Helpless…

… to do anything but weep and feel that knot of fear being pushed higher up in my throat along with the helpless, useless, impotent anger at the apparent worthlessness of our lives…

Today, my city mourns.  Innocent casualties of war and the death of our spirit and self.  With the burial of those perished today, will be the laying to ground of the death of our identity, morality and our faith.  Not we ever had any of these things to begin with but at least there was hope.

Students were killed today in another link of an alien war that has been brought to our country by those for whom we are no more than pawns.  Students!  Young women and men conversing about studies and class mates and books and games, maybe some had a wedding to go to or to arrange… Some may be sitting there thinking of the things they need to do when they get home… Some simply thinking how hungry they were…  And the walls came down on them along with debris, fire and scraps of metal that silenced their dreams, and their ordinary concerns…

And left forever echoes of screams and agony in the hearts of the parents who were seeing their future in those bright eyes that are now closed; who were now seeing that hardest labor of love coming to fruit…  Parents who will now bury those dreams and hopes under dust and dirt and leave a piece of themselves with them.  I can visualize the agony that is going to scream through the minds of those families today and wonder how people can not think of the repercussions of what they’re going to do?  Self sacrifice is all good and noble where you’re concerned but slaughtering others… Spare a thought, you miserable brainwashed machine!

How can any cause justify the death of this innocence?  Do these people truly feel that targeting innocents and civilians is going to make an iota of difference to those who sit in the seats of power?  As if we are worth that much!  And how many of us truly care anyway?  We will be saddened for a while, be worried a bit about maybe this being us but in the end we move on; going on with our ordinary lives.  We are conditioned to be cold now.  We have no feelings of remorse nor guilt nor retribution.

We have no sense of self.  Those who have died have done so in vain.  And those they have left behind will cry and mourn their loss.  And we will go on as we always have in the face of everything done to us.  We take it.  Here are our collective asses… Stuff whatever you can up them.  We can take it and more.

As to those who believe they are carrying out the Almighty’s will, why is it not Allah’s will that the oppressor dies a painful death?  Is it open substitution?  some kind of macabre play where the understudies for Zardari and Chief of Army Staff or Musharraf are always on stage to take the bullet both literally and figuratively?

Bloody bastards, if you must do something to right the wrongs committed against you, then do so against the perpetrators?  Go on and blast Musharraf and Zardari and Altaf Hussain and all the rest so your revenge can truly be complete!

Frank Herbert said: “If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.”

I don’t even want to blame the USA.  Why should I?  I have no right when I know that the fault lies within our on money grabbing, power hungry little hearts.  But DAMN!!

People say that standing up to the US and its imposition of rules and bills; drone strikes and elite forces would eliminate all this.  Saying it is rather easy, but doing it requires spirit that understands sacrifice.  Not the free for all, kill one-dozens free kind of spirit but the spirit that maybe we need to re-evaluate our lives.  Some comforts, some luxuries that we could do without, if it could mean breaking this narcotic hold that money has on everything we do.  It is money and silken sheets and crystal decanters that prompt the drive for governance in our country.  Never an actual spirit of changing the system.

I’m random and I’m ranting…  and everything has gone uncomfortably numb!

Acid

I had heard that there is no pain perhaps more than that of unrequited love…

But what then of knowing that love is requited with all due passion and still is doomed to end in separation?

Satin Raindrops

It touched her like the smoothest satin,

Liquid heat flowing from the tips of her fingers,

Coursing through her body like little flickers of flames

Where they stopped, a sliver of lightening splits through

Dazzling the pale smoothness of her skin for just a second..

Making her sheen as silver, sheer as a clear cut crystal waiting for that one flash

to turn to diamonds

He could just watch, mesmerized as still as she was with the rain falling on her.  He wanted to save each little droplet of water that kissed her hair, her face and went on to trace silent, still contours of her body that somehow still hummed with the spirit that was her.  The spirit that sensed him and showed itself in the lift of a cheek flushed with heat and lips that glistened with moisture…  And then was there, in eyes that sparked with mischief and innocence and within that innocence a knowledge of what she could do to him, lending confidence to the hand that lifted to him and the finger that beckoned..

The thunder echoing around him was inside him now, drumming through his heart beat, till he could hear nothing else; the lightening crashing around him just illuminating the path that led to her; till he could do nothing else but reach and allow her to draw him into her… melding, melting as the water cloaked them into one…

Violated…

Am miserable.  Had my I-pod nano stolen from my desk at work today.  One of those untrackable crimes I’m afraid, where it’s near impossible to both track the goods or the perpetrator.

It was a birthday gift from my bro and what is more upsetting is that it had pics…  old and new, family and friends and yes, a few that perhaps I kept as a reminder of a few skeletons in the closet, pics that I had no business putting in something that I was carrying around in a place of work or otherwise, anywhere outside my room.  Nonetheless, it’s been done and lost.  And I am getting a tension headache that’s grabbed the back of my skull and traveling all the way to my temples in these measured pulses of numbing agony…

He’s so going to kill me.  I have half a mind not to tell him, who told me repeatedly never to put pics on an i-pod but I in all my superiority then was arrogant and condescending about his faith in my taking care of my things and my privacy…  This is called falling right into shit!!

My mind is now filled with panic inducing, far reaching implications of the pics that rival armageddon.

Allah, please protect me and give my mind peace.  Everything is yours and to you it will return and you know all…  Keep me safe from the evils of Satan, of this world and the people in it, my own intentions and my own deeds… Ameen!

If Nothing Else, am Well Read

Saw this tag on Xeb’s blog and thought I’d get to it some day…  the spiel is that:

1) Look at the list and highlight the ones that you’ve read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
3) Tag a few people you think would enjoy sharing similar information about their book interests.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon.
60 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jone’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Hmmmmmmm…. 75 out of the given 100 is not so bad me thinks.

In This Place You’ll Feel There’s No Hurt Or Sorrow

“If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.”

So said Michael Jackson and I hope in his passing he found the peace that eluded him in his life.

Michael Joseph Jackson – August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009

So, Michael Jackson’s Dead.  Kind of hard to believe.  I didn’t track him career like a hound but he was hard to ignore… The ever changing skin colour, the physical transformation and yes the scandals of child molestation.  There were other things too, which I’m sure will be fed to us by the foaming at the mouth media till its all but coming out of our ears and nose and but cut the guy a break.  It’s bad enough to have every facet of your life examined to the point that your body being taken by paramedics outside your home is captured by the papparazzi of all things…  And then in death, every person deeming it their right to talk about you as if you were their best friend…  Yet death comes to you alone.  I always feel sorry for all these stars… sorrier as they become more famous because suddenly they are public fodder.  They’re not allowed to be human, to be flawed or insecure or to hurt.  Plastic!

It takes death to humanize them but we don’t let them have that either… They are now angels, fallen or otherwise, glorified in death and made a spectacle out of…  Their life and death sold on the streets… Like 20 dollar t-shirts with the king of pop’s picture on it selling outside the UCLA medical center where he died within hours of his passing! And it’ll go on… His albums, songs, videos, his life… Items he used, his home and whatever his last rites may be..  will be catalogued, labeled, valued and sold and resold like so many trophies… and will make people rich!

There was a time when I thought that there only was one singer in the world and his name was Michael Jackson.  As in ALL songs were only ever sung by MJ.  And his videos are still fun to watch.  Who hasn’t watched the boyfriend turn to werewolf to boyfriend to amazing dancing zombie in Thriller.  I know as hell that I did.  And tried to copy them too.  The moon walk, the pelvic thrusts, the spin, the twitches and grunts and shouts and the “Ow”… all of it.  I still know the words to Beat it, and Smooth Criminal and Billie Jean… All the rest… Dirty Diana, Remember the time, Black or White, Heal the World, Man in the Mirror, Who is it, Give in to me and They don’t care about us….  Oh so many!

I hope you find the care in the other world Michael Jackson, that you didn’t get here….

Salute!

Broken

It’s like splintering into pieces from within…  Shards splitting from the center into slivers fine and sharp…  The kind that burrow in and make you bleed and you can’t get them out.  The fine edge just slides over your skin, through it leaving a sting sharp enough to make your breath catch…  Imagine thousands of those shards slicing through you inside out at the same time… so you don’t quite know where to hold the pain first…. you don’t quite know how to make the blood stop… even as you fade… all you feel is the agony…  all you see is the red…  all you feel is the helplessness of knowing that all that waits is darkness…

My Little Lost Boy

What do you do when you realize that the man you love is just a little lost boy?

It was agonizing to watch him break down that way.

I don’t mind saying that I am always cynical in the face of his declarations of love and devotion.  I return them but I try and keep it real.  Injecting doses of reality into romance kills it but at least it keeps one grounded.  Or so I tell myself.

Yet, tonight, I was helpless in the face of his misery.  It’s a little daunting to watch a six foot guy dissolve into tears in front of you and you being helpless to do anymore than just hold him.

My own grief?  That comes later.  His tears did more than tell me that maybe the love he says he feels for me is real.

His tears also told me that the time when he could maybe take a stand for me is not too close.  And even when the time comes, there is no guarantee of him and me being any more than what we are today… unnamed, unrecognized.

His tears told me that for all we mean to each other, we may never be.

His tears told me that for all I may do to have him with me, at the end of it, I may be alone.

His tears today may very well be my tears tomorrow…  Except that I wiped his tears away and kissed his brow and held him as he tried to gain control…  I doubt anyone will be there to wipe my tears away…

For one who believes as strongly as I do in being the mistress of my own destiny, it stuns me to see my greatest defeat in the eyes of another…

Of Senses, No. 1

She hated this feeling of nothingness that wasn’t quite nothing…  It was a great yawning, gaping emptiness inside that she could physically feel.  She had gone into it knowing all the NOs that would echo around, thinking she could handle it, keep her distance. After all, she had been burned before and yet, she was here again, waiting an endless wait…

The cold and fear and insecurity still crept through, raising goosebumps on the arms she had wrapped around herself.  The breeze coming through the window caught her hair and sprayed the rain on her face.  Her eyes weren’t on the lightening that lit the sky just as her ears were deaf to the rumble of thunder.

She saw only those leonine eyes smiling before his lips did as he watched her, she could hear only the muted sound of his heart as it beat next to her, she could only feel the warmth of him wrapped around her as he held her in his arms.  How to explain the feel of it?  It’s not the physical sense of him that she missed although she would be lying if that wasn’t a part of it…  There were things associated with the strength of him and that golden skin that were so much more potent in their absence…  things that went beyond what he looked or felt like.

It was warmth and heat and scents…  mysterious…  associations…  like walking though narrow cobbled streets of a small town in the Meditteranean in the heat of summer where the smell of the surf and sun mingles with the aroma of fresh summer fruits…  or the shadowy streets in Arab where dark skinned peddlars sell sultry, dreamy spices that carry undertones of magic…

It was that scent of deodrant and shaving cream; and dust and sweat and below that something essentially him that made him burrow into him when he held her (oh how he laughed when she did that)…  It lingered in her hair, on her skin along after he had gone…  Her fingers tingled with the sense of him.  The scent that drove her to smother her face in the pillow for hours at a time…

On repeat…