected by the shadows of adolescent beings
that have never been my friends.

I whistle as much as to exhale,
as to inhale the scent of an embrace,
of this place called Here
standing on the welcome rug,
in a smile or a kiss or a hug,
in a space without fear.

I whistle
to shout out where I am -
in this corner
or up those stairs.
I whistle
to say I'm alone,
and you've caught me unawares.

I whistle
to say I'm on my drawing mat
so why don't you come in
and we'll have a picture or two to share

roomful of water
bubble-full-of-thought
if i break through the surface,
will you hear me shout?

Fireflies

So then I gave 'em all the finger

An Old Sunday Afternoon

Mi Casa del Mar

Auguries of Innocence

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

...by William Blake

For a morning well spent

Meet your candidate

Keys

I carry the weight of the world in my bag:
the keys to different locks,
rooms, doors, armarios, hearts -
all jangling inside the pockets
of my camel leather satchel
protesting at what I've become:
this shadow of a person who used to be open
before the world decided
that she needed to be put away
for fear of tainting the others,
for giving everything freely anyway.

In memory of a certain lotus who died unecessarily

Across the verandah