The Water Strider

~
Know me for what I am:
the water strider, the rule-bender.
I walk

on water.

I shock the thinker
stalk the disbeliever.
I am
the water strider.

I glide, I flit, I dart
on the water’s tense face.
I chase space.
Pace, stride, take pride in that tart start.
I am Jesus-like.
I trace in him my making
and my end.

I fear, I hate, I love water.
I walk like I own water.
It mimics and reveals me
in echoes of light. Yes, the light touch
is what I advise:
Devise ways to disguise
gravity. A certain agility, some speed
is all you need.

Anybody can walk
on water.
~

Link: Water Strider
~

Jokhini

~
I love this tree.
Do you know the tree outside Dutta da’s house,
the one just across the garden?
It’s a nice tree, a flowering tree.

Throughout the year, tiny white flowers bloom all over the body of the tree.

It’s a shame I can’t remember
the name of the tree.
I might have known it once, but not any longer.

I love sitting on this particular branch. It curves so beautifully and fits me so well. When I sit here with my legs swinging in the air, one-two-one-two, I can see right into Dutta da’s bedroom. I watch him sleep every night. I can follow his dreams as he tosses and turns on the ornate bed that belonged to his grandmother. Sometimes he wakes up, gets out of bed and looks out of the window. I almost feel his eyes on me. Does he know that I am here? Does he know that I watch him night after night, waiting for him to come out, waiting for him to touch my tree, waiting for him to touch me? But no, he doesn’t see me.

He only sees me in his dreams: sees
my eyes as sharp as curses, sees my
hair that has a life of
its own, sees me naked.

I get bored sometimes. I sing, I talk to myself, I play with my hair; but I get bored. The day irritates me and I try to escape between the leaves and the white flowers. When the night arrives with its harsh whisper of consent, I feel better. For some reason I have taken to laughing a lot. Everything amuses me--the insects that I catch and tear apart, the children on their way home after play, Mrinal mauling his little cousin’s fresh breasts. Everything amuses me. With his ink-tinged fingers, his wrinkly pyjamas and his sad-dog eyes even Dutta da seems funny.

And I can’t stop laughing.
I laugh because I have nothing else to do.
My laugh becomes one
with the wind
and the pollen
and the cries of the children.

I know I can wait forever, but it’s tiring. When will the bastard come out and piss on my tree? When, when? I want to go and pull him out of the window. I want to scratch him in anger. But I can’t. It’s not allowed to me. My feet will always walk away from me. Away. In the other direction.

My feet, my feet.
My poor, poor feet.

And then, of course, I have to cry. I seem to remember a time when I had feet. Real feet and not the ones that I have now--always turned away from me, annoyed with me. However, I cannot be very sure. I am never very sure of most things. So I cry and wail and moan and scream and shake the tree until the white flowers fall like dust to the ground.

The white flowers fall
like dust to the ground.

~

Conjoined

~
Someone with fine hands cut us up
carefully
oh so carefully
that we never felt the pain and the stitches
never showed.

Sometimes the stitches loosened and showed things beneath the skin
but scabs soon formed and healed
so that we forgot
how we were stuck together once
with spit and glue and blood.

Beloved brother, beloved lover
when crows sing
of distances and winds
gather over time and shalmali flowers
bloom on the marks
of our bodies

we stay fixed as if still sewn
together instead of apart--

Stay with me.
Don’t move.
~

On Metaphors

~
…These are examples of metaphors.

I laughed my socks off.
He was the apple of her eye.
They had a skeleton in the cupboard.
We had a real pig of a day.
The dog was stone dead.

The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek words μετα (which means from one place to another) and φερειν (which means to carry) and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn’t. This means that the word metaphor is a metaphor.

I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards.

--Christopher John Francis Boone
~

People say her face is like a haiku

~

People say
her face is like a haiku--
a hybrid shape
a sound, a brush of the tongue, a sigh.

People say
her face is a shocking translation--
syllables fixed in the throat
a frog’s splash, a dash, a numbered
thought in the sky.

People say
her face is a poor simulation--
a futile season
a lined total, a whim, a
floating
lash in the eye.

~