Cannabis

Plum like fruit bunches hung from the tree. Orange dots against boughs of green. Big old tree this. With its poison fruit. Passion fruit. Which could kill, hides venom in its pulp. Squirrels know that, wouldn't even smell it. They would stay clear of fruit laden arms. Migrating birds that would perch and catch breath, if ensnared by the poison fruit, would drop dead in a moment. Dead birds. Dead meat. No perspiring traveler would rest in its shade. Only scavengers built their nests on it. Only they found worth in coming back to it after picking from bones. The poison tree, apart from this, was a beauty. It bred orange flowers, of the size of grapes, with tiny petals spread all around. And filaments from the central pod, sprouting, ending with drop full of pollens, the seed that would regenerate. They said, the flower was not poisonous, flowers never are. Petals shrank in the sun and the flowers died, falling down slow dancing in the air, forgetting about gravity. They formed a bed beneath the tree, a bed of flowers, this one. A man and woman, lay there, making love.

Dominatrix

She wore her kohl lining the upper flap of the eye, the lower flap nude. Always on top, she was a dominatrix. She had a small face, fluid with vital emotions, her chin being their epicenter. You couldn't say, if she was thirty-seven or forty-five or older. She had stopped aging, because she had never married, never given birth. That way, you don't grow. You stay static in the minds of some strangers as a cynical spinster, and in the minds of the rest as an accessible mistress. 

So, she had stopped aging. As if, she was standing still in time and you were younger than her, then you would get to her age and then after gradually age and go senile. Though she would stay the same, preserved like a specimen, with a mere few creases of skin under the eyes, hair carnally dishevelled, that true smile pasted on her brown lips, and the smooth flow of words from between them. Peace had become her.

But it got lonely though. Sometimes. For her. When she fixed dinner for her old father every afternoon, all by herself in the kitchen. Did the ghosts of her married sisters come by, or the laughter of her nephews. For company? No. So, she looked for it everywhere, for people, to know, hear, listen to, spend time with. All that. She had thousands of people in her phonebook, you could never fall out of touch with her, she would call you. Text you, mail you. Over just about anything. Late in sleepless nights, she went to those dangerous websites where she met psychotic men, who would utter the weirdest of things, things that were disgusting and pleasing in the same breath. 

The tone of her skin got darker with each summer, her mind seasoned like wine, retaining bits of bygone youth. Retaining the hush in her voice, the polish on her nails, the crystal between her legs. Holding on, as the rest of us, abandoned. 

8

A few weeks ago, I completed eight years of blogging. And I hadn't paused to notice it. I had forgotten. Neat excuse. But I had. Very few occasions in life call for a celebration. We are all sinking into veritable depths of monotony. And discarding the right to be special. Every day.

Once I had thought, my writing would take me places. Now I think what places, and laugh. Is it even possible to take anyone anyplace, ever. Aren't we all static, merely enjoying the illusion of motion. So much oxygen is getting us high. My writing may not move me a millimeter. My mind is fixed, frozen, glued to its labyrinthine biases, against the act of motion itself.

So yeah, amongst the shiny success of others, I may finish up a reluctant loser, a hopeless mediocre, a screaming for sympathy, self published author. Hah, yes. My glorious future, ladies, the one I had been told and coaxed to believe existed has now perished into oblivion. I am clutching thin air, in my fist.

I am not talking apocalypse. Or glass half empty. All I am saying is that life doesn't always pay off. Mostly never. And we continue to survive, as beings of angst.

Switching between phones, booking tickets, losing breath, consoling, cooking, being consoled, murmuring, driving, buying, stealing, loving, unloving, sleeping, waiting, waking up, catching breath, sighing. Writing, counting years, writing, counting years. 

Flame

I haven't stalked him for such lonng. I feel weird. When I now do, look at the old pictures. Seems like an era ago. Like a very long period of time, has elapsed, and  I was in a coma. Life doesn't add up. Love doesn't beget love. Never, infact I am personal opposer of that. Fact. Word. So, we aren't where I had propositioned we would be. But mere, old flames. We are the two comical characters in any middle aged woman's memoirs of love. Affairs that failed to work. Calls that weren't answered. Answers that didn't have questions. Dates remind me of him. Not the exact ones, my crammed memory doesn't allow me that liberty. Nada. I remember him in rough approximations of those. The second week of June, the first of November. On the thirtyfirst of December. You know. All that. Like the lost stanzas of a love song. The miffed strums of guitar. Like unrequited love. When I loved him, and then when he loved me back. But not just in the adequate amount. He was inadequate, grossly in that regard. A man's ability to give love, is a wee bit more important than his amorous prowess. We both failed actually. Hah. That is why, sometimes I feel a hole in my soul. And a lot of couldbe's surround me. Like float around my head, revolving in circumferences of ellipses. This and that. It's not regret. Nada. Something much inferior in degrees of human emotion. In severity. There is no heartache. It's a mere wave of mild hopelessness. It will pass.  

*Nada: Spanish for nothing. Nothing for Spanish.

The Flyover

Is it true that everything comes a full circle? That one is indeed adequately punished for each of their misdeeds as is rewarded for the good ones. It did feel so, some years ago. Not anymore. It doesn't feel like. Bad karma bites you in the ass, alrite. But the good one, never begets glory. May be I am greedy. Or, could also be that people paint rather a hunky dory picture of their lives, more than it is. And I am only a shabby mirror of the truth, not its empowered alterer.

I was thinking on such lines, and walking on the flyover. This one was old one, much older than those which have now been built. Its footpath is made of adjoining slabs of concrete. On which an insane beggar sits on all day. He has a mess of hair and is constantly drooling. Though you would never stop by while driving on the flyover and drop a coin in his bowl. There was nothing for him there, not even shade, yet he wouln't budge. And at nights, you would never see him. Probably he went down to the railway platform to sleep on.

I wanted to see the sunset from above there, since forever. An orange ball falling into a crucked skyline of broken buildings. All I wanted was to take a walk on it in the evening and let my mad thoughts consume me, that's the best way to go. But in the many years that I have lived, and the many more years that I have been alive, I have never had the time. Yeah.

About two years ago, I stopped writing that string of stories on lovers walking and talking. If you know what I mean. A few months after that, I found love. Thank Gods for that. And after that charm passed, I forgot to write. Me and the written word. Ladies and gentlemen, forgot each other. If you know what I mean. Now suddenly, instead of thought, it's a sea of incoherence that's consuming me. And I am thinking about that beggar again.