There's no room

She sat there, listless, yawning, waiting for her daughter's violin class to end.  Her eyes were unfocused and there were bags under her eyes.  She seemed incapable of taking another step.  She could have curled up and taken a nap right there on the carpet of the waiting room.

I commented on her tiredness, told her she looked ready for bed.  I was waiting for her daughter's class to end as well because my own class started next.  On Tuesdays I do have an elevated level of stress because I need to time things perfectly: leave work at a certain hour, catch a certain bus, pray for flowing traffic etc.  But I wouldn't dream of giving up my violin classes because of this.  In fact if my class was two hours long instead of 30 minutes, even if it started at 8 PM and ended at 10 PM,  I would still love it.  I would prefer it longer.  It's the only time of the day when I am doing something good, something that enriches my life, something that is so far removed from what I do to earn a living.

Our conversation went on.  We started talking about Route 206 and how clogged it got during rush hour because of all the construction and the long stretches of one-lane traffic.  I experience Route 206 on Friday nights or Saturday mornings when I go for my Hindustani classical vocal lessons.  I told her my reasons for traveling on this route on certain days.  That's when she told me how impressed she was with my efforts at taking classes, my desire to learn new things.  She said it wasn't possible for her to absorb anything new at all at this point in life.  She said there was no room.  She said she was crazed enough at work and all she wanted was to relax with a glass of wine after work and not do another thing that involved getting off the couch.  Just bringing her daughter to violin and soccer and basketball was an immense strain.

I told her I would get crazed if all I was doing was my work, that moving numbers around in spreadsheets would cause early brain death for me if that was all I did with my time.  I mentioned I would be bored out of my mind if I wasn't finding ways to learn new things.  I said that it was difficult for me to find inspiration in number crunching.  She said her work inspired her everyday.  That there were new challenges everyday.  Each work day was different for her, there were new problems to solve, new opportunities to explore creativity, to get absorbed in her work, creativity was rewarded, employers cared.

Hmm...so where before I was feeling mildly superior for having interests outside of work and the energy to explore them after a fourteen hour long day, now she had swiftly turned the tables and backed me into a corner, forcing me to the recurrent exploration of the "where did I go wrong" theme.  How did all my choices lead me to a place where all I do is move numbers around? Why am I so singularly incapable of finding something exciting to do to keep body and soul together in fine functioning order, without craving newness? I click open all my files, review everything I have on my plate a million times, trying to find something new, something exciting, a different way of doing something, some way to find enchantment and contentment in what I do and I continue to draw blanks.

If a hammer is all that is "officially sanctioned" to perform all necessary tasks in my role then all my problems do take on the morphology of a nail.  I am not allowed to stray.  I am not allowed to emerge from my straitjacket.  So I stay put.  I smile and take pleasure from the wide-eyed looks of wonder that I get when people say things like, "Wow how do you do it? I couldn't."

Student Loan

It was an automated response
It confirmed receipt of payment
And showed me a new balance
Not much different from the old.

The response stated quite clearly
Its "no reply" nature. It promised
A swift bounce back, a notification
That an attempt to communicate
With the sender would result in
Undeliverable bits and bytes.

Longitudinal research on my life
Will show an undiminished loan,
Borrowed fifteen years ago and
Still as fresh and as youthful as
The day it was born. It is in fact
A burgeoning beauty,
With no concept of age or death
Or diminished stature.

It feeds, it grows and it feeds
Some more. It has reached
Immortality. I am certain it
Will outlive me.

So I fired up a response
To the no-reply address. This
Wrath needs to be bounced
Off the walls of my padded cell.
I am straitjacketed and shackled
But I can still scream "usury",
And have it fall back on my
Crumbling self.

Poetry

I have been hanging out with poets and people who want you to believe that what they are writing is poetry, for many years.

Identifying that which deserved the tag of poetry back when studying language and literature was a requirement, in ones school years, was not so challenging.

I didn't much care for what it entailed. I never liked learning all those lines by rote and then being asked to recite it in class. None of our teachers delved any deeper into the subject. Studying English was generally fun because textbooks came with stories, but poetry was like a bump in the road, something for which one did the bare minimum required in order to get by.

I am certain many of you would say that it wasn't so in your schools and that your teachers made the study of poetry meaningful for you. That is entirely possible but it wasn't the case for me.

We studied a lot of poetry in school. We were asked to read it, learn it by rote, recite it and perhaps answer a few questions about it on exams. Nothing more, no painstaking exploration of ideas. But despite its resemblance to an onerous chore, identifying what set poetry apart was never a problem.

One noted rhyme, rhythm, meter and an exploration of thoughts an ideas within those bounds, as though these explorations were endlessly possible, in infinite combinations within these bounds, as though these limits, these external constraints didn't even exist or impede. In the final product one sensed that which differentiated prose from poetry.

Beyond those student years, life ensured a rigorous and methodical schooling for me in the prosaic and mundane non-arts. I fell headlong into soulless pursuits. Poetry was a distant memory. But it has managed to become a part of my history in recent times.

I came in close contact with writers, many of whom told me they couldn't express themselves in prose and preferred poetry as a means of expression. Many of the folks I met were close in age, so they were probably schooled in the same manner, in the same era as me. So I marveled at their love for poetry and their distaste for prose.

I started reading what they were writing. Later on I graduated to asking them why they called what they were writing poetry, their works were nothing like the thing that neatly slid into the exalted slot reserved for poetry in my brain. These so called poems came without form, without structure, without a spine. They resembled words slithering around on a page or a screen in rather messy configurations where a few lines were longer than others, nothing rhymed and no ideas other than yearning, loneliness, lust and longing were ever explored. They appeared to be journal entries that were being aired out with line breaks and mushy language.

I wasn't criticizing, I was just puzzled. Perhaps this indeed was poetry and ideas like consonance in recitation and adherence to meter belonged in the dark ages. Perhaps poems were supposed to be like yawns or tears or other impromptu ejaculations, delivered in the moment of their creation.

But with so much wondering and seeking going on I was bound to run into a poet who has kept up quiet but sustained efforts at telling the world that poetry wasn't a yawn or a tear. Rather it almost always needed to be a wondrous alchemy of words, observation, metaphor and structure and that sacrificing linguistic excellence and elegance was never an option.

I now sought poetry where a larger thought, a larger idea could be explored even through the casual observation of the most mundane. Poetry could now be found in ink drying on paper, in waiting lines, in waiting rooms, in hospitals, in cafeterias, on buses, on ferries, in the spaces between things. I didn't need to accept longing, yearning, loneliness or, at the other end of the spectrum, the verbatim description of recent events as poetry. It was liberating.

I tried writing some of my own poetry. The streets of New York City glitter at night, have you noticed? In the day time Lincoln stares up at us out of pennies embedded in the sidewalks, homeless people push their lives around in shopping carts, no one looks at anyone in an elevator, there's a certain air of desperation in interviewees and an air of extreme discomfort in interviewers, there are people who draw smiley faces or baby's feet on misted up bus windows when they are stuck inside a bus with steamed up windows on a wintry night, all these things make for poetry in the truest sense because there is that which the eyes see and that which can be attributed to what one sees.

The key to poetry lies in this attribution, this is the realm where the concrete and the sublime come together seamlessly.

There are those who write about world events and natural disasters. They want to tell us about the people who lost everything in Hurricane Sandy and they reproduce news reports in rhyme. This is not poetry. You cannot describe an earthquake and the resultant loss of life, limb and home and call it poetry. In these instances the poetry lives in the aftermath, in between that instant when one was whole and contemplating one's things to do list for the next day and the instant when one's home was reduced to rubble, rendering all such lists extinct.

And when poetry is all of these things, when it explores all that's interstitial, that's when it becomes irresistible food for ones soul.

Did I Leave Footprints?

There was a credenza
In a corner of the room.

I paid it no mind

Perhaps it served
Some obscure purpose.
I had rested
A coffee mug on it once.

We gave it away last spring
Dragged it to the curb
On recycling day
And left it there.

There's a square depression
In the shag of the carpet
Where the credenza once was.

The original hue
of the carpet was
a much brighter beige, it seems.

I walked out the double doors
Of the Port Authority Bus Terminal
This morning and squinted up at
The New York Times Building.

Did this still feel like it once had?
Like home?

I walked east, then south
Balancing a purse, a tote and
a steaming cup of coffee.

I noted the woman dressed in
The all familiar black who had gold
colored shoes on with red laces.

I was indeed here even if my gait
was wobbly. estranged.

I even recognized
The bagel and coffee vendor,
He was at the same spot
on my old beat.

He did not remember me.

Back at home much later
I see the lighter colored
rectangular track where
the credenza once was.

These footprints were permanent.

Earler in the day,
The guy at our meeting,
The disembodied
Speaker phone voice,
Whose face I've never seen
Swore he had met me
And had known my name
For "hundreds of years"
He insisted, "who hadn't?"

Makes me wonder
If there was a marked,
permanently etched,
Indentation
Where I once was.

Sunset

This was prompted by someone's picture of a sunset.
***


As the eastern seaboard ascends into darkness in golden hues of slanted light,
I squeeze the sand between my toes and let the water cover me up to my knees before it recedes again, taking with it the sand I was trying so hard to hold. I feel the gentle brush of the breeze add another layer of gold to my hair and skin.

A lover would taint the moment. Words would be as unwelcome as the misplaced applause between two movements of a concerto. As the sun glows brighter each second and as the expectation of darkness starts building up to a crescendo, I feel a disintegration of all that was me. In that one moment I am nothing. I am insubstantial and I perceive no boundaries, no endpoints to my nerves, my skin, my limbs.

There are clouds now that offer pink and purple streaks across the orange orb of brilliance and darkness is at hand.

There is a frisson of fear now, darkness is the impending denouement. I lift up my camera. I want to capture the divine in its final moments and share it with virtual friends who would be awakening to brightening skies on the other side of our planet. I intend an image that defines the pleasure, the sensuousness of an ephemeral moment of sensual absence and divine presence.

I expect a copyrighted image that tells of the keenness of my eye and boasts of my aesthetic. I am all perverse humanity now as the growing darkness devours the divine and I start the long walk to the boardwalk and the blinking neon palm trees, scrolling through my camera roll for that one image that would set my social networks ablaze with appreciation.

Automata

About automata I obsess,
Although this I do confess,

I knew nothing about them,
until Scorsese's enchanting go,
at Brian Selznick's Hugo.

Hugo sought a heart shaped
key, to let his automaton,
be that which he was meant to be.
I sought beauty and artistry
and an afternoon tinged
with a hint of mystery.


Scorsese, blessed by Mesmer,
cast a spell, and delivered,
as he carved out voids,
and filled them with dreams,
and an arc of resolution,
tailored and trimmed,
for our consumption.

This fiction spun alive
every dust-ridden archive,
and museum basement,
revealing abandoned and
creaky inanimates - worn,
broken, yet concealing,
logic and precision.


Our own Morris Museum,
set up displays when they
obtained some and news
reports showed wide-eyed
kids, each one a forty eight
inch bundle of wonder, awe
and fascination.

Their robot puppies didn't
do the trick, their walking,
talking and peeing dolls
fell woefully short, against
a smiling figure that could
enchant while writing,
sketching or playing ball.

Renaissance creations
from Parisian courts,
with elegant vetements
and a hint of a soul -
What made them tug
at heartstrings, like no
robots ever could?


****

I find automatons fascinating.  There is poetry around them, they are ancient attempts at the secrets of the soul.  I find our obsession with creation, especially when we make successive, iterative, evolving attempts at assembling something that can be like us without emerging from a womb.

I was building on a conversation with my daughter, often my muse, and I mentioned to her that perhaps we come close but never simulate humanity in its entirety because we never program irrationality or impulse or impetuousness or the times when we do something that defies all expectations and all paths that would be considered logical, meaningful or rational, in other words the eternal Spock vs Kirk debate.

Can one work irrationality into the complex internal mechanisms of an ancient automaton or a futuristic android? Who knows! But for now my daughter concurred that we made more irrational decisions than rational ones as humans.

Illustration: Anoushka Thakur