The Angry Young Man Must Die

Oh how I will miss him!

But he must go

Only to remain in memory

But dead to the world

Dead to me

And yet I will miss him

He sure was

The ideal of my life

Taking the world head on

Fearless and restless

Anger and rage

Spilling forth generously

Yet a keen eye

Always looking out

For the Underdog

For the weak, the brokenhearted

On their behalf

Boldly proclaiming Heresies

Defending the helpless

Fighting their battles

Tired, and yet fuelled by anger

The anger flourished

The arrogant helpless

Didn’t even realise

That they were helpless

Proud in their helplessness

They turned against him

He reached out to help

But they twisted his arms

The anger roared
And those whom he defended
Needed to defend themselves from him

He took on the strong

Pushed their lines back

Gained respect

But even more hatred

They hit back hard

And drove him out

And the murderous anger matured

Its venom spewed forth

Harming everything

Relentlessly, passionately

Caught between the fires

The powerful mocked

The helpless agitated

Fighting to the left

Fighting to the right

Anger, oh anger, everywhere

That is why he must go

Small battles won

But the war long lost

He must die

The weak and the strong

Have already killed him

He must definitely die

The sun must set

Maybe in his death

Probably there is redemption

Anger is not passion

It destroys rather than builds

Passion possesses care

Anger is not vision

It blinds the farsighted

Vision is compassion

Anger is not motivation

It demotivates the most motivated

Motivation is but love

Anger births hatred

It is crude, harsh, destructive

There is no place for any anger

Even for righteous anger

No right to anger, nowhere

All anger destroys

That is why he must die

It is in his death that

The helpless will see wisdom

The powerful learn compassion

But for that he must die

And I will miss him

But the angry young man

Must die

Blood on my Hands

I have killed them

Their blood surely

On my hands

Murder it was, definitely

Watching them die helplessly

Tried my best to save them

I did all I could

Stood bewildered watching

Hearing death’s deadly tune

I paced the floor up and down

Changed waters by the dozen

Care and medicines

None withholding

But nothing I did

Could save them

Three mates were they

An incredible trio I must say

When morning broke light

There remained but two

There was panic in their world

As they circled the slain

Coping with their pain

Sadness unfeigned

Watching them experience

The loss of breathe

I experienced death

As I helped with the funeral

Nagging thoughts unfolded

Cold hearted murderer

Was I not responsible?

Was I not the killer?

Was it not my water they drank?

Swum in my tank

My food eaten and air taken

Was I not responsible?

Was I not the killer?

I watched them looking at me

Their gait greatly reduced

Lethargic, unusually quite

No appetite, unseduced by food

Didn’t take that as a sign

As winter fast approached

With playfulness all but gone

I thought t’was the cold

What else could be but the chilliness?

It shrivels all to the bones

But those tiny powerful eyes

They kept staring

Recollecting good times

Memories reminiscing

Maybe pleading

To be set free

Maybe foreseeing

Changes in their destiny

The noon-day sun

Burned dim

The clouds cast their spell

She had suddenly gone still

I rose with panic under my belt

Knocked on the glass panes

Shook with might to inject life

Circling around their home

Sensing loss in the fight

What should I do?

How should I be?

The breathe all but gone

Final moments prolonging the pain

Helpless about helplessness

Every breathe now tedious

Nothing I could do would help

I turned my face

And she was gone

Ha, ha mocked Macbeth

You too now have blood on your hands

Only the big man remained

Golden glistening skin

Majestic in stride

He is powerful, he is a fighter

He will surely survive

Overcome cruel fate

The sun disappeared

A shroud of darkness

Blanketed space

Humans light a million suns

Pushing darkness backwards

The big one had suddenly gone cold

But I could do nothing onwards

With a heavy heart

I watched till I could watch no more

Eyes closing, I went to sleep

I woke up as the sun rose strong

Rested through the night

Drove darkness at dawn

I turned to see

Behold he too was gone

I paused as I gazed through

The window panes

One last time

Was I responsible?

Was I their killer?

Three beautiful creatures

Gone now, all dead

A World without Me

I see a world without me

Just as busy and green

The sun rising and setting

Its usual course following

Cities bustling bursting their seams

Lethargic countrysides lazying

The newspapers have their headlines

Internet editions changing by the hour

No mention of me

No mention of my existence

Life goes on

As it always has been

Maybe there is a mention

A little obituary

A little gathering by a graveside

With a few black clothes hired

The cars drive away

I am left alone

All gone, including me

So did I exist? Or was my life a dream

A few ol’ pictures, a drawer full of papers

A character in a few memories

Blurry, growing fuzzy, as the plot fades

With me dead, I am but an object

A bit of ash for keepsake

A bounded entity now

Left behind in memory

With me gone

The objects begin to play

Who said objects don’t grow

Expand and increase

In innumerable ways

It is now, I am immortalised

Never to die

Never to leave

Always to be

Forever to grow old

In this aging world

Only when I am

Truly no more

The Potter's Wheel

I shared my life with her and she left me

I dreamt my life together and now she is gone

As I turned and watched and looked beyond

The glorious sun setting for once broke my heart

Every waking hour

A gift wrapped in me her I gave

Every breathe was hers to keep

But she left me, disappeared

Crying out as she left, never to return ever

As I watched her storm through the window

A part of me left with her

As I braced my life and pulled in my breathe

I knew she can’t go far

It’s the horizon we share

As the sky reaches from the east to the west

And touches us wherever we be

It is that sky, the same universe

The one whole of which we are but parts

That holds us, embraces us

In our absence, there is presence

In our loneliness togetherness

Forms are created forms perish

Like clay in a potter’s hands

A thousand forms, a million designs

Clay is one and yet is all

Forming and deforming

Round and round the potter’s wheel

How else do we live with separation?

How else do we account for brokenness?

It’s in the breaking

That we are formed

Once more yet again

It’s the distance

That draws and maintains

The unity of the soul

As I gaze out of the window one last time

Holding back my pain, my haunted sorrows

Flashing images of good times, great times

If I had the legs to move and hands to grasp

Would I not run after, would I not embrace?

But there I lie lifeless

It is I who had left, I who had stormed out

The form had broken, time run out

I can see myself looking through the window

Everybody there, the universe together

She will be fine, I tell myself

She has a life full to live

A beautiful vessel is she

Potter’s favourite shape

Gold to hold, gems to keep

Destiny beckons her and live must she

To make music to make love

To write out a script

For the dear potter to spin

Much to do much to live for

Life has begun and it sure must go on

Even as I left, fading in the far distance

I knew for sure, I was certain

Unformed takes form again

In brokenness there is new creation

The universe holds us together

The Beginning and End of Memory

Today I took a new route on my walk and came upon an old-age care home. It was a neat block of lovely fresh flats tastefully built in the middle of a green carpet of grass. The view was captivating and the lovely gardens surrounding it forced me to stop and take a second look. The curtains were flung open and the colours radiating out was not only picturesque but had a strange attractiveness with a welcoming fragrance. As I began to resume my walk, it almost felt that I was being invited in to participate in the life that was happening behind those double glazed windows. I watched some of the elderly crossing rooms on walkers, while others seated, watching the telly. Some windows led into private quarters while others into community areas with settees and long dining areas. As I continued to peep in (probably I shouldn’t have), the place looked merry with vibrant colours, Sky entertainment, great food on the table, fun, laughter and friendships. As the home passed out of my peripheral vision, I glanced back one last time. This time I was looking right into the very last window of the very last room and suddenly life went into slow-motion. An attendant was helping an elderly lady get to her bed. She had one of the most beautiful angelic smiles I have ever seen and it seemed she was looking right at me. As the attendant was gently nudging her and as her body was being lifted towards the bed, her face was fixed looking through the window, looking right at me. As I turned my head away, I caught a slight wave of her hand and I walked on with a waving hand. Thoughts of birth, life and death came in unannounced and struck a conversation that I was to witness.

We come alone and leave alone – at both ends we are with strangers. That was the very first thought. If we try to remember, we have no memory either of ourselves or of those around us not just at the time of our birth but even the first few months or years. We are born among a bunch of strangers whom over time we start to call family. As the years grow by, we understand what relationships are and what father, mother, brother or sister means. Those very strangers become family. Then an uncanny thought crossed my mind – as one grows older, with the fading of memory, the family once again becomes a bunch of strangers. The memory that held those relationships together is slowly lost and along with it the relationships that it cherished. Those who held you while you were a baby are no more and those you held are not always near. Of course they do love you, and they do come in regularly to visit. They peel an apple for you and even as you bite into it, you try hard to remember, to reach out, and to connect but everything is blurred however hard you try. You seem to know them but just can’t seem to place them, to remember anything properly any longer. As they close the door behind them, you breathe out a sigh of relief. The pressure to try to remember is gone, along with them. It is better to be alone. But then you are not really alone, you are in a home full of people with whom you play games, watch telly and have your meals. But there is no pressure with this bunch of strangers, there is no strain to remember – actually, there is nothing to remember about strangers.

The similarity between childhood and old age is definitely uncanny. Another example is that at both ends, you don’t seem to have control over your own body. The body does things that even surprise you. At both stages of one’s life one is dependant and needs to be cared for and looked after. People are always around you, watching over, looking out and taking care of you. They are around you but cannot be with you. They care and do everything you want, even before you ask and they really want to get into your world, but are unable. You are bounded off and they cannot break in to your horizon. They can read your body language and sometimes it seems even your mind, but at both ends, you always remain an object of care – of loving care, but an impenetrable care.

These thoughts of birth and death made me wonder about the life lived in between. I thought about the different faces that I had seen through those fantastically colourful windows. Each one had lived a whole life with a multitude of relationships. It made me wonder about people, the ones with whom we live, and move and have our being. I wondered about those faces behind the fences– who would have shared the best days of their lives? Who did they live it with? What did they do? They all would have stories that span the time they have distanced. Stories that narrate their time, stories in which they were uniquely the lead actor – the central character. In all their actions, all their emotions, and in all their relationships, every role they played, each one lived in a uniquely personal way. But an actor does not play just one character; he plays different roles, different parts. The myth of the unified self! Maybe there are unique stylistic characteristics in an actor that identifies them irrespective of the roles they play, like Al Pacino’s coarse voice. But a good actor is able to disrobe and empty himself, undergo kénōsis before every new role, so that he becomes nothing but the role – a different person in every new role, completely immersed in the role, he does not play the role, he is the role.

But she is still the same, is she not? But how is she the same and to whom is she the same? In the different stories of her lived life, she has played different roles and different groups of people have seen a different her, so how is she the same. But then at least to herself, and in her memory, even as she draws all these different stories together into one magnanimous whole, a book with each story a chapter – but one book, however, a book that can’t be found in a library, unavailable to any other person, not even available to herself objectively. Only available to her in her memory where she is always the actor, the editor, the producer. But is that it! What happens when her memory fades! What is the use of producing stories only for oneself and for them to be burnt to ashes with the passing away of memory? There must be another way out. Would there be another way to keep these stories alive, to ensure that they have a longer shelf life than the fading memory? But then there are those fragments she leaves behind, traces of herself in co-actors, crew and the entire production team of every story. Maybe even in the lives of the bystanders who watched her perform in front of life’s camera. They all take away traces of her. I suppose we leave ourselves behind as fragments in those who share the stories with us. A story brings different characters together and each character completes the other. My part and role is necessary for the completion of the story and for the other characters to perform their roles. So in performing my role, my character, playing my part, I am giving myself to the other, to complete their role. Just as my part would be incomplete, without any sense without those myriads upon myriads of actors whose parts have completed me, and given sense to my stories, similarly my part completes each one of them. But I would not know what I leave behind, it is left behind, even as it leaves me, it becomes a part of the other, in the unique way they have appropriated and received it. It no longer is mine; it has become a stranger to me, it is partaken by the other.

All I have are my memories, my special seat in the balcony, in my own theatre, where my stories are screened, for the audience of one. Surely, a day will come when all this will not matter, these memories will fade away and all these others will come to become a bunch of strangers again.  Yes, that day will probably come soon, for me and for my memory, when I am no more even to myself, and the stories become incoherent. But these stories live on. They have taken a life of their own. They transcend me even as I leave them behind, in every other person who has walked, talked and woven stories with me, together. Not just the chosen few who played roles opposite me, but the hundreds with whom she shared conversations, meetings, coffees. The thousands of bystanders who watched her and maybe never uttered a word, but they have got a bit of her, a tiny part of her that completes them. You leave behind a fragment, a special part of yourself in each of them.

Then what should I do and how should I be – create beautiful memories, memories that I can live within. Memories that will last me a lifetime and more, memories that will keep me going, even in their faded form, memories that will be the world I can slip into when I am alone, when once again I will be with a bunch of strangers, with death sitting at the foot of my bed.