Kolkata Dreaming

Missing my annual trip through Kumortuli bylanes, missing home

Perverse Pleasure

"How long will the pain last?" a broken hearted mourner asked me.

"All the rest of your Life." I have to answer truthfully.

We never quite forget.

No matter how many years pass, we remember.

The loss of a loved one is like a major operation.

Part of us is removed, and we have a scar for the rest of our lives.

As years go by, we manage.

There are things to do, people to care for,

tasks that call for full attention. 

But the pain is still there,

not far below the surface.

We see a face that looks familiar, 

hear a voice that echoes,

see a photograph in someone's album,

see a landscape that once we saw together,

and it seems as though a knife were in the wound again.

But not so painfully.. And mixed with joy, too.

Because remembering a happy time is not all sorrow,

it brings back happiness with it.

How long will the pain last?

All the rest of your life.

But the things to remember is that not only the pain will last, but the blessed memories as well.

Tears are proof of life. The more love, the more tears.

If this be true, Then how could we ever ask that the pain cease altogether.

For then the memory of love would go with it.

The pain of grief is the price we pay for love.

– Martha White

Perverse Pleasure

Cruising 99

BY GARRETT HONGO

for Lawson Fusao Inada and Alan Chong La

A Porphyry of Elements

Starting in a long swale between the Sierras

   and the Coast Range,

Starting from ancient tidepools of a Pleistocene sea,

Starting from exposed granite bedrock,

From sandstone and shale, glaciated, river-worn,

   and scuffed by wind,

Tired of the extremes of temperature,

   the weather's wantonness,

Starting from the survey of a condor's eye

Cutting circles in the sky over Tehachapi and Tejon,

Starting from lava flow and snow on Shasta,

   a head of white hair,

   a garland of tongue-shaped obsidian,

Starting from the death of the last grizzly,

The final conversion of Tulare County

   to the internal-combustion engine,

Staring from California oak and acorn,

   scrubgrass, rivermist,

   and lupine in the foothills,

From days driving through the outfield clover

   of Modesto in a borrowed Buick,

From nights drinking pitchers of dark

   in the Neon Moon Bar & Grill,

From mornings grabbing a lunchpail, work gloves,

   and a pisspot hat,

From Digger pine and Douglas fir and aspen around Placerville,

From snowmelt streams slithering into the San Joaquin,

From the deltas and levees and floods of the Sacramento,

From fall runs of shad, steelhead, and salmon,

From a gathering of sand, rock, gypsum, clay,

   limestone, water, and tar,

From a need or desire to throw your money away

   in The Big City,

From a melting of history and space in the crucible

   of an oil-stained hand—

Starting from all these, this porphyry of elements,

   this aggregate of experiences

Fused like feldspar and quartz to the azure stone

   of memory and vision,

Starting from all of these and an affectionate eye

   for straight, unending lines,

We hit this old road of Highway Ninety-Nine!

Perverse Pleasure

May 1, 2017 The New Yorker Issue
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/saturday-night-as-an-adult

 

Saturday Night as an Adult
By Anne Carson

We really want them to like us. We want it to go well. We overdress. They are narrow people, art people, offhand, linens. It is early summer, first hot weekend. We meet on the street, jumble about with kisses and are we late? They had been late, we'd half-decided to leave, now oh well. That place across the street, ever tried it? Think we went there once, looks closed, says open, well. People coming out. O.K. Inside is dark, cool, oaken. Turns out they know the owner. He beams, ushers, we sit. And realize at once two things, first, the noise is unbearable, two, neither of us knows the other well enough to say bag it. Our hearts crumble. We order food by pointing and break into two yell factions, one each side of the table. He and she both look exhausted, from (I suppose) doing art all day and then the new baby. We eat intently, as if eating were conversation. We keep passing the bread. My fish comes unboned, I weep pretending allergies. Finally someone pays the bill and we escape to the street. For some reason I was expecting snow outside. There is none. We decide not to go for ice cream and part, a little more broken. Saturday night as an adult, so this is it. We thought we'd be Nick and Nora, not their blurred friends in greatcoats. We cover our ears inside our souls. But you can't stop it that way.

Taraxacum (Dandelions)

Photo by:  PHILIPPE HUGUEN/GETTY

disappearing into nothingness

 

have you ever had the feeling that you are being torn to shreds?
that your existence may no longer be a reality- that you will cease?

there is a strange restlessness as i feel the diminishing, the daily cutting away

there is no fight left in me

only salt tears which seem lacerate as they slide down

i don't even know what i am mourning

because isn't it my deepest desire to stop being?

perhaps it is what comes after that scares me

the great unknown?

or perhaps nothing at all? 

Perverse Pleasure

Requiem w/ Eye Roll

JAY HOPLER

No minister mild of manner, moon-

    Faced over his tab collar,

    My grandfather; rather, a gambler,

An embezzler, a loan

    Shark, a con man, a womanizer

W/ booze on his breath & both feet on

    The gas of whatever

        Jalopy got left unlocked.

        He even borrowed the gun he shot

            Himself w/, the smartass.

        Of course, he conked

    In a cornfield in Winchester,

Indiana, so that joke was on

Him—. Oblivion.

How's that for a punchline?

It's not you anymore

I don't know why sometimes old obsessions fail to die
The hurt still hurts and the tears still prick the back of my eyes
As I wistfully gaze at where life has led

Across continents, datelines and a whole milieu of feelings in between

Now, that you have someone to call your own...

And I have my hand to hold 
I sometimes wonder what it was all about and what I still try to hold
It is that me that I miss
The innocence and the angst and the wide-eyedness
The blushes and the desperate hopefulness
Everything washed away in the summer rain
The pain, the pain of the stabbing words

The final cleanse that ended it all
Not just a relationship but also a phase of life

When I was happiest of all