The Face of Seeming

Painted faces sped by in velvet carriages,
Looking back, the rack of neverbeen,
Saints and swallows racking my willow
Limbs; could not see you at the feast.

Enamelled eyes, prize open the thoughts,
And surmise what's never said.
Colder than ice, so nicely
They did speak and fade.

Chained alive, pain has wrenched your face,
I can't find you behind the stagnant mask;
Clothed in sand swept from many shores,
You are something I dread to ask.

Another year...

I should be studying for the Modernist Prose exam. I should be tucked inside my mosquito net, little dog-eared book in hand, warming blanket upto my chin.

Instead, I'm posting/swatting mosquitoes. To think, another year has slipped away again. Where did all those minutes go? Sublimated into a confusing swirl of half-recognized faces and thoughts of tenderness. Gone absolutely!

Everyday, I get older. I sometimes make a great sweep over my face with my hands, as if to physically wipe away the years. Let me revert to childhood simplicity, a Lucy without the boobs, when I was invincible in my fortress.

Now, everything is in ruins, my mind picked at and broken into bits for the tourists, loud and obnoxious, who scrawl trite graffiti all over my body. Very soon I shall be an incoherent mass of debris, just a bit of ash left over from the extinguished incense-stick of history, symbolic of I don't know what...

But now I shall go to my bed, and cover myself up tip-to-toe with my lovely, delicious quilt, which uses grandmama's old faded widow's sari as a cover. Then I shall have no more doubts or questions, but one: over the chin or under the chin?