Where Worse Things Keep Happening

To have to revisit one's own past with such distinct clarity - one would hope it were something beautiful. Shame! Shame to see that the pains that were numbed by the kindness of time, have been pried open by bullets and bomb shards.


Where Worse Things Happen

[Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. - Arundhati Roy]


[The blood-curdling echo of wails
Shall keep reverberating yet]

In the white silence of night,
In the vengeful stinging of frost -
The narrow breadth of my gauche hands
Has expanded monumentally,
Till it now encompasses
The galactic girth
Of my utter helplessness.

Each bleached morning,
I carry that leaden weight
Strung to my eyelashes.
Kohl, charred and inured
Spreads chaotically
From all the chafing.

Whereto should we look for succor…
The fallow faded promise of heaven?
The bitter belated justice of hell?

Or the paradoxical tying of our hands
(O yes, paradoxical!
I tried hard,
But fingers aren’t hair.
They’re unknottable)

And so we have become
Buyers and sellers
Of puppet masks –
We have one for every occasion
We have to have…
For underneath those facades
Our glazed over eyes
Do not [cannot] alter
Ever.

Dec 5th, 2009