Adjustment

Poem in Cottage Reader: Adjustment

Do a running stitch on the wound

Where the old photograph was oozing out

Make sure you adjust the volume

Coming from that pendant in the jewellery box

Hide familiar words on high tension wires

With spaghetti, tomato sauce and cheese

While you cut the tears out of your hair

Fix the fireflies on your black chemise

Eat the gaps between your fingers

Remember to water the flowers kept in books

Submerge your eyes in the stop bath daily

Fix the rewinding with a Plaster of Paris mouth

Dip the tip of your pen in freshly made brine

And strap your stomach to the brain

When you walk, throw bread crumbs for a trail

You never know when you want to be sought out

Make a papier-mâché mask

By beating pieces of poems to a pulp

Adjust its tones to suit your changing premise

From colour, to sepia, to black and white

Then take a compass and trace your phobias

When you reach a hand littered with little stick-on eyes

Enter the television and enact your favourite scene

But, always stay away from static, in the early hours of morning

Writings from that place

I do not know the difference between before and after

Inside the shopping mall, night could well have been the day

the only indication of a present

is that pain in the feet, possibly due to walking a long way.

but lets not talk about that

it is not what I wish to talk about

I want to mark this moment

and separate it from this long continuum

why is it important, you ask

to just type down my tryst with nausea

passing it for a poetic event

umm, perhaps its not! After all,

we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes again

stuck in our solitudes

Like a dog running after its tail

wait, I am not sure if that's the right metaphor at all.

it is a struggle

to remove the glasses, tinted by the pasts

transgression has become a victim of its own abundance

How does one write about uneventfulness?

Again, this is about marking!

distinguishing this moment from the next

like tagging a photograph as 

"the day when we went..."

but such moments happen lesser and lesser

the blues hold the falling pieces in place

On autopilot most things happen

but time runs out

like excess water seeping through mud in a flower pot

I shift from muse to muse

expecting a tour-de-force moment to happen

but I am sure that when that moment comes

I will reject it, and move on!

As so over I would be

that I would have played all the possible scenarios of that situation already...

Poems in the Cottage Reader

http://cottagereader.com/tag/ritika-kaushik-poems/

He sat and thought about it today


 I saw I thought I sat today
[There is a dirt spot on the room floor]
And we need to deal with it
 [We need to clean the dirt spot]
Because there is unhappiness
[I saw the dirt spot only now]
But it is the reason not to be

I saw I thought I sat today
End dirt
Clean with reason
Dirt spot has room
Unhealthiness unhealthiness

 I saw I thought I sat today
 [There is no dirt spot on the room floor]
It was important to end it

I saw I thought I sat today
I thought a dirt spot today

I am That

I am that


Tumultuous tumultuous
The temple of faith
In search of its gods

Surreptitious surreptitious
The center of life
In search of its odds

Sumptuous sumptuous
The supper of greed
In search of its nods

Incestuous incestuous
The desire of difference
Polka polka dots

Nativity

Nativity

One, two,
A foamy dew

Three, four,
A priestly whore

Five, six
Dragons bleat

Seven, Eight
There’s no gate

Nine, Ten
Three wise men

Of Unhappiness ~ Well actually no!...its something else I think-sept 13 2010

[Ok I thought I'll write this down for perspective. All right allright even I can be touchy sumtimes...u knw]

"But all joy wants eternity—Wants deep, wants deep eternity"

Loneliness is not about being alone. It's about that moment when you want someone by your side but you got none. So essentially its not a feeling of being deserted, its the feeling of not being at peace with just yourself. And Bam! there goes the whole argument for individuality. But, that's only half-true. It's about wanting, sometimes needing, not having
But never about being.

Hence, a desire, a dream.

From within, Not without.

That abrupt silence, when you want something said, something heard.

Want
Want
Want

You see that's the key word. Do we need what we want, or do we want what we need.

Or perhaps its the need to want...

Kharrar Kharrar sept 27 2010

Kharrar kharrar

do pahiyon ki cheekh
mujhe gusse se latadte hue
basketwali ladybird pink

Door khade, mitti ka tel haath mein
dus saal purane lock
mein kahin chuppi hui mai

Kharrar kharrar

aawaz waise hi jab gusse mein
tumne cycle mujhe thama,
bus le li thi,

Main aaj bhi
ghar ja rahi hoon
usse ghasitte hue

Aaj koi maamooli din nahi
Mai ghanti baja, pedal maar, gir padi
gusse mein cheekhi,

Aur mujhse aayi aawaz

Kharrar kharrar

An Idea about Art June 3 2010

I think that the basic design of human endeavour beyond survival is Art, art of tackling boredom. Sometimes we get so involved in it that we forget we can always invent something new if one thing doesn't work. Other than that if boredom finds it way back again, one can just let it settle like Dust. Boredom for the sake of boredom, art for the sake of art, but it all for the sake of meaning. And so we finally would have nothing. Unless dust counts, although flowers do seem to.

And to look beyond this limited argument, there is also the art of survival which precedes the art of tackling boredom. Sometimes we confuse the two. And I wonder whether I am doing that right now.

At least I am happy achieving irony eve of 27th sept 2009

Just about 46 Minutes to go. It's as if I am falling at such a speed that I don't even realize it. The ground almost seems welcoming. No, its not a sad realization of being a year older, it is more about the realization of inevitability. Being a person who can't get used to things, even with a lotta difficulty, I seem to shrink instead of grow each year. The confusion rises with each new realization and the reason attains a more existential pathos. As the hands of the clock rush to meet each other in a loving hug, I sit and imagine what difference will it make. Pessimism. Cynicism. No, its not just that. i am just peeling the onion only to realize that it doesn't have a center. It's made of layers. So as I uncover each layer and accord to one more year of living, my quantitative analysis fails as I realize that there's nothing inside but a tabula rasa [blank sheet of paper].

But, then I need to write to pass this tick-tocking of the clock inside. Before the phone starts to ring and I answer it with a genuine smile, I need to know and understand this ritual of growing old. I need to fill another blank sheet to feel that I have achieved something. I need to know I still can make an impact. Even if it is on a binary code where everything is made of 1 and 0.

22 years gone. 22 minutes left. Signing off.

Rituals 26 Sept 2009

A group gathers to sing a birthday song
Another fights over a weighing machine
Houses are put on fire, buses are stopped
as a cartoonist is convicted through humour laws
A chemist happily sells a carton of pills
A child is born somewhere and billed
A few keys pushed, an artificial click
we have a poet chanting Tick tock tick.

Randomizing Blip Nov 10 2009

Found a new God
shunned the Priest
slaved by freedom
tied by proximity
deafening bangles
exploding ink
electric stagnancy
microscopic blink
syllabic communication
wet matchsticks
dried fertility
oxymoronic hints
catastrophic mercy
evolutionary quip
plastic insurgency
domestic brief

Noting down Nov 20 2009

When relationships make no sense, when you are there and you are not there, when the line of balance is so thin you just want it to tip as you can't handle the anxiety; there is thread of hope that binds it all into a fantasy. This thread tangles more than it sets into order. While one happily sees each day pass by, on a day to day basis, the wage being a hope to wake up the next day and look forward to something; meaning is completely relative and loses its meaning altogether. Compartmentalisation becomes the only way to sustenance. What if suddenly we find that the code words we had used to catalog our mind and memory have been tampered with. When everything becomes irrelevant, what is there to look forward to. and if nothing then what we are left with is a huge mass of time in our hands, that is dead weight. No possibility of wormholes then only infested rots that ooze of stagnancy. And to say anything to someone, half knowing you won't mean it the moment you utter it and still saying it is like writing this very note here.