More verbore

What with the TAAQ blog and all, I'm not much of a puli on this paper any more.

But here's more from the poetry cupboard. Ah to be young again.

Train
Twinned ribbon-steel stretching into black distance
Overlined with wires of blue-ice fire;
Metarticulate serpent glides to concrete stop.
And the earth momentarily lives.
Disjointed shades of thought
Detach themselves from weary wrought-iron
To cling like benign tumours
On bolted stanchions.

Greasy black hair smelly cigarette
Pockets of gaiety exchanged epithet
Peeling yellow paint rusty rivet
Faces locked on private
Dreams.

Wind ruffles through window bars
Sickly sweet aroma of half-done work
and the Train moves on.


Midnight
Midnight
And the sky is red with cloud
Whisper whisper
Coconut secrets
In dusky stillness
Moribund shadows
of unborn Sun
On angel wings of the night
No star no planet
Just murky soup
In the china-black bowl
Of Milky service Way

Scratch
Steel point ink sword
Your blood is your life
And you squander it
To imagination not thine
Drawing midnight into fine line
With white space sense, your friend

Sleep steals in with sandy eyelids
And I must go
Midnight, my friend, I watch you
With lightless eyes and tired mind
And soon you are gone.

Amen.

The Old School

Twisted wrought-iron
Rusty chain
Old green tree
With silent laughter
Trembling each leaf
To the happy wind

Teacher
Raving lunatic psychopath
Now grey and kindly
with scraps of short-pants memory
That is you.
Thick lenses squint your man-face
To wrinkles of a naughty, dirty, child-man.

Adverbial clause quadratic equation
Third battle of Panipat
Warren Hastings dead for ever
But his memory
Grows differently
With each clay mind
Moulded twisted beaten
With school-master cane

First Day.
Farewell adieu forever mother
Swallowed into mindless patter
of black-hole feet
Salty crystal brown eye
Fine graffiti wood
Cold comfort.

Paper plane fantasy
Grounded by anti-aircraft ma'am
Antique gene-cousin
To a buck-toothed tram
Boysterous back-bench wit
And a gaggle of giggly skirts
Shadow-dark shoes
Painfully starched shirts
and skinned knee blues...
Nostalgia hurts.

Swinging out into empty sky
Sliding to sandy sand
She-saw justice and
Boy-scout two-fingered honour

March March March
(Mind fever exam God and neighbour help us all)
In April we go home.

Class of '83
Scattered like memory
That still lives

Alumnus
Friendly castaway
With residual red-bottomed schoolboy hate
And fading childhearted joy




For The Home School. What a place it was.

Parsley Sage Rosemary and Rhyme

Ha ha. Found some of my old poetry, stuff written in the mid 90s, by a no-doubt-conceited teenager. Unbelievable stuff. sheesh.

Down to Urth
There's a butterfly shouting somewhere
To a meddling mosquito's cantata
There's a lieuten-ant with a pomme-de-terre
And not the ear for the operetta

Stocks his bobbing abdomen
With starchy sustenance
Hasn't the fine acumen
Of cultural parlance
He's never looked at the sky.
Never wondered why.

With a well-filled ante-room larder
He's felt to be a good father

To a Pencil
You've a whole wood body
And a belly full of lead
Scratch my black thoughts on white
Spew yourself dead.

Mindless self-sacrificial pole
Dwindling every day
Duller every minute
Etch out what you mean.

What forgotten mother spawned your length
Slim waif of word and song
Nondescript pulchritude
In writing flesh and bone you belong.

Six-cornered circle
with dark blind centre eye
Watch where you draw your line
When you die you'll leave behind
Only your charred soul

God help your earthlife dust
If there's a rubber close to hand
Your fragments
Tomorrow's sand.



There's a lot more... will probably put em up sometime.

It's a bit strange, having someone else sing songs you've written, especially if you've gotten really accustomed to singing them yourself. But I really do think it's beginning to work. Just have to put in so much more time.

Dunno what's happening with work though.. there just seems to be more and more to do, more and more that's taking me away from playing and writing music. Or am I just being hog headed and whiny. Work is good, after all. Pays the bills. So I shouldn't complain, I guess. Our big clients now want us to be a full-fledged agency, a one-stop shop that would probably make the most sense for them, but I wonder if I have the time, mindspace, ambition, and the drive to plunge into something like that. I know there's a lot of money to be made and I know I'd probably be good at what needs to be done, but. But. Ah heck.

Giggigigigigigigigigigigigigigig

Been a while. Busy, busy, busy. TAAQ opens for Jethro Tull here in Bangalore day after tomorrow, Feb 3. Wow. Five years from our similar experience with Deep Purple. Our resume seems to be looking up...

Once around the sun..

Yesterday, Nov 26th, Rohan Miles Mani marked his first trip around a star. He did it with a lot of family and some friends present, and underlined the magnificent scope of his voyage with an unaided walk across the living room. Dressed in spotless white kurta, he was otherwise seen purloining various mobile phones from the indulgent attendees, yelling at the top of his voice, and choosing to stand sideways on a see-saw. Talk about rock stars.

So, son, in your journey so far, you've covered something like 584,337,600 miles. I think your walk across the room was far bigger, though...

Wow.


Bindu and me, we're thankful for all the time so far. Here's to a few more 584-million-mile trips. What a life...

An eye full of Chen

Just got back from Chennai, braving our way through storm and rain, pothole and drain, chorus and refrain. Whew. Had a gig with the Raghu Dixit Project (formerly Antaragni) at a gala conference of Periodontists. From the Indian society of Periodontology of course. Can't imagine a more scintillating, glitter-fest of a conference, eh? All those looovely posters (size A0) of bleeding gums, plasma-cell gingiva, and the pulchritude of plaque. You might say we had a narrow brush with boredom, but it wasn't a total floss...

Typical brain-dead event damager. Can set up PA only after conference ends, which means set up time, sound-check time... and the bar/buffet set up is about a hundred metres away (Chennai Trade Centre - massive joint, huge halls, but no food allowed in conference space). No point in dwelling on the details anyway.

A young son of a drummer opened the gig. 7 year old chappie, all decked out in spandex, zebra spot silk shirt, and shiny vest, complete with mini TAMA Swingstar kit. What a dude. And he can really play. Krakthik, our drummer, (another son of a drummer, but 25, single, sexually frustrated, pressurized, groove-not-yet-happening-but-serious-scope-is-there, sweet guy really) got quite worried, watching him. The kid thulped the kit, and you could see from his paradiddles that some serious practice was happening. Very rare, at that age. His fussy, preening, yellow-sari mum waited in the wings with a cordless mic, ready to shove it in her darling's face, for his vocal bits. (She's understandably proud, but there's something about a proud parent that's always a bit irritating, isn't there?). Loved the little guy's spirit though - halfway through his solo, his mum hovered around with the mic, but he just waved her off with an impatient gesture and simply bellowed aforementioned vocal bits. Super.

Our gig went pretty well. Really happy with the Line6 PODxt Live. Plugged it into a Peavey 212 something, unfamiliar amp - and got a good sound in a flash. Good buy, that.

Only downer was during this song called Ambar, a really nice intense ballad. Raghu was in fine form, and my first solo really cooked. Halfway through, I saw two booze-addled periodontists walking up, and knew what was coming. Now this is the kind of song you DO NOT interrupt - you know the kind. And these morons can see the singer, eyes closed, putting his all into every word, and they have the nerve to come up close and say 'say, do some tamil, no? or can you play 'Words'?' Yaaaaaarghh. Botched the second solo a bit, I was so mad.

Anyway. There were some people in the front who seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Spent most of the next day cursing said braindead event damager who was inaccessible for the whole morning. Shacked up with some babe in a hotel. Ah, professionalism. Told us we could play again on the next evening, and hadn't thought of how it would fit into the periodontal schedule, which it didn't of course. Yaaaaaargghh again.

And oh, we stayed at 'A Boutique Hotel' called the 'Chennai Gateway' (or Gatway, as printed elsewhere). If boutique means small, mediocre food, bad service, and a great whacking 11k.v. power line directly over your room, this is it!

'Twas good to see Miles in the morning. Up at 5:30 as usual, gives me a huge grin when he sees me. And I shall go away now before you find this proud parent irritating.