Ten fingers counting we have each
Nine planets around the sun repeat
Eight ball will last if you triumphant be
Seven oceans pummel the shores of the sea

Six senses feeling
Five around a sense of self
Four seasons turn on and turn off
I can see three corners from this corner
Two’s a perfect number
But one, well

----

Interesting use of numbers Mr. Matthews. Careful with that axe. :)

I am an extraordinary machine. Hold on. My batteries are charged. I am 6 times stronger. I have macrovision eyes. My hands are made of steel. I am stronger than you. I will destroy you. You will explode and I will stand beside the ashes and smile. I will be 6 times happier because I am an extraordinary machine.

30

I never imagined myself becoming 30. It was a just a number, a number that was always very hazy, and in the future. I never imagined I’d have a paunch at 30. And that I’d still not know what I wanted to do with my life.
Or that I’d never have driven a Merc. Or never been to America. Or never taken one photograph that makes a few people, maybe a handful, fall silent. When I was 16, 30 seemed like the age when life would have been lived and conquered. I’m still fighting though. I thought I’d be famous by now. And that I’d have figured out how to put my emotions into words by now. I thought I’d have become the eloquent yet sensitive human being I am in my thoughts. I didn’t think that I’d have written my book my now. I thought I’d have written several by now. And here I am, finding it difficult to write a few coherent sentences. I am sad to turn thirty, with so much unaccomplished. But one of the few things I’ve realized about myself in the twenties is that sorrow is an emotion that passes, and numbness is more permanent.

In 4 days I’ll be thirty. And when I look back to compile my 10 greatest moments of the twenties, they all feel insignificant. The ten greatest moments in my twenties won’t add up to much, on a global scale. And even to my friends, who were there for several of them, they wouldn’t seem like much. They might not have realized they’d witnessed the greatest moments. Should I include the first photograph JJ liked? Selling a company? Watching a great movie? Laughing with friends? Passing out of college? Holding hands with Radha? How do you count what is slipping away from your memory, and yet be sure that you’ve captured the important things? I wish I could take a backup of my memory on a CD, and come back to visit those moments later, finding them uncorrupted by time.

Feel the sadness. Feel the moment.
I want to walk to the top of a grassy hill and sit there for a few hours, feeling the memories slowly invade me, and cry them out, one by one. I don’t even need a drink to cry. I want it to be a sunny day, and for the sun to provide healing warmth. Reassure me that there is still time, and that it is only a milestone, not the end of the road. So that I can walk down the hill, with the momentum of gravity, making me run faster and thus more happily than I really feel. And when I reach the bottom of the hill, I will hopefully shake off the sadness and become numb for another decade.

----

Sandeep Joseph
Like a complete unknown

The red isn't the red we painted, its just rust. :(

Known™

100% waterfall. Boo.
Sensation overload.
The third guitar sound in a rock song.
Becoming "the" louder sound.
Tomorrow hittttts today.
Clap. Clap. Boom.
Witches and scales out of tune.
27th key. Tuned.
Tuned-down.
A lighter sky.
A cringing sun.
A brother. One line left.
Sounds so unsound.
Dischordant.
No ringtone.
No special fx.
This cat whispers.
A softer name.
A lighter sky.
The body is gone.
Gone.
Stop.
End.
Fin.
More?

A sensitive grid

I am a compartment, my hand rests on a sensitive grid. My eyes catch random lights. They blink. They dilate. I am an envelope, my face holds a thousand stories. My hands catch a terrible disease. They absorb. They pain. I am a compartment, my hand rests on a sensitive grid. My eyes no longer see because my mind no longer retains. I am inside but I am wide to receive.

This is frightening. I am approaching the big three "O". I hear its a magical year as you come full circle. Everything starts again. Clean slate. Wonder how that colour tastes. I will be close to my family and friends. Cannot imagine being in Dubai when I turn 30. Friends dont let friends have friends haircuts. No? Planning a 5-day trip to Goa. Sit under a blood red sky, make friends with the local x-genome, have a mojito, look at things blur in front of my eyes and slowly pass out before the break of dawn. A fantasy I will not miss. See you later, gator.

The Booklovers

"This book deals with epiphenomenalism, which has to do with consciousness as a mere accessory of physiological processes whose presence or absence... makes no difference... whatever are you doing?"

Aphra Benn: Hello
Cervantes: Donkey
Daniel Defoe: To christen the day!
Samuel Richardson: Hello
Henry Fielding: Tittle-tattle Tittle-tattle...
Lawrence Sterne: Hello
Mary Wolstencraft: Vindicated!
Jane Austen: Here I am!
Sir Walter Scott: We're all doomed!
Leo Tolstoy: Yes!
Honoré de Balzac: Oui...
Edgar Allen Poe: Aaaarrrggghhhh!
Charlotte Bronte: Hello...
Emily Bronte: Hello...
Anne Bronte: Hellooo..?
Nikolai Gogol: Vas chi
Gustav Flaubert: Oui
William Makepeace Thackeray: Call me 'William Makepeace Thackeray'
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The letter 'A'
Herman Melville: Ahoy there!
Charles Dickens: London is so beautiful this time of year...
Anthony Trollope: good-good-good-good evening!
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Here come the sleepers...
Mark Twain: I can't even spell 'Mississippi'!
George Eliot: George reads German
Emile Zola: J'accuse
Henry James: Howdy Miss Wharton!
Thomas Hardy: Ooo-arrr!
Joseph Conrad: I'm a bloody boring writer...
Katherine Mansfield: [cough cough]
Edith Wharton: Well hello, Mr James!
DH Lawrence: Never heard of it
EM Forster: Never heard of it!

Happy the man, and happy he alone who in all honesty can call today his own;
He who has life and strength enough to say 'Yesterday's dead & gone - I want to live today'

James Joyce: Hello there!
Virginia Woolf: I'm losing my mind!
Marcel Proust: Je me'en souviens plus
F Scott Fitzgerald: baa bababa baa
Ernest Hemingway: I forgot the....
Hermann Hesse: Oh es ist alle so häßlich
Evelyn Waugh: Whoooaarr!
William Faulkner: Tu connait William Faulkner?
Anaïs Nin: The strand of pearls
Ford Maddox Ford: Any colour, as long as it's black!
Jean-Paul Sartre: Let's go to the dome, Simone!
Simone de Beauvoir: C'est exact present
Albert Camus: The beach... the beach
Franz Kafka: WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!
Thomas Mann: Mam
Graham Greene: Call me 'pinky', lovely
Jack Kerouac: Me car's broken down...
William S Burroughs: Wowwww!

Happy the man, and happy he alone who in all honesty can call today his own;
He who has life and strength enough to say 'Yesterday's dead & gone - I want to live today'

Kingsley Amis: [cough]
Doris Lessing: I hate men!
Vladimir Nabokov: Hello, little girl...
William Golding: Achtung Busby!
JG Ballard: Instrument binnacle
Richard Brautigan: How are you doing?
Milan Kundera: I don't do interviews
Ivy Compton Burnett: Hello...
Paul Theroux: Have a nice day!
Günter Grass: I've found snails!
Gore Vidal: Oh, it makes me mad!
John Updike: Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run...
Kazuro Ishiguro: Ah so, old chap!
Malcolm Bradbury: stroke John Steinbeck, stroke JD Salinger
Iain Banks: Too orangey for crows!
AS Byatt: Nine tenths of the law, you know...
Martin Amis: [burp]
Brett Easton Ellis: Aaaaarrrggghhh!
Umberto Eco: I don't understand this either...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Mi casa es su casa
Roddy Doyle: ha ha ha!
Salman Rushdie: Names will live forever...

----

All you booklovers will love this song by Divine Comedy. I am a dead man lying by the side of the road with daylight in my eyes, then?

Piano lessons

So, I was on the piano playing one of my pieces and suddenly I hear someone knocking on my door. I thought it would be a complaint (luckily no one has complained till today). It was this lady and she wanted to know if I give piano lessons. So, all that I play is pretty. I thought it looked like that only inside my head. I guess its not only me inside my head. I "am" inside, plus plus plus. Go, mordecai!

Drain you

One baby to another says -
I'm lucky to have met you
I don't care what you think
Unless it is about me
It is now my duty to completely drain you
I travel through a tube
And end up in your infection

Chew your meat for you
Pass it back and forth
In a passionate kiss
From my mouth to yours
I like you

With eyes so dialated,
I've become your pupil
You've taught me everything
Without a poison apple
The water is so yellow, I'm a healthy student
Indebted and so grateful -
Vacuum out the fluids

----

Its been almost 15 years and this song still hits me. Kurt and the boys rock!

1st and 7th drink?

American poets advocate writing in 3-5-3 syllables or 2-3-2, the classical haiku rule is 5-7-5, steming from an even older artform, the tanka, 5-7-5-7-7, This was often split between 2 authors, one writing the 5-7-5, the other *answering* with 7-7, often to be *answered* again with a 5-7-5: thus building tangka chains 1000 and more links long.

Whatever, Robert Frost said poetry without rules is like a tennis match without a net - and it is true also for haiku. And Basho had his motto: "Learn the rules; and then forget them." Take your personal pick:

1. Seventeen syllables in one line.
2. Seventeen syllables written in three lines.
3. Seventeen syllables written in three lines divided into 5-7-5.
4. Seventeen syllables written in a vertical (flush left or centered) line.
5. Less than 17 syllables written in three lines as short-long-short.
6. Less than 17 syllables written in three vertical lines as short-long-short. (Ala Barry Semegran)
7. Write what can be said in one breath.

----

More at geoff's place :)
So, ready?

Half (pt. 2)

When I hand my love in
I’ll be done
A handed glove
Hides the door

Half a chance
Half a chance
We still
Have a chance

Mr. full, mr. have
Kills mr. empty hand

Half a chance
Half a chance
We still
Have half a chance

----

What a gorgeous song. Ben Shepherds vocals really haunt me. The end section makes me feel like I am in the mountains sleeping under the sky just before dawn. Such warm soundscapes.

I am so happy right now its not funny. I hug everyone in my circle. I tell them I love them. I kiss them. Now I am a magnet. I am attracting everyone. I am surrounded by people. I have friends. I am a sailor. Lost in sea. Oh, thats it. :)

One of these days I'm going to cut you up into little pieces.