Heartbeat com[m]a

The other day my heart ceased up but my brain was alive.

I was sick of being told how to breathe mid-sentence. So when we had a five minute discussion on whether menu should be followed by a comma or a semi colon because no pause just wasn’t working, I said a quiet fuck you under my breath and later that night bundled up my dying imagination and made away on an escaping thought while my heart lay deathly still and cold from missing a familiar thrum.

I always become Jewish when I’m on the run.

Like Anne Frank.

And so, heavy with a deep sense of loss from leaving behind a dysfunctional heart and a significant chunk of Europe in the 30ies among other things, my bundle and I fled past people and places, skirting at the edges of memories like thieves, to arrive at a familiar scene.

My aunt’s old house in a hostile neighbourhood where people hung their children’s bums off balcony walls and flung turds into enemy houses over messy water wars.

There I arrived at the door of a friend’s studio-plus-house dressed in a white blouse and green sari. I’d never wear white with that green. Never. So I already knew something was wrong.

As soon as the door opened, there he was. Duck. Sitting squat in a shocking shirt of clumsy pink flowers with deep brown shadows, while some people I didn’t like sat around and made small talk with him. He didn’t even look up to acknowledge me. Just sniggered with everyone as I passed them by to go to the balcony, because I had business there.

Turns out, after a long journey I wanted to take a dump and the best place for a pot, as we all know, is an open air balcony because then you can pretend to your house guests that you’re just going out for a smoke and no one will ever suspect that you need to lose a load, except of course vicious neighbours.

There I was, dodging intrusive neighbourly stares by artfully draping my sari around the pot so that it looked like I was squatting for pleasure and no other reason, when I noticed Shane Warne and a few of his buddies draw up in a car to move into the house next door.

A pressing sense of unease not entirely unconnected to my exposed bum wormed its way into my belly as I watched this scene unfold. Shane Warne and his band of boys were loud and unruly, their energy infecting the air so rapidly that soon the whole neighbourhood looked like it was going to explode into world war three in which atomised faecal matter vaporised us off the earth – ashes to ashes, shit to shit. Meanwhile the house guests were deciding on an orgy of some sort. But Duck, ever hesitant Duck. I could sense he wanted to say something on the lines of an apology as I struggled to clean my bottom discreetly, when someone gave me farkin’ CPR.

Custard

Last night Robert Downey Jr. fell in love with me, and he pranced about my head causing me excruciating bouts of heartache, because he’s such an imp.

And K, who’s married to F, a philandering Dutchman said that I should be patient, because he does love me, doesn’t he?

I s’pose so.

So I hung on every word and every glimmer in his sparkling eyes, while he hopped in and out with dizzying frequency in leotards and a billowing white shirt stuffed into a tiny waistcoat, claiming with each fleeting flit around my brain that he truly madly did care for nothing else but my ROI-ignorant head.

That’s how much I adore Robert Downey Jr.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking. About things. Variously. And how introspection is a deeply committed job that requires nothing short of 24 hours each day for any sort of breakthrough. Time that I can ill-afford because, hello, there are meals to be worried about and then eaten and then worried about again – because if your digestion’s screwy then introspection is a far thought residing in near about the 10th foot [or if U’s to be believed then the 25th kilometre] of your large intestines. But my digestion’s okay.

It’s just that I do have a job right now, and however little time I try to devote to it, there is the inevitable sitting-it-out at my desk, slamming drawers officiously, sharing MY VIEWS across the desk with A who ignores me as much as she can and tapping at my keyboard that I’m contractually bound to do.

So, much as we’d like to believe that I spend hours pondering the depth of my navel, as S, recently America-returned, says – not of me yet, though – I’ve a lot else to worry about. Like the singular strand of grey that I found lurking in my eyebrow.

That’s serious. When did the post-40s tip toe around my eyebrows?

But this isn’t what’s been occupying my thoughts lately either.

Meandering. That’s what’s been bothering me. And the inability to focus long enough to construct a legitimate sentence because bastards are just so much easier to produce.

Okay so this came out wrong. No really. Don’t judge me.

It’s just that I like the word bastard.

Pay heed now class, there’s nothing such as a ‘bastard’. It’s a state of mind. And the muck’s in your head if your state of mind insists it’s a bad thing.

Now repeat after me.
Bastard rhymes with custard
It’s gay and tart like mustard
It’ll never leave me flustered
‘Cause I love a jolly bastard.

Nuggets

I’m fairly angsty in private. And, I'm fairly serious about making lists. So if it’s in a diary, I really must’ve meant it.

***
Discovered in my travel plus lists diary, from a year and half ago.

A list. And an insight.

List:
Self
Passport
Ticket
Chuddies

Insight:
Somewhere deep down, beyond layers of lycra and Maybelline Glow, some place hidden, there are parts of me that wouldn’t trade anything for being from India. Parts that will never relinquish the sense of wellbeing that’s about being Indian. Parts that prefer being washed over being wiped.

Lifeline

As a writer, increasingly, because with practice comes profusion, you see merit in giving everything a slogan.

Including people.

Especially people.

M [not THE M-monumental, but our writer M – yes we have a writer now, for a brief pause to my daily insanity] was very pleased with his. It was my welcoming gift to him.

It goes: Because one ego’s not enough.

And though this happened several months ago, even now when I ask him why he is the way he is, he responds with less gratitude, more pride and no shame: because you said so yourself.

Today, in an act of considerable generosity, struck by sudden inspiration no doubt, M composed mine. Just as I was breezing past him, on my way to the ladies’ let, because that’s when most of our significant conversations happen, when I’m breezing past him to let.

I said, breezing by, when you eat five cheese pasta with bacon, the guilt will kill you before the cheese does. He said, it’s five cheese pasta with bacon. Guilt has no place between a man and his five cheese pasta with bacon. I said you’ve got to be kidding. He said why? I said BECAUSE. He said I’ve got it.
It goes: I’m lady H. Fark off.

Polyp

If you let words sit in you too long, they ferment and become a bloated palimpsest of rancid phrases and overfed sentences that bear little resemblance to the lucid ideas they once were.

And they make you ill.

There is a piece of work, a spot of writing, the thought of which once sent happy tingles through my head. It was my private pleasure spot which I would fondle with delight every now and then in anticipation of epic gratification. It was the perfectly located itch waiting to be scratched, the epicentre of a giant orgasm that my client was about to experience, the promise of paradise where all good prose is meant to repose.

So I admired it and stroked it and nursed it and fussed over it, afraid to let it out for fear of being overwhelmed. Sometimes the thought of it got so unbearably exciting, I had to put it away promising myself a quiet moment in which to really indulge the joy of expressing it.

Somewhere between then and now, It became a tumour.

A turgid, insensate knot of mangled phrases that have mutated beyond recognition from overstimulation and are choking my head.

So now I need to cauterize it.

What a charming start to the year.

Jazz

You do not want to read Morrison when there are tendrils of heartache tracing old fault lines in you. Not even those trivial tremors from when you didn’t email me when I thought you would, because if you do, read her then that is, then goodbye and thanks for all the fish because there’s no way you’re going to work out of her words whole.

And there’s no point in reading her really if you aren’t that well-lived we’ll say for properness; well-lived enough to have old fault lines, cracks, musty little secrets and memories that aren’t worth reliving.

Because in the smooth jagged exuberance of her notes lie the adolescent memories of a brazen old city that refuses to become jaded, the secret twist of an unsmiling dead girl’s intentions, the difficult knots of unlove in a maturing marriage the fierce madness of silence in a house where parrots are fed on affection where things lie exactly where they should and not where you expect they should and there’s also the stunning depth of a blank starless city sky and it’s all so casual you could miss it in a blink if not for the sudden sharp shooting sensation of recognition that crackles through old fault lines and fissures.

Thanks Go[ld]phish, I’ve barely begun. [Aptly, because I know you’re chuckling, I have nowhere to link your name.]

Skinny Cats

[Since we're on a pissy poetry roll, dahlings.]

***

Skinny cats
Slip through cracks
Deftly, softly, swiftly.
Their thin veins
And underfed frames
Make them agile and shifty

'Skinny Cat', by Ben Ditmars

Angry poems about you

WARNING
If you’re not eighteen yet, then don’t read another word. This post is not for you. Not because you can’t piss me off, but because this post contains inappropriate and uncensored thought and verbiage.

This is for all those who've pissed me off. Fuck you very much for chancing upon my life.

Radical You
I like sanitised environments
I like them
I like them
I like them
Neat. Sterile. Safe.
You can store all that intellectually stimulating chaos up your anus thankyouverymuch.
I’d much rather be safe.

My Many Nike Moments
Just because I laugh at your jokes
And look you in the eye
Doesn’t mean I like you.
Not this way or that
Do yourself a favour
Get stuffed.
Don’t think. Just do it.

Sleazy Platform Ticket Counter Man at Nizamuddin Railway Station
Your mouth is like a urinal mister
Your words slither like excrement
You’re violating me with your fuliginous spewage.
I want to poke your filthy groping eyes out.

In Public Spaces
Swagger an inch closer
I dare you swaggering swaggerer
I’ll stick your dick with an all-pin prick
And watch you stumble in pain.

Road Rage
I’d corner you against a wall and ram your rear repeatedly, but my car can’t takethe trauma.

Taximan and Automan
Who knew you had such talent?
Driving forth, looking back
Through the passenger watching rearview mirror!
Oh that long probing fondling stare
Makes me think you’ll do just as well without them.
So then, may I poke your eyes out with a rusty wrench?

My Childhood Paedophile
At the Chittaranjan Park Fish Market
For every chop chop chop
Quiver, flail and death
I picture the ceremony of your emasculation.

***

Fark along now. I've nothing more to say to you.

Unworthy

There is a nightmare on the prowl, my baby disappeared in a rambunctious carnival crowd; left me comforting my fingers on a bottle of ink, discovered in horror on a leaky sink. Awash with shame, I sank to the dirty loo floor, where’d my poor neglected child go? Hungry and spent she must be dead by now; I haven’t the courage to step out this door. Perhaps I’ll just die of desperate sorrow; they’ll discover my ink stained body on the pot tomorrow. But guilt is such an insidious thing; I’m awake in the afterlife, still feeling like shit.

Dear Blank Page

Don’t stare at me. I will have you arrested for attempted mind wreckage by the mind control police. You will be defiled with all kinds of disreputable, putrid, incoherent verbiage, and after every inch of you is covered in insulting nonsense, you will then be expunged into the ethernet unceremoniously, where you will disappear without a trace after languishing in an anonymous spam folder for a month.

Oh and. Some words mean exactly what I intend them to mean and not what you might think they’re supposed to mean just ‘cause some dictionary said so.

Sincerely
H