quasi & odd poetry: i am an island

I am an Island. 

An intricate, complicated island.  

Loved, missed, covered in warmth. 

I am an island. Surrounded.

 Surrounded by lonely, lonely hearts.

An oasis covered in sand.

I am an island bird, that’s forgotten flight. 

A poem without reason, 

A lifelong goal without plight. 

A reason without cause, a fateful end.

A moment, a moment, a Monet moment painting. 

A painting without light.

I am an island, an island bird, an island fern. 

I’ve burnt my bridges to the main land. 

I am thriving in the humid heat

Green, lush, fragile-handle-with-care, 

Browning before your eyes.

I am an island. 

In your eyes, I am a vast ruthless sea.

Amore

When the moon hits your eye 

Like a big-a pizza pie
That's amore,
When the world seems to shine 
Like you've had too much wine
That's amore.

I love a good full moon. The divine beauty of the moonshine makes me think of fantastic creatures and mysterious places beyond my reach. I have adored the blazing August moon, and gazed longingly at the cool October moon. I have foolishly tried to photograph and paint a full moon, hoping that the beauty I saw through my eyes and the feelings of utter despair that are evoked in my soul could be translated and shared with the world. Needless to say, it was all in vain. I’ve never owned a camera powerful enough to take a perfect picture of a full moon.

Coming from Bangladesh and being a fan of romantic Bengali literature, moonbeams or jhostna has had other effects on me too. I remember myself singing in the veranda on a moonlit night, reading poetry anticipating a full moon. I have gazed onto the blank abyss trying to envision my future. I have hoped for love. I have walked frantic through the streets trying to find the meaning of life. I have had friends take me for drives because I could not stay still. I have had severe mood swings from extremely happy and hyper to hitting all time emotional lows. I have whirled around trying to chase my own tail. The moon has filled me with joy and made me love everything bathed in its glory. So I can assure you, the moon has hit my eye, like a big-a pizza pie.

The wine has shined and the mirth has flowed like a twinkling river. However, what I am confused about is that amore part. Love. That clandestine feeling that is supposed to heal you from within and save your soul. Despite all the beautiful moons I have witnessed and the jugs of wine I have consumed, love has managed to slip through the cracks. I have been starry eyed looking at the beautiful moonlight, amazed at God’s glory, entranced by the magic. But having shared this beauty with many different people, I can assure you that not once have I looked at the person seated next to me and felt love. I have been so in love with every ripple in the moon lit night that the chalice in my heart has always been too full to let mortal love in. So here I am; a freak of nature; a logical, listmaking, deathly honest hopeless romantic. With the ability to love unconditionally and unendingly and the inability to feel or share that love with a human being.

(photo credits: my dearest talented brother, ahmed orko nur)

A look at the color of death

William Weitzel aka Doc aka Whitey is in his death bed. He is counting seconds and breathing tremendous breaths. The wind is choky in his throat and his heart is failing. We go in there once every two hours to turn him from side to side. The medtech Miss D, goes in every hour to give him his morphine shot. His mouth is open and he is breathing through his mouth. The nasal canula has been placed in his mouth and he seems to be sucking in great amoutns of oxygen with every gasp.

Melrose is at his side talking to him. She whispers goodbyes to the wind hoping he can hear them. "Go on Dad, it's ok. You are not doing anything wrong. Go on and we will join you as soon as we can. The dogs are probably jumping with joy thinking of you coming. Go on Dad, go. We'll come be with you as soon as we can."

His daughter Lynn sits next to her mother. She tells us that he has always been a strong man. Persistant. A family man. Perhaps that's why the journey has been delayed. His temperature is 140 and rising. His mouth looks dry. He is unresponsive and still, except for the heaving of his ribs. His face is pale and feverish, just like the rest of his body.

But his feet are cold. They have turned snow white. "The nails are turning", says Renee. The nails had turned slight purple about 4 hours ago. Now they are a ghastly grey. The nail beds are dead. Waiting for the rest of him to join them.

PS: Mon 3/22/2010/3:43pm

I called Sunrise.

Doc passed away at 7:38am.

I got done with work at 7am and had walked out the building door at 7:30am.

Blue Bottles

It’s 4:48 am on a cold Pittsburgh morning. A girl sits alone at her little nook. She is facing a great loss today. At wits end she desperately looks to her left and to her right. To her right a dark window frames snow laden tree branches. Everywhere else around her the room is a solid black. That’s all she can see or feel. The icy winter night is running through her weak veins. The little glass bottles that she had tossed out into the sea along with her desperate pleas have failed to extract a response from the world.

The oceans around the globe must be cluttered with those dragonfly blue bottles. “There must be someone out there who will find one. There must be someone who will understand. There has to be someone who will respond”, she had thought years ago when she had thrown in the very first bottle. It contained in its belly a small piece of paper with one sentence on it, “Hello, can anybody hear me?” A month later she decided to chuck another bottle out to the great blue. This time she decided to add one more sentence to the note. In her mind, the added sentence provided clarification. The third bottle had a longer note in it. By the 100th one, the writing covered two note book pages back to back, of her dearest thoughts. The girl had begun to pour her soul out into those meaningless notes.

At first she was sending out a bottle every night she saw a full moon. Then she started missing a couple of months. Then she sent one out every 3 months or so. But today marked the last day of the one year she had not tossed out a note to sea. Exactly 364 days ago she had promised herself that if she had not received a note back by the end of the year, she would give up. Tonight was the unfortunate night. Her hopes sealed and dreams abandoned, she has made a decision tonight. She has decided that there was no one else in this wide world. She has realized why her loneliness had started to become so dense and tangible. There had been no replies because no one else was out there; no one was left to find her bottles. She was all alone, the last one of her species.

Old Notes:5 I Have a Lover's Quarrel With The World

"Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 12:46am"

                                          "And she powders her hair in gold"

The epitaph for one became the definition of life for another.

I have recently come to find, by the aid of a pop-up internet psychoanalytical quiz (!) administered to me by a friend (!) that the problems in my life are merely as big as the deer I see when I walk on an imaginary pathway through a make-belief forest. Which on hindsight, was only a small doe, with glittery eyes and nimble feet. Perhaps a female chitra horin, shining brightly with an aura of its own. I had stared at the doe and it had stared right back, with utmost curiosity. And then with a sense of great bravado, the beautiful shonar horin had leaped and fled back into the depths of the woods. My interaction with the imaginary animal supposedly represents the way I handle these problems in my life. So what does that mean? I stare my troubles down without solving them. I look at them and think about them untill they become an unsolvable enigma. They eventually realise I am not the one to walk away so they flee? Idk.

Recently, I have managed to find myself in a rather awkward fork, in the twited road of life. Initially I thought that I had taken the road less travelled but that is proving to be harder to handle then I had expected. My impateince gets in the way of my sensible decision making......a lot. Confusing me, destroying what little confidence I have left. My emotions fly every which way and I get stuck in this abyss of indecision. I overthink every non- existent sign and find symbols in the wind.

I usually walk around aimlessly in the afternoon snow with my ipod stuck on the same track; "La Valse D'Amelie (Piano) by Yann Tiersen". I imagine Paris in the spring. The chill of the cobblestone sidewalks and the fresh scent of the early morning blues. Somewhere a wood stove has been cleaned and the ashes smell like home when truck drivers sit around a small wood fire, warming their cold fingers during a cold spell. I imagine an unnamed dock, a grey horizon changing slowly into a bright yellow sunrise. The sky with its many many colored facets. I imagine living in an old attic studio filled with paints, paintbrushes, rollers, papers, bins of brilliant acrylics and many semi- finished, finished painted and sketched on canvases that range in size from huge to tiny.Here every day I re-invent myself and question my existence. I can close my eyes and see the slanted window that graces one of the walls that face outside. I can see the little prismatic cut glass charm that hangs from the window sill. Every morning the sun disperses off the little charm and swarms the wooden floor with small rainbows. Every morning I miss home.

I now know that these images are my way out. Every time my brain fails me and I see the haunting golden doe of troubling thoughts, I retire my senses. As a defense mechanism the back of my eyelids become projection screens and I see my happy place. A place where in real life I would only end up if every major decision that I have ever made in life was cancelled out and re- evaluated. Thats how I fight my troubles,i stare at them blankly, with utmost respect and curiosity. Then I retreat to a place where all my troubles are non-existent. I hide.

Which is going to be my solution to this next dilemma I face. I am retreating. Finding my sanctuary and re- evaluating my choices. Not giving up. Never giving up.

Old Notes:4 Reevaluating the White Picket Fence

Friday, July 4, 2008 at 11:09pm

I consider myself to be a fairly logical person. Most of how I think and almost all of my ideals are based partially if not completely on an action versus reaction sort of equation. I tend to think and rethink the cause and effect of all that happens in my life. Surprisingly, I am also a spontaneous person. Don’t ask me to explain how that works, but apparently it does. So, sometime in the recent past I had started questioning the fiber of me. Basically asking the why, what, when, how and more importantly who questions directed towards myself. It may sound easy, who would know you better then you yourself. But, since the questions started flooding in, I found out it was quite possibly the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do. The difficulty mounted more once I discovered that the questions have no right or wrong answer, and it’s hard to forgive yourself when you are the only one making the judgment calls. I hate it. The obsession to figure out who I am only seems to lead me closer and closer to insanity. I call it a midlife crisis, one which at least for now seems to have no apparent turning or focal point.

In trying to find myself I looked at what I like to call the final product. The sparkle at the end of the tunnel. So I questioned why I was doing what I am doing right now. I am in college, studying a science; initially I had wanted to move on to medical school and someday become a doctor. My parents would be proud of me, my cousins would look up to me and as conditioned by culture, I would someday be able to attract a good fellow who’d be lucky to marry me. Jack and Jill, sitting on a tree…..and the rest is history. My very own white picket fence dream; the perfect husband who’d marry me for love, a beautiful house, a successful career and eventually (more sooner then not) children. By the time I had turned 10, the social format had already turned me into a conformist. Society needed me to believe that this was it. That was all that would and should make me happy in my life. I not only accepted the pretty picture, I also started to judge anybody who thought otherwise.

Every girl has their own white picket fence dream, their own destinies to fulfill. Some of those destinies have been conditioned and probed into them like mine was. Some are more free willing. For one the dream may end in a house in the suburbs and a minivan. For another it may end on a Buddhist monastery somewhere in the Tibetan plateau. No need to specify that there are infinitely different combinations that exist in between. Since I started to figure out what I really wanted of life, I also started to examine my dreams and goals. Breaking them down, condition by condition, stripping off all reasonable doubt, taking off every pretentious peel to find out exactly what made me happy. Imagine my surprise then, when I found out that I did not care for anything which thus far I had thought was right for me. To begin with, I did not believe in love. The all magical, all curing, tremendous power that supposedly engulfs and destroys all negativity. I never could figure how that worked and quite frankly, I don’t much care for all the crazy things people do in the name of love. Self doubt reassures me that I’ll never get into a medical school. To keep it simple; I do not want to get married, I will most definitely not marry for “love” (for convenience maybe, still considering that attitude), absolutely never want to bear children and have no want what so ever of settling down in a house. I shudder at the thought of any commitment, get bored by any relationship more then three months of age, cannot trust myself with any responsibility, get obsessed with certain facets of perfection and need to be constantly stimulated to retain a certain level of sanity.

Problem is, now that I have decided what I did not want, it has become harder then ever to try and set a different set of goals for myself. I never thought it would be this hard to find out what makes me happy. Imagine a hydro phobic’s worst nightmare; trying to swim out of a very deep, murky dark lake of sort. A lake that he voluntarily dived into. That’s what this feels like.

Dang it, I hate thinking.

Here’s a drink to solutions presenting themselves to me on silver platters, soon.