We can do all the things other couples do while traveling,
If only you would just be here.

We can be naive and discuss occasions,
Prematurely plan the seasons,
Talk about what we miss from back home,
Then fall silent to contemplate the reasons.

I’ll build us a hut in the mountains
Where we can eat and sleep and stay,
And when fantasy fades and the dream is over,
It’ll be our time to go away.

If you came I’d be delighted,
You’d fill the void only you could fill.
When you’re sleeping I would sit awake,
Feeling grateful by the window-sill.

On a bus-ride you can sit curled on your side,
Throw your legs over mine.
When it’s over you’ll get up
While I nurse the blood flow back from steady decline.

We’ll laugh at the absurd,
And pore over the ridiculous.
We’ll stare wide-eyed at the unimaginable,
And proudly feel superior to the superfluous.

We’ll share earphones for music,
And watch movies squinting over a tiny screen.
We’ll run out of batteries just before climax,
Stifling in our bladders a primeval scream.

Sometimes the mist in our heads will cloud judgment,
We’ll hold each other tight and close on a cold night.
When the fog dissipates in the late alpine morning
We’ll breathe in a long freshness to know that we were right.

I’ll write to you like you’re still far away,
You’ll reply in a note on the table.
I’ll struggle with how to respond,
To communicate thoughts I’m not able.

We’ll walk in the dust of uncertainty,
Not ever knowing what tomorrow holds.
We’ll navigate our rivers of preconceptions,
With each stroke chip away at ancient molds.

If only you would just be here
I’d tell you so many things.
Every night spent under cover of many layers,
Every day worn down shedding many skins.

Hi everyone,

I haven't been around in a while and the reason is that I've been traveling through the Himalayas for the past month and a half.  I have a lot more traveling to do still, so I'll be here for another few months.

I've been posting pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/pranshuarya.  Check them out and let me know which ones you like.


Pranshu.

She lays there, clothed and surrounded in hospital white, body battered, soul shattered. Arms are at her side, one leg is resting peacefully flat while the other points to the ceiling, held up by nylon rope, forcibly kept straight in a hospital white cast. How she got here she doesn’t remember, but all she sees now is her limp body in front of her and all she feels is the lack of her own presence in all joints bones muscles. She’s utterly motionless, at peace everywhere except inside, where it really matters. He’s with her, quiet as she is but for the rare remark on the benign, the unimportant. (The weather’s been overcast for a few days, the relatives are calling and feeling snubbed, coworkers the same…) She stares at the ceiling directly above her and asks the hospital white to pass the time rather swiftly, but when she looks to the clock only two minutes have passed. So her day passes in mental agony and the physical numb. It’s late in the evening, time again for her to relieve herself. She can’t move and he must help her. He knows what to do. She feels his hand on her crotch (at least there’s still sensation there, she thinks). Staring straight up still, her eyes swell at the thought of her own helplessness. She’s looking down on herself now from above, the devil of her soul hovering in stark contrast to the hospital white ceiling, laughing at her condition of shame and disgrace, a scalpel in hand cutting at her pride without anasthetic. Abruptly she turns her head to the side, closes her eyes to swallow the tears she feels are coming. (They come anyway, she can’t stop them quickly enough.) His gentle hands feel what his eyes do not see, what she is feeling inside but cannot bring herself to say, even to him. He feels her shame, and although distressed by it, smiles that childlike smile. He moves his hands away and softly touches her arm. After a few seconds delay she brings her dilated eyes to look into his, and hears him say these words: “Some day soon I’ll be lying there and you’ll be standing here in my place. Tell me, how would you want me to feel then? I’ll be entirely in your hands, under your care, at your mercy and exposed. Will you want me to feel ashamed and my pride slighted? Am I not you and you me? Aren’t we one and the same? Then why these tears, this sad loathing for yourself?” He doesn’t know whether his words can or will reach her, but he means them just the same. She sees his smile in a blurry picture through the tears, and although they don’t change how she feels, his words warm the temperature of her consciousness just enough to turn her head once again to the side in peaceful resignation so he may continue where he left off.

Political boundaries are so powerful, so embedded in our conscience and consciousness that not only do we live within their confines, we also feel according to them. I'm not condemning things as they are - simply observing, for I have a firm and sincere belief that things are this way not due to any one person or group's evil actions or intentions.

First there was the human. Then came man and woman, followed by the Christian, the Jew, the Hindu, the African. Then came the royalty and the peasantry, the proprietors and the slaves. Now what do we have? Muslims, gays, lesbians, disabled, Afghani, Iraqi, etc. etc. The labels just keep piling up don't they?

Never content with what he has or what he’s given, the human animal forrages far and wide in hope of possibility and opportunity. This scavenging brings him progress and evolution, but it is also the cause of much pain and distress. Where to strike the balance between the two realities is a difficult question and an even tougher task, but still a few exemplaries of his species manage to do just that. With their light they lead the rest, who blindly follow, not fully realizing what they’re following or what they believe in. They’re still evolving, seeking what’s better, the truth. The wise one has realized that better is always relative, forever in perpetuity, and so his search comes to a quiet end, like a forestfire raging inside of him that suddenly dies one day, peacefully going to sleep after years of frantic, directionless activity. The fire served in him a vital purpose, and now that it’s gone and silence reigns he can console those in whom it still burns with full force. He knows there’s no consolation to be given, but the burning man will take anything, like a drowning man will cling to a splinter. The burning man is the everyman. We’re born burning: with curiosity as children, desires as adults, and regrets as life winds down and the fire no longer has anymore forest to swallow. Those who’ve reached the higher plane where the fire of evergreen curiosity has ceased to burn have traversed a unique path, one designed just for them by divinity. They are grateful and look humbly upon life, illumined now with the flame of compassion for their fellow man who is still tortured and still tortures himself and his kind in his sincere but misguided search for truth, beauty, and peace.

Two poles, distant and irreconcilable. On one side is what's noble and exalted and on the other what's vulgar and subhuman. It's tiresome switching back and forth between the two opposing modes of being, of seeing, of relating judging and feeling.

One end is the mother and grandmother; the other the mistress, the slut. In one corner the bride stands in sparkling white; in the other she lies naked, the very same night, in her husband's bed.

I picture your open arms longing for my embrace, stretched as big as your love, spanning one pole to the other.

I also picture your legs, also open, wide as the poles themselves, longing for another embrace; one that's less talked about but as original and natural as the other one.

How we morph our interaction from the field of one pole to the other is the art called relationship.

What's life without color? Not color the unfortunate blind cannot see, but the color gifted upon each human mind to fill the imagination for the future and memory for the past.

Memory carries in it the imagination to build castles and shanties around events we walked through (sometimes with our eyes and minds closed). Color makes it happen, color that lights up the brain and the heart.

A summer of love, winter of heartbreak. A spring of success, autumn of failure and false hopes. What affords these poetic descriptions is the color we bestow upon the happenings of our lives.

That summer of love was so perfect, so magical, so green. It was bursting with life each and every moment. The color green pervades all the songs we listened to, all the days and nights we lived through, the drives we took together and the places we stopped only to look at each other some more.

The winter that followed was also perfect in its frigid-blue warm blanket heartache. God was smiling down on me, telling me what goes up simply must come down. The winter also had its songs - ones I listened to alone. The drives I took and the days and nights I passed were all my own, not shared with you or anyone else. In that they were special. What else but color affords such exclusivity to call something so deeply my own, even if it be sorrow?

The walks, the smell of the air, the questions in my mind on a certain day forever etched in memory - all these are color that fill my picture. I will always remember the buildup to each rare moment of truth, epiphany, ecstasy, and denoument. Color pervaded the portentous play of the clock; color of unknown, mystery, blissful ignorance of both near and distant futures that defines the living man.

I live and dream in vivid color. It's my constitution and from what I've seen, it's unlike most others'.

Words bridge the gap. So much stands in between but words they bridge the gap. Between father and son, mother and daughter, brother to sister, brother to brother. Words bridge the gap between generations, between ancestor and progenitor. History is a gap bridged by words. Fact and fiction, account and imagination, these are opposites between which words bridge the gap. Between city state country continent, words bridge the gap. The gap between lovers is often bridged by words. Many times they’re not sufficient, but sometimes you discover only too late a few words were all you needed. Sometimes words even bridge that gap between your legs.

Press you in my eyes squeeze out your essence. Dress you in disguise drown out your presence. Live to see another morning drink to sleep another night. Strain to see the picture forming Freeze as it does from sheer fright. Take you to the corner make you remove the mask. Twist you till you’re a little warmer till you submit and let me bask. Pictures and words will never speak the face and notion of what I say. Heroes and villains will come out bleak in the ordinariness of another day. Beauty in your eyes crowds my vision, beauty in your lips drowns my voice. Beauty in your touch grants omission to unbearable fuzzy outside noise. Pendulum of time swings making music in rhythmic sound. The eagle soars on boundless wings reveling in possibility of what be found. A rhyme the world never saw a rhyme the world never will see. A rhyme frozen, let to thaw a rhyme not content to just be.

I shivered a long time ago. Wearing thick track pants and matching sweatshirt, curled into a ball in the center of the bed under a blanket and a quilt, I shivered because I was feverish. It was the happiest day of life thus far because I wouldn’t have to go to school the next day.

Now I realize how small my world was back then. I can see the house, the nearby park, even the school in one picture in my mind. It seemed so large then that little world of that tiny town; it’s all there was. The few milestones found in every town comprised the waypoints I led my life by: the grocery store, the park, the school, the railway track, the bike paths.

The world - my world - has gotten bigger since but the feeling is still the same. Today’s new and larger purview is only as complete as yesterday’s smaller ignorant one, and no more. Everything I need is here now, everything I needed was there then.