A Perspective From The Graveyard

We stood around with our eyes fixed on the slight bump in the dirt before us. My colleague was wearing a white dish-dash with blotches of mud on it, evidently from the burial process that took place a few minutes ago. We had lost our way from the mosque to the graveyard and were a bit late. The look of utter devastation on my colleague’s face was nevertheless unabated. He was an only son. His father was slightly older than fifty-four years when a brain stroke took his life the night before.

On the way to the graveyard, while we were still struggling with GPS and crude, shouted directions from passer-bys, my other colleague, who is also an only son, told me to imagine how difficult it would be. Being the only son, losing your father, your sole role-model and life-guide, and becoming a de-facto patriarch of the family yourself. How absolutely life-shattering. I thought about it for a minute. I told him if you keep thinking about it, you’re going to suffer twice. Once through the worry and another (probably) through the real event, God forbids. And it’s not going to make it any easier.

There’s no rehearsal for grief.

Or is there?

It takes a year for the soft tissues of a body buried underground to decompose*, while the dry remains may persist for a hundred years. A friend told me that psychological studies showed that a family could take up to five years to regain balance after the loss of the patriarch. My other colleague (the one who can’t read GPS) got philosophical and said that death puts life into perspective. That we live, work hard, marry, make babies, make them grow and then die on them. I said, well, that’s life. It’s a cycle. Decomposition and regeneration. And we, human beings, are making more babies than ever. There’s more life on earth than death than ever before…. None of that will give you comfort when the big one hits. But that’s the reality. We may have different beliefs about what happens in the unknowable strata beyond death, but we all agree that life- with its cycle, bio-degradability, and renewability- will go on.

______________________________________________________
*Interestingly, the prostrate gland in a male body is the last soft organ to go. I don’t know why this fact gives me comfort, but it does.

Writer's Block

Behold the writer's block, its cementitious make-up and rough surface. Its weight, the cuboidal shape and the volume it occupies. Just what makes this bloody block so damn heavy to move or to nudge, to smash with a head-butt like a true Korean warrior? Is it stationary? Does it move? Or does it just rotate acrobatically in silent space around a random axis?

Let's see, on one surface - and this object is versatile it doesn't know up from down or right from left- on that first observable surface play images of your daily concerns; the appointments you need to catch, the chores you need to attend to, the dreaded visit to the dentists, the degenerates on the road. They all play out on this surface, like a movie projector. Every time you turn away from the moving picture, it changes lights and color and forces you to look back at it again. Your jaw open wide as if by surgical claws, the dentist smiling ominously as he moves in to drill….

… on the next rectangular face, there stands your to-do list at work. Your career aspirations. The long queue of disgruntled clients. The visage of your unpleasant colleague stares at you from one corner, while the monotony of the three hours meeting plays hop-scotch on a grid roughly drawn by chalk on the other.

(Let's skip the next three faces. Lots of unsavory stuff in there.)

There's nothing but her on the last surface. She stands there, fully clothed and utterly unperturbed. The cuboid here seems to change structure; it's gelatinous, rubbery and its surfaces gain a three-dimensional vividness. The curves get moist and slippery … and the smell, an olfactory wonder. You try to avert your gaze, to shield your eyes, plug your ears and hold your breath. No avail. The holographic cocoon engulfs you like fate. It's not even an object or a part of an object anymore. This part of the block is the anti-matter. It's the black hole of your energies. If a writer's block is an idea block, as some suggest, then how could you write anything but the ideas that this image stirs in your mind? How could you fight a thought so compelling, so riveting and so damn dominant?

The answer is simple: you just can't.

You embrace it and move on.

Love in the eye of a wind turbine

Love in the eye of a wind turbine

The moments twirl
with a constant puzzle
waiting for the stars
to be aligned
Your hair is mussed
with the flow of time
and our gusts of passion
here, intertwined
Cartwheeling sundials
and their shadows on this
wall, of mine
The struggle for where
to draw the line
And the moment that I
drank your wine
from the grapes of your
finest vine

Love in the eye of a wind turbine

Flawed humans stand exposed
with their flawed logic,
erotic curiosity
To err is human
To err and enjoy it, is,
divine

To err is human
and humans we are
we love to err
and we err to love
we do it on impulse
and we do it by, design

I swear by the neatness
of your emotions
The regalia of innocence
and the tyranny of values,
sublime

I pledge allegiance to the aroma
that wafts from the poetry of your
rhymes
Your stunning bravado
and the shiver that runs
down your spine
All came tumbling
on a night of an earnest bonding
The night you told me
that your secret, is me
and it's mine
The night you taught me
Lip-reading for the blind

Love in the eye of a wind turbine