new sorta kinda poems

Metro and Toxi City

escape, artist

escape. from the world to the word. from steel and stone to ink and paper. close the door. let the world sprawl outside like an old dog. it won't go anywhere. sadly. close your eyes. open your mind. let it go wandering. forget the things your eyes brought you. let the mushrooms lead you upon the barely visible trail where the grass still grows. let the smoke rings build worlds of smoke. escape, to arrive. you think dreaming is pointless. you are right. well guess what, so is reality. remember, that reality is just one word, one world. fantasy has a million, a billion. all yours to explore, to conquer, to pillage and plunder. awaiting your consent to let go.

Image: Dream of The Endless (from The Sandman by Neil Gaiman)

watching the world go by

I am a watcher. One of the reasons why I like my home being 20 kms away from office. I watch the world through the glass windows of my car like you would watch your favourite TV Channel. I like to take guesses at the private lives, the little lies playing inside the heads of strangers. And the fact that they have no idea what goes inside mine. It makes me feel like God.

Another thing I do while driving to office is commune with music. I talk to the writers who wrote the songs and musicians who are playing it. I like to imagine what goes in the head of the singer when he or she belts it out. I am a watcher.

And the fact that the lives and lies and stories I imagine may not be true does not matter, not one bit. For a far more intriguing possibility to me is- what if they are.

What if my watching makes the things as they are. Heisenberg's principle and all that.

A watcher. That's who I am.

Image: Uatu, the watcher

an excerpt by John Ruskin

We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is to be done in halves and shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all. Perhaps all that we have to do is meant for nothing more than an exercise of the heart and of the will, and is useless in itself; but, at all events, the little use it has may well be spared if it is not worth putting our hands and our strength to. It does not become our immortality to take an ease inconsistent with its authority, nor to suffer any instruments with which it can dispense, to come between it and the things it rules: and he who would form the creations of his own mind by any other instrument than his own hand, would also, if he might, give grinding organs to Heaven’s angels, to make their music easier. There is dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and sensuality enough in human existence, without our turning the few glowing moments of it into mechanism; and since our life must at the best be but a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace, and the rolling of the wheel.