The words, they fell. Together.
And he must have been insane for having lived his life by his favorite book of poems. Each poem sending him in a different direction. Lost. He smiled. Still. And cried too.
…
He liked his poems really short. Real. Like fleeting moments. Like random virtual conversations with stranger friends in spacious blue-bordered white boxes. A tiny photograph giving you a sense of who you were talking to.
But that made life all the more difficult. There were too many poems in his book. About too many things. And he had often got the feeling that life really did not last so long. It hadn’t for his best friend who committed suicide. Or for his dog who suddenly stopped walking and then at about 3:45 AM with still eyes he stared at him and stopped breathing too. Or for his brother who wanted to get himself a glass of orange juice but died on his way to the kitchen.
He liked his poems to collapse thus, suddenly. It made them real. So real that it brought tears to his eyes. And he didn’t mind crying. Just like he didn’t mind smiling. As long as there was a reason for it. He didn’t mind doing either. And he never complained about having to smile or cry for too long.
Short poems, he felt, beat life at the wretched game. And they make the wretched game, however short it lasts, worthwhile.
He didn’t have a favorite poem, although he did have a favorite experience associated with one. He had read a poem about a girl who died on the street trying to blow out the stars from the sky because they didn’t let her sleep. The next morning he read an article in the newspaper about a young girl who was found dead on the street. There were no wounds on her body. He was sure it was the girl from that poem.
…
He was a writer himself. Though he didn’t like calling himself a poet. He believed that such titles were best given than assumed on one’s own. So he called himself a writer. Or rather, he just kept writing.
At a gathering of friends, in his turn to share a joke, he randomly recited a short poem that compared a spider’s web with the intrigues of society. He was passionate in his rendition. His eyes were closed. In the poem the spider spun his web cautiously and men and women brushed shoulders on the street and made a crisscross of undecipherable patterns. That was the first time he realized the consequences of a different interpretation.
It was only fitting that so many friendships or acquaintances (soon he forgot which it had been) came to end so suddenly and so quickly.
Like that short 8-line poem about a man who survived a bad fall off a cliff. The poem started with an 8-word line and lost a word as it moved downward towards its end. But the man survived at the end.
The last word of that poem was ‘man’.
He had tears in his eyes when he read that poem. Here was a man who had fallen off a cliff and was now buried under a heap of words that were trying to create a beautiful pattern. Life was cruel, he thought to himself.
…
He had first read the word happiness in a poem in school. He was young back then but he found the poem a bit too pushy. And as a result as he grew up he became wary of happiness. The word. He didn’t feel sure that it meant what the poem wanted him to believe it meant.
But his teachers insisted and didn’t give him a chance to argue. Soon he stopped believing in his teachers and alienated himself from his classmates who only believed the teachers.
But what hurt him was when his mother and his grandmother tried to convince him that the poem was indeed definitive. He hit the wall of self-doubt. As she recited the poem, his grandmother got it all wrong. She was illiterate, so she was entirely dependent on how things sounded. And the mispronunciation of his self-taught mother only made things worse.
His brother as always refused to partake in the discussion and went out to play football. They stuck his father’s dead photograph in front of his face. It was a blow-up of a passport size photo taken before he left in search for work. That ended up being his last photo opportunity because he died in a blast at a chemical factory. Since the photograph was so distorted it was difficult to tell if his father was actually happy.
The eyes were a bit clear and the mother said they had the look of content. And she said that was happiness. But the poem had mentioned rainbows and sunshine. And he saw no trace of either in that distorted photograph. But he did discover the curious relationship between happiness and contentment that day.
He began reading poems. He simply wanted to find what Happiness meant.
…
He read a poem about a place where it rained in patterns. Like a puzzle. Some days the rain fell this way, some days that way.
In this place, he imagined, on some days you could walk in the rain without an umbrella and still have just your face wet. The rain falling on the face like a spotlight.
And then he read about a place where it had never rained. About a people in whose language the word rain didn’t exist. It was like that time in school when read that poem about Happiness. It seemed too political to be true.
But he wondered what would happen if the people from this place were to meet the people from that other where it rained in so many different ways. He wondered what pattern of rain they might desire, once they knew what rain was. And he also wondered what pattern of rain the other would be willing to forgo.
He smiled as he imagined that exchange between two poems.
…
It happened unwittingly. But as the poems started to tell him more, he started to live by them more. And soon he started to filter them out. The poems that misled him and those that directed him towards a better understanding.
That poem about the fork in the road, for instance, though he found it too long for his taste, he internalized it. What he got from these poems sometimes was happiness. And at other times it just wasn’t. And how he knew what he felt was by looking in the mirror.
The unhappy poems made his eyes red and the happy ones made his cheeks red. But most of poems did nothing but leave wrinkles on his forehead. He washed his face after reading those poems. But the wrinkles stayed until he slept and woke up. It was like going into a forest and leaving behind those in-between poems
somewhere.
His first book of poems caught fire when he was making coffee for himself. He had gone out to the other room to get himself a pen. He liked to write next to his poems. He didn’t call them poems, but that’s what they were. Poems in responses to poems.
When he returned half the book was on fire, and half wasn’t. He thought half the book would like a useless puzzle whose pieces went missing. He let the whole book burn.
He eyes were red and even after having slept for a long time the wrinkles on his forehead stayed there. He didn’t know what to do.
…
He couldn’t remember a single poem from that book. Poems that went on for pages. He had conversed with that book for so many weeks. And none of the conversations survived in his head.
For a few hours he saved the remains of that book in an urn. But then he thought that was just too melodramatic and threw it away in the garbage dump.
He wrote feverishly. But never more than a few lines. He forced his poems to end quickly.
By the time life presented him with harsher instances of its unpredictability, he had come to accept it through short poems.
He read some poems that were so beautiful that it was sad that they ended. And it was sad how they ended. But that was life, he thought.
And by the end of it all, when he had nothing left and except for that one favorite book of short poems filled with notes on the margins he still found himself smiling and crying. He travelled in different directions and found that he somehow always managed to return to the same place.
The place where he often found that he was lost. He must have been insane to have lived his life by his favorite book of poems. Each poem taking him a few steps away from where he was. Just a few steps away. From where he smiled and returned. Or cried, but returned. Still.
(Ironically, it was with those many in-between poems that he associated contentment. (Not happiness; that he stopped bothering about after his book of poems got burned.) But he could never quite understand why he felt that way.)
…
He liked his poems really short. Real. Like fleeting moments. Like random virtual conversations with stranger friends in spacious blue-bordered white boxes. A tiny photograph giving you a sense of who you were talking to.
But that made life all the more difficult. There were too many poems in his book. About too many things. And he had often got the feeling that life really did not last so long. It hadn’t for his best friend who committed suicide. Or for his dog who suddenly stopped walking and then at about 3:45 AM with still eyes he stared at him and stopped breathing too. Or for his brother who wanted to get himself a glass of orange juice but died on his way to the kitchen.
He liked his poems to collapse thus, suddenly. It made them real. So real that it brought tears to his eyes. And he didn’t mind crying. Just like he didn’t mind smiling. As long as there was a reason for it. He didn’t mind doing either. And he never complained about having to smile or cry for too long.
Short poems, he felt, beat life at the wretched game. And they make the wretched game, however short it lasts, worthwhile.
He didn’t have a favorite poem, although he did have a favorite experience associated with one. He had read a poem about a girl who died on the street trying to blow out the stars from the sky because they didn’t let her sleep. The next morning he read an article in the newspaper about a young girl who was found dead on the street. There were no wounds on her body. He was sure it was the girl from that poem.
…
He was a writer himself. Though he didn’t like calling himself a poet. He believed that such titles were best given than assumed on one’s own. So he called himself a writer. Or rather, he just kept writing.
At a gathering of friends, in his turn to share a joke, he randomly recited a short poem that compared a spider’s web with the intrigues of society. He was passionate in his rendition. His eyes were closed. In the poem the spider spun his web cautiously and men and women brushed shoulders on the street and made a crisscross of undecipherable patterns. That was the first time he realized the consequences of a different interpretation.
It was only fitting that so many friendships or acquaintances (soon he forgot which it had been) came to end so suddenly and so quickly.
Like that short 8-line poem about a man who survived a bad fall off a cliff. The poem started with an 8-word line and lost a word as it moved downward towards its end. But the man survived at the end.
The last word of that poem was ‘man’.
He had tears in his eyes when he read that poem. Here was a man who had fallen off a cliff and was now buried under a heap of words that were trying to create a beautiful pattern. Life was cruel, he thought to himself.
…
He had first read the word happiness in a poem in school. He was young back then but he found the poem a bit too pushy. And as a result as he grew up he became wary of happiness. The word. He didn’t feel sure that it meant what the poem wanted him to believe it meant.
But his teachers insisted and didn’t give him a chance to argue. Soon he stopped believing in his teachers and alienated himself from his classmates who only believed the teachers.
But what hurt him was when his mother and his grandmother tried to convince him that the poem was indeed definitive. He hit the wall of self-doubt. As she recited the poem, his grandmother got it all wrong. She was illiterate, so she was entirely dependent on how things sounded. And the mispronunciation of his self-taught mother only made things worse.
His brother as always refused to partake in the discussion and went out to play football. They stuck his father’s dead photograph in front of his face. It was a blow-up of a passport size photo taken before he left in search for work. That ended up being his last photo opportunity because he died in a blast at a chemical factory. Since the photograph was so distorted it was difficult to tell if his father was actually happy.
The eyes were a bit clear and the mother said they had the look of content. And she said that was happiness. But the poem had mentioned rainbows and sunshine. And he saw no trace of either in that distorted photograph. But he did discover the curious relationship between happiness and contentment that day.
He began reading poems. He simply wanted to find what Happiness meant.
…
He read a poem about a place where it rained in patterns. Like a puzzle. Some days the rain fell this way, some days that way.
In this place, he imagined, on some days you could walk in the rain without an umbrella and still have just your face wet. The rain falling on the face like a spotlight.
And then he read about a place where it had never rained. About a people in whose language the word rain didn’t exist. It was like that time in school when read that poem about Happiness. It seemed too political to be true.
But he wondered what would happen if the people from this place were to meet the people from that other where it rained in so many different ways. He wondered what pattern of rain they might desire, once they knew what rain was. And he also wondered what pattern of rain the other would be willing to forgo.
He smiled as he imagined that exchange between two poems.
…
It happened unwittingly. But as the poems started to tell him more, he started to live by them more. And soon he started to filter them out. The poems that misled him and those that directed him towards a better understanding.
That poem about the fork in the road, for instance, though he found it too long for his taste, he internalized it. What he got from these poems sometimes was happiness. And at other times it just wasn’t. And how he knew what he felt was by looking in the mirror.
The unhappy poems made his eyes red and the happy ones made his cheeks red. But most of poems did nothing but leave wrinkles on his forehead. He washed his face after reading those poems. But the wrinkles stayed until he slept and woke up. It was like going into a forest and leaving behind those in-between poems
somewhere.
His first book of poems caught fire when he was making coffee for himself. He had gone out to the other room to get himself a pen. He liked to write next to his poems. He didn’t call them poems, but that’s what they were. Poems in responses to poems.
When he returned half the book was on fire, and half wasn’t. He thought half the book would like a useless puzzle whose pieces went missing. He let the whole book burn.
He eyes were red and even after having slept for a long time the wrinkles on his forehead stayed there. He didn’t know what to do.
…
He couldn’t remember a single poem from that book. Poems that went on for pages. He had conversed with that book for so many weeks. And none of the conversations survived in his head.
For a few hours he saved the remains of that book in an urn. But then he thought that was just too melodramatic and threw it away in the garbage dump.
He wrote feverishly. But never more than a few lines. He forced his poems to end quickly.
By the time life presented him with harsher instances of its unpredictability, he had come to accept it through short poems.
He read some poems that were so beautiful that it was sad that they ended. And it was sad how they ended. But that was life, he thought.
And by the end of it all, when he had nothing left and except for that one favorite book of short poems filled with notes on the margins he still found himself smiling and crying. He travelled in different directions and found that he somehow always managed to return to the same place.
The place where he often found that he was lost. He must have been insane to have lived his life by his favorite book of poems. Each poem taking him a few steps away from where he was. Just a few steps away. From where he smiled and returned. Or cried, but returned. Still.
(Ironically, it was with those many in-between poems that he associated contentment. (Not happiness; that he stopped bothering about after his book of poems got burned.) But he could never quite understand why he felt that way.)