Sixteen migrant workers (were run over by a freight train as they tried to make their way home) No matter which way our world falls, only one side is soiled, only one side is wounded, only one side bleeds. This inequity is favoured by a sky that cannot tell day from night. The illusion of … Continue reading Curfew: Day 47
Lockdown writing: ten things about The Poem. 3/3 7. Teach The Poem to run its fingers over sharp edges. To cry in an unknown language. To bleed until living and dying are equal options. 8. If you already know what you’re going to say, don’t say it. The Poem is not your lover. No part … Continue reading Curfew: Day 46
Lockdown writing: ten things about The Poem. 2/3 4. Let the day walk around turning off the lights, turning off the sun, let the layered shadows become a despairing womb. The Poem will appear as you remove the blindfolds, one by one. Don’t be gentle. 5. Imagine desire. Imagine satisfaction. Imagine a heart that has … Continue reading Curfew: Day 45
Lockdown writing: ten things about The Poem. 1/3 1. When you open the door of The Poem, anything can walk in. But look closer, inside and outside are now one. What about these faces, are they arriving or leaving? Where do you think you are standing? 2. Don’t write about love. Love, like a story, … Continue reading Curfew: Day 44
I watched her, not comprehending- the way she held her baby, the way she kept glancing at her phone, the way she rummaged in a big white bag embroidered with blue pigs and red billy goats. She sat between me and the window, a stranger, till I saw the book she wasn’t reading and suddenly … Continue reading Curfew: Day 43
A hundred years from now, this time will be abstracted into a zen koan that our wise will shape into a mirror, or a river, and find the anguish of the world returning their perplexed gaze. Even a painting looks back at you. Corrects your first impression, draws your eyes to shadows that weren’t there, … Continue reading Curfew: Day 41
When was the last time a thought ran all the way to an exclamation mark? Disconsolate, broken strings float in the air – existential paradoxes -somehow deferring to gravity. This grief too was birthed from a rib of life. Raised in a sage’s empty bowl. Who could have foretold this stillness of the sea? The … Continue reading Curfew: Day 39
The painting was an elegy in black: dystopia, with its mouth full of night, watching, as hope was suckled by a colossal moon. The man stood before it, silent, the exaggerated chiaroscuro of expectation and despair drawing him into its darkness, the light only a device to examine his own failings. Maybe this was how … Continue reading Curfew: Day 38
This much we know: 1. That having walked this far, we cannot take one more step together. 2. The daylight we borrowed has to be returned to the night. 3. Loss, like the fragrance of roses, is stronger, close to the skin. 4. With every storm, the sky is trying to wash more desire off … Continue reading Curfew: Day 36
Another vicious summer hail storm. Does it validate the emptiness outside? No one is getting wet. No umbrellas are raised in self-defence. Rain and death saturate the earth, at will. Yesterday, more than fifty people died here. But, we have learnt the alphabet of silence. We have mastered its syntax. We craft dirges with its … Continue reading Curfew: Day 32
