bacchus

summer of love
where songs become tatoos

ink on skin, fantasies of flesh

when the saxopohone man plays on 54th street
filling an open wound in the sky
we name him sunrise

when his pain climbs through brass
resonant
amoral
nostalgic

we call angels

he plays for a band of black gypsies
with crimson in their lips
castanets in their breasts

who sleep on gray slate in the night
and jump from skyrise to skyrise
while their chests heave and swell

for a day of milk 'n honey.

the man on 54th street
knows all this
and when he plays
he plays for all the angels
who wish they could play their dream
too.

sometimes, the clothes do not make the man
naked this freedom, which i hold in my hands

for andre

the water
like glass

the beachsand
like gold

a coastal road
a swim
a flight
a pair of birdwings

i've been found
in the house of sand and fog

estectica (beauty)

your kisses
rise to the level of art
finding sacred in the profane

the yellow stucco wall
disappears
as your lips become
the vulgarity of beauty

love monologues

1
love is not for cowards

2
have you ever met someone so in love they didn't need a lover?

3
love's only reason is what reason could never understand, you dig?

4
how do you catch a bird without killing it?
...by becoming the sky

i spoke before i bled
i laughed before i cried
i found before i lost
i lied before i came
i hurt before i held
i drowned before i swam

i died before i loved

1976

i am completely inspired by the 70's. everything from the music and rebelliousness to film and national consciousness. it was an era of revolution and lost youth. it was the postmath to blood, but every time i ask anyone who lived it, they look at me as if i'm the dumbest person in the world with the dumbest question and ask, "why do you care?" this is why..

war was not the answer
but crept curiously
through the crusted shingles
of rooftop fear
the sanguine grain
broke revolting minds
and there was my mother, the poetess
left undone
her magnificent village of waterfall hair
piled up,
let down
slumbering
angry
questioning the energy feeding through her umbilical cord

i lay
in the silence of screaming
where blood was the new black
of daggers drawn
i lay
in the answer
where mothers were the question
one thousand suns revealed one pilgrimage moon
in darklong corridors of fighting
the distance sang
of oppression
hate
destruction
creation
so why do they ask me
if i remember?
when i was in the womb
burning
while the world was on fire

the night i met bob dylan

Lost and found through the meandering
maze I was found in the fogged blue din
full of love entering two wooden doors
rickety and crackling with no shame
like the lovers, the knights and the fools
awaiting Cailliope with teeth and vowels.

I sat by him, a hermit, a stranger within
I wanted to know. Before I even opened
my eyes or took off my scarf I wanted to know.
he smiled I smiled he spoke I swam in his head
while Nina Simone sang Sinnerman and he lifted
his glass to ask me what I wanted from the night.

I replied You as he smiled and spilled his glass
as the moon spilled on me once. We danced all
night finding freedom in touch banshee lips and
smoking fingertips. For that moment of pomegranate
seeds I journeyed to the promiseland and asked
him if he would ever wander to Morocco with me
to smell the stars in the desert measure life in cups and
currents of fish away from this medieval city of mockery.

His smile became sweet, a magnifying glass even but
every bird has a nest and before he left he told me he
loved me and I think of him still I think of him still
here in this dark desert of mine I think of his eyes
feating and fasting while I,
I never go hungry.

The Famished Road: By Ben Okri

Ben Okri’s, The Famished Road, is the author’s daring first book from his trilogy. The Famished Road is the story of Azoro, a spirit child, who is destined to fall on earth and live a mortal life, but who, painfully and constantly attempts to will himself to death and return the spirit world where he is peaceful and free. Azoro’s home is colonial Nigeria, where staunch and proud men hunted by politicians and are at the mercy of poverty, men who fear magic rites and whose natural urge for existence embeds their people in rituals and cultures of dreaming spirituality and cult belief, all in a land that is burning with revolution.

Among this vulgarity and beauty, among these diatribes and tattoos, emerges Azaro. Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but he is ethereal and open to the rhythms of Nigerian life. He witnesses the Black Tyger, riots, burning houses, and appalling hunger and squalor , while hovering in the background are classism at the bar of the enigmatic and powerful Madame Koto, the mysterious but helpful photographer, the malevolent blind singer, as well as a slew of good and bad spirits. From all this Azaro metamorphisizes. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits is Azaro's story. He accepts his destiny as a child of this earth. Okri expresses the relationship between father and son through their friendship crossed with bouts of frustration and socio-economic limitations.

Okri has much to say about the state of living in Nigeria, but in his poetic way he ultimately unites us with visual and verbal prose ascending into a mystic conception of the spiritual world. Deriving his inspiration from his own homeland, Okri allows Azaro to narrate through the vegetation and landscape of cotton silk trees and lakes, myth and songs of his people and fuses the characters with a phantasmagorical timelessness which allows them to appear in our imaginations time and time again.

Rolling, quivering, heaving and fleeing, The Famished Road is an emotional journey into the heartbeat of Nigerian country, a beautiful wandering from the written to a world whose universe has its own language. Okri creates an allegory of life where a river becomes a road that swallows its travelers, as life, voracious in its hunger, overwhelms and swallows those who travel its road. Life, screams Okri, is a famished road.

Raktakarabi: The Urban Sound Opera

Parnab Mukherjee's production of Rabindranath Tagore's Raktakarabi: The Urban Sound Opera is a daunting script not so much for its poetry but for the edgy realism that becomes the meta-text. The director's efforts to move away from the poetic construct and create an urban thriller are evident as the play delves deep into the darkness of Raktakarabi -- the scary layers within the text, the textured characters of Nandini who breaks open the red dawn of the future and the lone voice of Raja whose moods, fierce and filthy, ricochet in black palpitating darkness, and the chiaroscuro play of shadows and basement light submerge Raktakarabi into a level of urban site-specificity where words become naked-raw installations and the primal pain of a coal mining town called Yakshapuri comes alive.

The production fuels unmistakable elements central to the play:

The genesis of Raktakarabi's soundscape was unclear to Tagore.

Raktakarabi has a strong sense of body politics: sexuality as a weapon and a hazy line between sex as a mental metaphor and sex as a physical metaphor. Or even the classification of Nandini as moral, amoral or immoral.

Raktakarabi was never quite finished. Tagore subsequently tried to de-mystify the text through numerous writings, thereby increasing the already piled layers of interpretations.

Not at all clothed in poetry, this production embraces the industrial metaphors which chillingly foretell labour exploitation. The set design turns Sankhini River into a silvery pathway, 'Rajar ento' or 'vestiges of Raja's meal' into labourers dilemma with the tentacles of branding, computerization and globalization. Even the site-specificity of the play evokes the industrialized, dusty town, hence the choice of a school basement.

Raktakarabi is a long poem laced with notions of freedom. This production has been inspired by Tagore's analysis of the play in the Manchester Guardian, analysis of Sankho Ghosh and a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharyya called 'Khelnanagar' -- a modern treatise that talks of an eerie post modern Raktakarabi landscape.

The brilliant uniqueness of this production lies not only in the gritty and barbaric performance styles of the cast, but also in its supplementary texts used throughout the play between acts and scenes. The supplementary texts used in the play include Tagore's drafts of 'Nandini' and 'Yakshapuri', Collected Letters of Tagore Vol 18, Sankha Ghosh's essay on Raktakarabi and poem, 'Monohorpukur'.

Deep in the red dust of Yakshapuri, a painstaking portrait is being painted. The portrait is of Kishore, innocent and defiant, bringing Nandini her favorite flower; Ranjan, a man losing his country and losing his life but gaining something he has searched for within -- his freedom; Nandini, the light in the presence of darkness; Raja the avaricious king whose human objects largely depend on machine and who brings Ranjan to his death; and Sardar, a symbol of the fascist face of India. This is a portrait of Tagore's literary creations in a side of sky and earth, dream and song, whose sonata of life is -- death as their only weapon.

frankincense and myrrh
incense perfume the air
smoke merges with light
spirals linger of dust
in the slant of sunlight
like an arabic scroll
mandala,
of arcs and curves
wafting
in hypnotic ritual
of afternoon prayer

sleepy island
palm fronds fall like eyelashes
tropical storms sweep
jasmine
to sweeten sleep
bluish dusk
in the half light
morning comes
in deep red crimson smudges of sky
his shape is in my skin