Archives for 2004

the day of, my father got lost driving twice.

This man was made homeless by the waves and lives now in a temporary shelter in a mosque in Nagore, Tamil Nadu, India.
He is crying and there is blood in his mouth.
His skin is the same colour as my father’s.

And it was at that age…Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesmal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

-Pablo Neruda

Chem 281, Chem 211, and some Commerce class are neatly packed into the arena-come-exam hall. procters stand at attention and everyone is able to quietly find a seat. hopefully the right one.

the microphone crackles. “commerce students, note that in question 23, on page 5, it shouldn’t be n = one, but n = one million.”
a low ripple of laughter and then 60 seconds later, pencils gripped hard, we’re at it.
for three hours there is almost is silence.

“there are 20 minutes left.”
there is a sound of blank spaces being filled in feverishly – anything to fight the emptiness. and there is the sound of surrender, of vast white spaces snickering snidely, untouched by charcoal.

afterwards, we dribble out out into the night. a girl is half-crying; she looks almost like she’s laughing, but there are tears and red eyes and a runny nose.
it begins to hail.

but then it ends with, “i find that if you want to be anonymous, you do things with your non-dominant hand. you think differently….like another person almost.”
and i stop short.
“i was wondering when you had seen me wanting to be anonymous.”

90% of the time everything i do is tongue-in-cheek. even those times when only i can feel my tongue against the insides of my mouth. especially those times.
how have i betrayed myself in that last tenth?

i receive no reply.
and of course, these aren’t the kinds of things you ask again.

Time can be deceptive.It can feel as if it’s travelling maddeningly slow when actually it’s going along at a frightening pace. I thought to myself the other day “How strange it is to have snow in September.” It was then that I realised we’re now in November.
- No Head Joe

a Sri Lankan girl in traditional Muslim headscarf submits a paper that discusses at length the past and present stance of the Department of Indian Affairs on rape as a means of assimilating the Native peoples of Canada during the late 1800s to early 1900s.

please see: my apologies

she’s dozing
her dreams are larger than this room
suffocating my sight.

a million coins, shattering the glass. so many more dreams, i’m counting them one by one. a grain of sand slips past me, through my fingers, lodges itself in my throat, makes my voice raspier. harder to lie, harder too to scream the truth, whose truth.
silence becomes a comfortable cloak, wrap myself in streetlights and gray pavement.

a million tongues. per capita per word per letter. the stories float just out of my reach, teasing my gaze, stinging my eyes. taking my breath away, no, just holding it. can’t breathe, that isn’t the same. because i try.

drawn into the colours. bird wings streaking the white and blue, leaking colour in their wake. note the spellings of my words, point out the Capitals. semantics, combing through someone else’s scratches, looking for some proof of decency.

impromptu hiatuses, like sudden silences, are sometimes signals of angels passing through.

times when i
                can’t believe
                grasp
the immensity of the power we each hold in our hands.

if power is measured by the flicker on the TV screen – but i know that person and he was a kid like me – like me – and i used to make fun of him and he used to share his lunch with me.

but – i don’t
        explain this to me.
how are we born? with the stamp of greatness on the backs of knees. with a nation’s love shining from the palms of our hands.
who
                who are these people?
their familiarity is unnerving.

one day i will be old.

i will have skin that wrinkles like cloth and there will be long lonely strands of hair poking through the folds on my chin.

teenagers will be painfully polite to me and sometimes they will jump up and give me their warmed seats. sometimes they will be abnormally cheerful and loudly bright, but most often they will be exactingly silent in my presence. and their eyes will watch the houses and trees roll by through the plastic window behind me and they will study the checks on their shoes, but they will not meet my squinted gaze and they will not see the smile that struggles to surface on my slack mouth.

one day i will see God’s hand write my story out in the sky. i will see my death
spelled out for me, the sunset will be yet another sunset and i will see the geese fly south and i won’t say goodbye. not to home, not to me, not to God.

i will see the clouds with my bedraggled hair in my eyes and they will be wispy like my memories.

one day.

today you looked up as i ran past.