A rooted mind takes root

The urge towards the Buddha had taken root. You figured your mind was no good being awol, and needed to be summoned and harnessed for you to have any chance at a liberated life. So you awaken your body that your mind may be inspired in turn. But your mind was inebriated in a pall of drowsiness unbecoming of an aspiring activist. It reached out for the glowing point emblazoning the occula-natal intersection, but what could the point do but swim hazily in protest against your stupor.

You burst into a dry panic; lost hopes and dying causes were reprising themselves with pent-up fury. Later, in desolation you would sit, curled up into a farce of an embrace, trying to recall the forgotten sensation of the precious convalescent fluid which, possibly, you had spilt into naught via a lowlier duct. You vow to take better care of your vital fluids, so that they may feel you worthy and deserving of being immersed.

The bow-legged charmer was sighted at the station, trying to be ignored by your reclusive consciousness. She walked past, then sidled up to you. You essayed your poker face, you hoped, to some avail; but the nightly exuberance was but a shadow of itself in the blinding twilight. Your habitual dumbness came over you and you chided the charmer on the pretext of chiding yourself. Deathly references pointed hamfisted fingers upon smoky graves in a jaded flail for the taste of a kindred spirit. She would turn out to be a truer you than you, and you felt shunted out of yourself.

There's so much more, but isn't all this already simply precious?

A shored wail

Things are dying inside me
But I am still alive.

Every new morning
calls me to awaken
to its shallow depths.

Where is my ticker?
I can hear it flicker
in a puddle of weak injury.
It won't even bleed
its pain out.

It hoards pain,
it's a plain whore.
It's playing itself hoarse
So I complain to the hordes.
In throaty whispers
that carry my plane to the shores;
They keep me on course.

Get that pitiful slime off that face!
You're only getting fazed by a phase.
If only you won't drown now, you'll love water all your life;
You were meant to survive.

Bask, drenched in Blood

A Bleeding Heart, surrounded by Weighty Thoughts, felt ambushed. It felt like it needed to be as authoritative as its planetary cohabitants. For, mark, these Thoughts were shaped as it, the Heart, was. They appeared to possess the same winding arteries that criss-crossed its own schema. Rational the Bleeding Heart was, and it could not ignore the way the Thoughts progressed about their ways, for, to ignore what was in front of you was to ignore truth, as far as you knew it. What could the Heart do but Bleed?

"Was I born to Bleed?" whimpered the Heart.

By all functional edicts, a heart is, indeed, meant to bleed. But, in staunch uprising, it had now become rather mistrustful of the PuppetMaster, Who implied, by means too subtle not to pay heed to, that it, the Heart, was ordained to Bleed. The PuppetMaster told the Heart it was supposed to ignore the smooth, facile way in which the Thoughts fulfilled their tasks and whims. The Thoughts, the Heart was admonished, would always be, for the Heart, an edifice of discontent; that which it, the Heart, could never adhere to. That was the way it was, spake the PuppetMaster.

The Heart made up its mind. It would not be thus subjugated. It would be a Heart freed from the evolutionary imperative of Bleeding. It would be renegade, and a happier Heart it would be for it. Its blood would no longer be called upon as payment for its existence. It would serve its captors in other ways - through a mindful love and admiration. It would be easy to love them, after all. They would be worshiped for their ascendancy in a set of parameters it valued in a bodily organ; and in idolising its captors, it would set its own ideals upon a hallowed pedestal. And, with this promise, the Heart began to pump its blood for itself once more. And it had a Hearty laugh with every pulse.

These people have always known their agendas. They are so "in the know" and so devoid of self-ignorance that they can manipulate. Me - on the other hand - not so much. For instance, I am just not given to manipulation or any form of forgery, because I dread the effect a lie would have on my already tattered view of reality; dread lest I make it harder for myself than it already is to successfully argue in favour of why 2 and 2 should make 4 - which, it seems, is too sinful a premise to expect to be true...

But Oh how cool it'd be if I found voice when the court was in session.

Death row

You know what can kill a person without fail? Nope. I'm not talking about poison, or some other 'foolproof' method of dying.

A person truly is doomed to death when his mind is stifled.

With the rate of connections his brain is able to make diminishing towards zero;

With the electricity that should ideally be rushing freely through his neurons grinding to a staggered halt;

With each thought his brain is able to muster being thwarted, harassed and killed because it represents something in the living world which unnerves and frightens him;

When the exciting venture into the world of imagination/mental creativity only holds the inevitable caveat of the unleashing of a world of negativity better left untouched;

When all your thoughts you'd thought were your very own brainchild seem exposed as nasty seeds planted in your head by those who were able to advertise their agenda onto your impressionable, 'naive' mind;

When the only possible aftermath of any foray into conscious thought is the realisation of how thoroughly your brain has been drained, seeped of any chance at originality;

When you feel like all your precepts, ideas, tools for thinking are all a crumbled pile of obsolete rubble because you just never really are able to find that reality agrees with what you think of it;

When the slightest period of thought-flow that has successfully gone on uncontested is beset finally by the fear of having pushed your luck;

When you realise that the reason you can't get your brain to make the wasteful effort of thinking clearly is due to the strength of your belief that faced with an opportunity/scenario for the thought to have productive value, your power will desert you;

When you're certain that if someone told you that your life depended on you telling them your name, the one thing you could bet your bottom ruppee on not being able to recall is the word Mihir;

When you begin to feel that no amount of cognizable thought can be worth anything when reality is just lurking around the corner, licking its chops, waiting for you to make that turn so that it can kill that sorry little meagre confidence you dared to accumulate from thinking you'd understood something for real;

When the only thing that has made possible a flow of thought unobstructed for long enough as to enable a rant even as unimpressive as this is that the fact that everyone is asleep has empowered you to believe that no other mind can exert its influence on yours right now...

.....phew....

That person might as well be dead, for all the surviving he'd be capable of if a band of wayfaring robbers accosted him on his way to work, requiring of him to solve a simple arithmetic problem in exchange for an uncut throat.

If that isn't the definition of "death row", the phrase can only mean a situation in which Dumbledore and Harry merrily use oars to traverse the black inferus-filled lake in Voldemort's cave while singing 'Du Hast' on top of their voices.

Soiled by something indulgent

The day starts with an early call.

You trust the innocent promise that this early awakening advertises to your mind. You go on to spend the morning ambushed by your own weakness for a sheltered outing, and you hence lay yourself bare. Don't forget, not denuding yourself was not ever an option when on an outing; the outing itself is the act of stripping yourself to the corrosive sway of elements.

The unrequited offer for a seat would go on to nab your peace of mind later, and force you hostage to the need to compartmentalize. Although well compartmentalised at the time of first reckoning, it may have gone on to spread its shadow over your skeletal membranes nevertheless, over the course of the afternoon.

Parental exuberance too may have curdled the mixture a tad, it is smelt.

The other contaminant possible as a suspect is the parting wave. Earlier instances of this conciliatory wave have produced bouts of atmospheric pressure similar to the one being felt now.

Then some self-identifying reading leads to the promise which the day proffered your way in the morning. The sight of your mould in the writing relieves and elevates your mental fortitude.

The Puppetmaster spake..

"What did he say?" Didn't you hear him? He spoke in words. You have ears. You know sound when you hear it. You have a brain which can decode sounds for you. You can understand how things work. You can correllate a sentence with the objects it's talking about. And that's why you can never say that you didn't understand what he said.

You know you heard him with your ears.

"What just happened?" Didn't you see? Things moved in front of your field of vision. They didn't happen when you had misplaced your glasses or anything like that. Wait a minute, you don't even need glasses. You have perfect vision. (You only ever wore glasses when you wanted to pretend like you were some sort of intellectual. You wanted glasses to make yourself look as if you had a life.) You can see things happen in front of you. That's why you've been given eyes. To see. And the stuff whose light entered your eye had a direct connection to your brain. Your brain can decode optical information into mental pictures. You can use these mental pictures to perceive the stuff your eye saw. And that's why you don't ever need to complain that you didn't know what just happened.

You know you saw it with your eyes.

You have seen life for so long that by now, you know how things behave. This is great for you. Because you know how things work and function, you can interact with them and make them do things for your benefit. Superman knew the air. He knew his body. He knew that a cape flying in his wake makes for a powerful image of purposeful flight. So he used it all to make himself fly, and earn millions of dollars for selling himself as a potent image of an alpha male. Not that you can fly. But you can see. And that's all you ever need to do. And it's all you can do. That doesn't have to sound like an escapist thing. It's only as escapist as a horse-rider saying that it's upto his horse to do the galloping. Provided he has fed it. Provided he has made sure that the bran in its bowl was not mixed with anything the horse was allergic to. Provided he has made sure she gets enough exercise and sleep. The rest happens as part of a mechanism. You can't say no to the mechanism. It's like air to your lungs. Breathe it in. You're sure to come back for more.