Somewhere within that one hour I must have started shivering, uncontrollably. And I knew I must have felt some semblance of tears rising in my throat. And I didn’t feel like living, I didn’t feel like going on in a world that allows these things to continue. I hate myself, my religion, the society I live in. verses in the Quran make me shudder, because I cant believe that anyone they’d call God would advocate something like that. Shudder to think of the lashes those protestors felt, shudder to think of the power the law of this godforsaken land wields. I am not afraid, I am sick. I am angry… and anger seems to have drained the energy from my hands and body. As if at every step, at every single turn I learn how cruel life is, how fundamentally wrong and unfair and unjust to just about anybody, and that nothing can be done to untangle this mad, horrible choking mess that this sadistic, totalitarian religion of ours has wreaked upon us… I have no faith. Not in mankind, not in man, not in any of his Gods. No God of man could ever assure him the right to burn and rape and victimize and torture and stone to death someone who has as much right to freedom, life, love, sexuality, infidelity, faith as he does. And if God does, if God does do all these things, if mankind itself was one masochistic act of divine chootiyapan, I want to quit. Now. I don’t want to belong to a religion that says all men are equal, but women… have special laws. I don’t want to belong to a society that deliberately misinterprets and advocates these laws, like a misshapen, deformed child whose idea of power is to cut of each of his imperfect limbs, one by one so that the right hand may have supreme dominance. I don’t want to live a life that lets me forget these things, slowly and gently easing my mind, soothing it, singing it its peaceful little lullabies like the tinkling of gold coins…. Everything I touch; the clothes I wear, the books from which I read, the places of learning and worship seem to have been made by millions of tiny hands, millions of starving little children screaming bug eyed, toothless, lice-bitten, bawling in their flea-ridden beds. It’s hard to believe in anything. I’m not asking for sympathy. If you think I couldn’t handle it, that I couldn’t really deal with the little trickles of truth as they hit me, you were right. I can’t. I cried when the first sword fell, I gave up the minute they killed the first innocent person. I felt, very honestly, that if someone who has done nothing wrong can be annihilated without anything moving except the dust that they fall in, then I definitely have no business to go on living.

if you could lend your ears to even the softest of voices around you.
if you could overcome your fear of the tiny winged insects that crash fitfully into your window at night
if you could learn to ignore the mad buzzing of voices judging what they dont understand
understanding what they cant judge
forgetting all that they cant be bothered to learn....
if you could learn
to respect things you cant relate to
to let go of the dreams that you hold on to with neurotic tenacity
to give up, back down, move on
stop thinking....

afternoon sky;
pink porcelain and
blue marble
held beneath a pale opal shimmer
this flushed strawberry sun
glowing, softly behind
this hazy veil of winter.

clear morning ice;
the air, sharp, like something metallic
glittering, beads of white fire on the grass
one distant, cold, rimless disc in the sky.
sharper, bluer, a world underwater;
like blue glass, like steel blades
another teethsucking dawn,
another
skinprickling day.

the story behind the "schwang".
because there is a schwang.
schwang-schwang, schwang-schwang.
its the feel of scruffy knees peeking out from a worn grey school skirt, ending in socks and tennis shoes, schwang- schwanging back and forth over the edge of a desk. side to side, aagey peechey. front kick back kick schwang schwang, schwang schwang.
its the feel of the same knees, now covered in pjs, perched on a kitchen counter, kicking against the wooden cabinets below. schwang-boom-schwang. schwang-schwang-boom-schwang.
its not just the knees, actually. the twiggy little lower calves joined at the knee enjoy it immensely, too. love the fall, the kick, the swing, the i-cant-feel-my-feet that comes with it. so they kick out. dhuzh!-schwang-boom-schawng-DHUZH!
the beatles even wrote a song about it.
yellow submarine...
"in the towwwnnn... (schwang schwang) where i was bornnnn (schwang schwang) lived a mannnnn... (schwang schwang) who sailed to seaaa..... (schwang schwang)"

yes. let profundity go to pot. sit back, chill, listen to some beatles... and schwang.

Blue Roses has an angry 12 year old sister named Thorn... this is her story:


i found poe's a tell tail heart realy haunting
but then i started reading the magic faraway tree
R.I teacher hoo v coll jojo (donaskwy)
is realy geting on my nerves
i asked her
why god is colled he
why there are no female prophets
why our name as in female or woman is just an attachment to man & male
and she went on about how we cry and can't handle emotions and need to be looked after like tose ppl in hostiples who thro up all over the floor without their bucket
HA! men are our thro up buckets !

another time we wrote a letter in class and he told girls to write saheli and boys to write dost
as i was alredy mad at him for making karima,aks and nabs his favorites and constanly compareing me to them , i wrote mere pyaray dost akbar and he cut out that and wrote .....sahaeli and cut out aks name completely and whereever i wrote toom kaysaiy ho he wrote toom kaysee ho

chavinists, the lot of them

i got my lib card back
i wrote 2 short poems


money
i've got some money
i want more
ive got 2 dollars
i want 4
no matter how much money youve got
and hav'nt spent it
your money will always leave you
discontented



lily
words may hurt
and self faith may be few
but your part of the sky
your what makes it blue

have hope in your heart
and a lily in your hand
and you'll trust yourself
wherever you stand

life may not be perfect
times maynot be best
but your best whe your different
more you than the rest

okso more later
luv ya much
gota go dye my hair green

-Thorn

"Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion."
- from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, W. Blake.

"The Rolling Stones and the Beatles are for blowing your mind, the Doors are for when your mind is already gone"- from amazon.com 's review of The Doors album

"Fitnaa: chaos, anarchy. it also denotes the subversion of the established order through discord. interestingly, it also refers to the moment of primal undifferenciation out of which order arose and which therefore, is also the source of Divine and human creativity..."
-Neelam Hussain, The Narrative Appropriation of Saima Coercion; Engendering the Nation- State, Vol I

"the blues are how life feels as it goes on" -anon.

"Maybe there's a God above
And all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
And it's not a cry you can hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah...."

"terey bina zindagi sey shikva to nahi;
terey bina zindagi bhi leykin zindagi to nahi..."

leave my mind alone for an instant and she'll die. shes getting old, it seems... old, tired, stupid. like an old dog. like an old dog no one wants to play with anymore. shes losing her instinct, she losing her ability to taste, smell, feel, touch... numb, awful, cold, numbess that wont leave. hell froze over. i stand at the top of the stairwell, stare down at the plastic chips packets on the sofas three stories below and the people in blue and red shirts running up and down, up and down, circling the image of those sofas, those chip packets below me and i stick my toe out. pretty toe. scuffy sneaker, leather and lace. looks nice against the image of the sofas down below, framed by a rising stairwell. take a picture. take a picture like you would of the the ray of light that resembled a falling meteorite, on the bathroom door. plummeting, two dimensional streak of glowing yellow heat. when i go home, will those words still be etched into my door? to this day, i dont know who wrote them. the only person i can think of is my mother... and why, why would she take a permenant marker, go into my bathroom and write behind my door "What Really Counts" ? what are you saying? "what really counts"- is it a question? is it an incomplete statement? how could you leave it hanging there, black on those ugly concrete tiles that id give anything, now, to rest my head against? how could you leave me here, with silence ringing in my ears, with the howling emptiness in my brain thrashing like a fish poisoned with oxygen...here, staring through blurry weak eyes at a couple of red chip packets on a couple on green sofas placed right of the centre of my vision, my toe occupying the bottom left quadrant of the frame, my freezing white knuckles placed dead centre as i think... falling.... is almost like flying isnt it? and i think if you place yourself strategically enough, you'll land on the sofa, right? no reason to get depressed, or excited. the last thing i want to do before i die is jump off a cliff, and see if i can miss the ground. :P

From Serge L Levitsky's intro to Das Kapital - Karl Marx
'When the capitalist society is over thrown, the worker will retain the full value produced by him, and at the same time have access to the "constant capital"* which all the workers will own in common...'
*previously defined as machinery, mineral deposits, raw materials, etc.

The conventional image of God as a single, humanoid being simply reiterates the belief that all systems must be centrally controlled, otherwise there will be chaos. Faith tells us that God is, in fact, present within each one of us and therefore the universe itself, if looking from a spiritual and scientific perspective, is an example of perfect anarchy. Moreover the central power that controls each entity within the universe is not an entity within the universe itself, or a group of entities. It is an intrinsic force that prevents things from spinning out of control. Hence a system of perfect anarchy does, and has, successfully existed… since the beginning of time.

Then again, isn’t the universe in a constant state of entropy? If disaster is inevitable, does it matter how we go- as capitalists or anarchists? Anarchists… that way, we all die equally horrible deaths, right?
Not quite…

***************

‘Constant capital, that lies in the capitalists hands, has only stored up or potential value.
Labor (variable capital) alone is entitled to the full benefits of constant capital.’

Who do we get rid of?
For the peasants of the French Revolution, the answer was simple. Us was the inmates of Bastille, Them was the bourgeoisie. But in a system that claims a democratic framework, the lines that divide Us and Them are very fine. We are so inextricably tangled in this mesh that we are capable of being victims and oppressors, simultaneously. We know that the government is not solely at fault (ref. the Keynesian school of thought) despite the media's efforts to make the word “government” synonymous with evil.

**************

On competition: competition b/w capitalists ↑ ---> misery of proletariat ↑
‘This process, according to Marx, is an inevitable aspect of the mechanism of capitalist society, just as the exploitation urge is an inescapable phenomenon in the presence of competition. He maintains that this urge is not necessarily inherent (!!!) in human nature but is dictated by the class structure of a society which compels individuals and groups to act according to their narrow self interest.’

Awfully chicken and eggish, don’t you think? Which came first- the establishment of class or the desire to compete?
How was class established without the desire to compete?
Ok, then, what if we abolish class… and some individuals want to start racing again?
You want to hold back individuals… “For the good of the colony”?
Like I said. Chicken and eggish.
Assumption of evil- conditioned response? (Ref. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley.)

*************

anyway. moving on

'Competition, in Marx's analysis, gradually leads to the concentration of accumulated capital in fewer and fewer hands, snce the largest, and therefore most efficient, of the competing groups is bound to absorb and eliminate the smaller ones.'

Darwin's evolution theory.

so, then... are all men equal?
are all people, damn it- are all people equal?

hands that trace their way along the neck
along the skin, loving it, enjoying it when she
turns her head so that hands
are cushioned between a heaven and earth of soft, honey-buttery smoothness
she takes off her glasses when she talks to you as if
its another barrier between us thats gone...
even if i didnt see you
i know the smell
the taste
the texture of your skin
the exact moist, tantalising flavour of your tongue

you come alive in my imagination.

you were
always so much more
wonderful
in retrospect.

Burning

its the warm, tingling smell of charcoal and dust in my mouth on the way to the dorm at 3 o'clock in the morning. its the way the air tastes when someone leaves the door open and the moths fry on the electric insect killer. its a hot, buttery summer twilight and the smell of danger in long, unwinding corridors.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and day sof hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a drying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all-
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
Ata times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

sometimes i cant talk to you any more.
sometimes you're bouncing along on a wavelenght completely not my own.
go through the long list of all the beautiful places youve been and you'll notice- my world wasnt one of them. i never went where you did, and you never came here. and that hurts.
i cant talk to you anymore when you speak of things that i wanted to see, but never will.
i cant even live each moment through you, because all i want, so passionately, is for each moment to be mine.
and i can already feel us drifting. i can already feel myself ashamed. if i ever thought we were even remotely the same then i was flattering myself.
and i was wrong.
you're my window to things better than what i have, and theres no way of getting out so id sometimes rather just close the curtains on you.
when you speak, please keep the condescension out of your voice.
i know im not as good as you are, and that i will never be as good as you will get...
but you're my friend. you're not supposed to remind me of these things.
and yet you do.
time, and time
again.

i realise that im holding you responsible for my insecurities.
maybe im not asking you to do anything.
maybe im just telling you the way i feel.