this coast, this island

everything grows too easily here, clings too heavily, overruns itself and drips with excessive fecundity. the wind stirs the air too vigorously, sweeps across the grass too aggressively, makes waves in the landscape refusing to just let things lie still, let our ideas settle,our dreams to drift at their own pace.
change is constant, though sometimes imperceptible, sneaking, surprising and crawling through the cracks in sandcastles we build.
our moats will fill with ocean water,but just at that moment of satisfaction, destiny realised, the battlements start to crumble and we are left with nothing but a heap of sand and the ocean, frenetic, oozing and incessant.
the earth is soft and roots grow deep, grabbing, ripping and rearranging as they go.
we are reminded that life will go on, not withoutbeauty,but always with a subtle violence.

the torn out page

i like to stare up at big trees and personify everything that i see
i love the desert for its refusal to let me do that
for it is nothing
and there is nothing
but
mercy mercy mercy
rain down upon our parched souls and lips cracked from the mountain altitudes
and soothe these spinning heads
i prefer my longing to my lovers and rebel from love when it's with me
wake up crying and biting my pillow,
hung over from joyful excesses with old friends
i enjoy sitting in cafes, spending money on bullshit and i like saving pennies in jars,
i want to meditate in the himalayas with a caveful of toothless saddhus and dance like a drunken fool to 80's music in a trashy bar
and i enjoy being severe and serious
pretending to know things
actually knowing things,
being sardonic and cruel
a great iceberg of frigidity filled with this hot soup of lust and selfishness
that i try to own
try to hide from
and sing little bajans to myself while slaving in the back of a bakery
working too hard for nothing but boney fingers
and to channel this intensity into something other than tears and love
and wavering wobbling between the aesthetic and the ascetic
burning and languishing and hating everything and hating lostness
while trying to get lost
to disappear
taking the winding backroads and shit filled alleyways
but always guided by some inborn constellations behind my eyes
despite my attempts to cloud them, rearrange them
with intoxicants, exhaustion, walking too long in the sun
as it beats me, rattles my dry brain in my skull
like the warning of a snake that i almost stepped on as a child
eating the wrong mushroom by the shushwap
puking up blackness on a bus ride
and loving the terror and the rush and
huddling alone, fearing every noise
keeping this material world spinning around this material girl
(keep it together)
(om hari om)
until i can let it all burn burn burn
because i don't know what i want to do for money
but i want to love india so i will.