run

Like huge udders, heavy and sweet, they hung blocking out the sun.

The wind was a trembling sheet of light on the water's surface, as I sat on the red brick walls around the old 'ghat'. The dry moss, brittle crusts of erstwhile prosperity, prickly against my thighs. The shallow stretch of water in front of me rippled hysterically, quivering in anticipation.

Away in the distance the horizon disappeared as the wind started to caress the dark udders, and then seduce them, and then they broke sprinkling their load in a mist of engulfing whiteness. the water started dancing in ecstasy, singing, prattling, breaking into thousand droplets on the surface as they came.

leap now. off the leaf and into the water.

off the wall, on to the ground and run ... as the wind rises and rushes, pregnant with drops of manna that wets everything... the water, yes, even the water, the ghat, the brick wall on the edge, the dead moss with seeds of hope hidden in their brittle skeleton, the dust, the land, the yellow grass, my heels, my shirt, the back of my head.

wet.

old

over a dead tree
the lightning screams
my friend's home.

-----------------------------------------

the water's edge
a rainbow curls
around my heels.

-----------------------------------------

her mascara it ran
with the mist of early morning
the night in its last throes
spun the darkest hour
trickling from the pool
in her eyes.

missingness

glyphs.


lost words.

when a people lose a word, they lose a a vital link. a link that fractures a sentence, creates a disunion and starts a void.

in that void dust gathers. In there, a darkness gathers, a limpid pool of black gravity. It pulls upon the adjacent word. And the word adjacent to it. And the one next to that. The words collapse like dominoes in a reverse motion. into the limpid black pool that was once a word. a sentence slowly becomes a pool of swarming melting words. created by men and women and their gods. words that the three sat together created so they knew what they were talking about when their paths crossed. so they knew where they were coming from where they were going, what they saw and what they were feeling. new feelings were given new words. the gods and people sat and pondered - and then they agreed. these words went, into that little black hole of enormous gravity of the lost word. the first one. the one that got lost first. the one that broke away from the sentance of the gods and men. that defied the predestined order and its meaning, that questioned its purpose. or perhaps, it just forgot. it forgot, fell asleep and got lost. or just wandered - or maybe it wondered, about the possibility of its meaning. and thus wondering how much more it could mean, the word lost itself, lost its place among other words and fell away.

words are these like reservoirs. of thoughts, dreams and ideas. they grow. with time they get fat with meaning. they are buoyant and soulful. they burst at seams with meaning, pregnant with thought. and they vibe with other buoyant words eager to consumate - eager to give rise to a new meaning.

then how does a word like that fall asleep and just get lost and melt and become black ink that forms a pool that just swirls and creates so much momentum and so much gravity that it blots out the sun, the wind, the light and even the whole thought and meaning that was once so pregnantly buoyant in it. how does a word become a hungry mouth eating other words and becoming an ever widening pool of thought on the way out to a far far world.

memory. words are memory. and they are forgotten. and More often that not, they are forgotten at the right time. when you need them and the ideas that they stand for. the gods and their people were too busy creating new words and new meanings and new pillars and new wheels and new fires and new smokes and in the hurry to create so many new things that they were busily arguing the names of - they did forget one or two of the old ones. the ancients. the first ones. the ones that came after the the ones that couldn't be spelt.

the ones that couldn't be spelt were tricky. and they were larger in shape and possibilities. now, they didn't get lost or forgotten. they just went and became pictures. they just eluded the people and the gods one day. they posed like they were images, hollow and bright and with no meaning but the obvious one and the gods and their people bought right into that.

the pictures went and sat in the middle and let the words do all the work. and initially there weren't any words. so, like in all people and gods, one or two earnest pictures went up and started to help on the side. soon they seemed to have a purpose and meaning. they lost the point of mystery. and when you lose your mystery and vagueness to a large extent - you are ready to become a word. so then a few of these pictures on the periphery started to become words. they, joined with other lesser pictures just like them, were sentences and they happily danced around the enigmatic pictures.

the poeple and gods became happy.
they felt they had reached a vital moment. they got pre-occupied with creating more words for the new world around them. and more pictures to go with them or maybe the other way around. and like we saw before new words came and the old ones just went off to sleep. and well, lets not go repeating the same story again. though that is sort of the point.

the point is, that nothing that is said here is new, or nothing that's not been said before or called a name or drawn a picture of. almost everything has already been said and repeated. it might have just been forgotten though, lost like a word - but has definitely been said or thought or imagined before. and so when you hear it, or read it - it breeds a sense of fondness, you 'like' the 'sound of it' because you know it somewhere deep within. it rings a bell though you could not have possibly said it in a conscious moment, at least a conscious moment from a conscious time that you consciously are aware of. or may you could have too, and someone would have felt the same ring. this is the immense nostalgia of a loss.

of forgetting a word.

and remembering the meaning.

but can there be a meaning and no word for it?
yes, a meaning that's left when its word fell through the spaces in a sentence that was long forgotten. a void that pulled the other words and their stories into it. and you cant stop it. this meaning that you cant define is this feeling that you cant deny, this sense of knowing that you cannot surpass yet you have no word for it. the gods have long left. and people have long fallen into the habit of forgetting. they have created immense vocabulary to call a world of things and world of names. and yet they have this vague feeling that they are missing something.

there is this underlying sense of looking at something that you know but cant quite tell. and familiar old feeling.
of knowing and recognising. and yet...

anyway, the words kept getting eaten up. from the side and from the front. new cesspools of dark wonder, new mysteries were created as fresh new ideas were born at the other end of our ladder, we moved farther and farther away from the truth, that was kept in a jar shaped like our first words and our first picture. the pictures remained pictures, all their mystery lost and all their meaning spoilt by the mundane. and the words collapsed into meaninglessness, in an endless chain of one lost meaning eating up the next, and became an ever widening mystery in our souls.

when one stands in the middle of the ruins - freshly dug or deeply researched, the strange familiarity that one feels, yet denies, the sense of loss that one cannot accept and the immensity of the 'missingness' that hangs all about - all began when we forgot that first word. and with the words, there went the stories, the rituals, the people, the gods. we forgot how it all began and with who and we forgot how it came be like it is today. all was forgotten, all was lost.

its ironic that the words today survive as fossils of the people whose meanings had fallen into the black vortex of their forgotten words.

just a glyph.

just an unicorn seal.