He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

-- W.H. Auden

"Brevity"

To a man I did not know, whose soul was writ in water.

An experience that humbles...and yet is forgotten in just a short space of time. What monsters have we become?

I wish I knew who you were, I wish I had made the time... It frightens me when your smiling face flashes before my eyes and in that instant I feel as though I am drowning...perhaps in the depths of my insignificance.

Arrogance and frivolity...competition amongst yourselves. Material wealth and the squandering of our virtues, the bragging, boasting and infantile emotions...It consumes us and buries our senses in a putrid yellow slime. We are taught how to swim and yet we laugh as we drown. We drown in our filth.

A parent should never have to bury their child, a brother should never have to feel that pain.

May Allah grant you the best of the world in which you have entered into...and may you be blessed with peace. Your position is envied and greatly feared, there is little that we can pretend to know.

Adam Desai - I miss you.

(29th December 2008)

"The Caged Skylark" - Gerald Manley Hopkins

As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells—
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.

Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest—
Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.

Man's spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,
But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.

Into the Cornfields.

The difference between a literary and a journalistic text is often misunderstood. I have opted to assume a somewhat journalistic stance before the commencement of this next piece however, I do not wish to be constrained by the crude dusty chalk lines that are etched around this style of writing...'if by dull rhymes our English must be chained' so to speak...

Frankly, at this point in time, there is little that I do care about and yet I desperately wish I could alter this confining frame of mind...freedom and passivity is actually quite a confining state of being as there is very little one can feel or do when they have reached this 'ultimate' position...Perhaps it really is 'lonely at the top' on more than one level..- if only we had the intellectual capacity and possessed enough patience with our stunted faculties of understanding to appreciate this notion. If we did, we would not continue to pursue that which is ultimately futile, we would not find ourselves racing away from our lush homely valleys into barren grounds that are weighed down with the mottled carcasses of those who once found themselves here...in much the same fashion that we have found ourselves here now..

It is an old tale if one considers it, - Keats touched on it in the ballad entitled la belle dame sans merci, an 'ancient ditty' as Prospero would have it, as the knight sojourns in the foreign land 'alone and palely loitering'... perhaps we are all enthralled by the wild wild eyes of those faery children that wander the earth unrestrained...How do we resist the sweet melodies that charm us like dumb serpents eagerly slithering to our demise? If we eliminate the notion of pursuing that which we long for and yet cannot essentially obtain, would we be happier? Or simply obedient followers of unschooled ignorance? What exactly is success? What defines this, and how does one separate the tangled wires that mesh together to make up this absurd concept? Can we, as limited beings obtain success? Does success define happiness or is it quite the opposite? Why do we constantly grapple with theories that we never actually pay much attention to when human nature overcomes us...? And lastly, are we all essentially servants of Eros when all the glitter, foils and civilised jargon is stripped away? How much can we control in terms of who we are and when the moment arises when one must venture out into the cornfields, why is it so difficult to define how we feel?

She wandered lonely as a cloud, and strained to hear the music, yet still she followed the white noise in her mind and ignored the rusty chains that clung to her ankles. The cornfields. How does one refrain from looking back?

Salt crumbled beneath the stones, and like a newborn her hands stretched out to touch, her nose lifted and her eyes opened, her tongue slid slowly over the parched lips...but she still could not hear the music.

"The street of lost footsteps and the endless postponment of closure.."

"The concept of genuine perception does not refer to one's insight regarding a single category in isolation, but rather, our true perceptional abilities are only illustrated when we are able to brush the delicates shades gleaned from that insight on to each and every thread interwoven into the colossal canvas of everyday life.
Each new shade enriches and ages our frame and gradually the colours will blend together to reveal the rare hue of empathy."

"A Mingled Yarn"

She spins tales of gold, they say. She spins them around her shapely form until, like a mingled yarn she emerges, dazzling and secure, delicately clad in her cocoon of comfort.

Her fingers weave in and out of the threads as her head gently tilts to one side. A smile plays upon the corners of her lips and she draws the young man closer to her, somewhere across the ocean the bright glass eyes flicker shut. Somewhere in a darkened room a candle burns and the scent of jasmine floats in gentle curls over the glowing embers.

They say she descended from an angel. They say that those that look upon her cannot gaze for too long..they say her innocence makes them fearful and their fear makes them run. It is she who makes them run.

With naked footsteps pressed into the lush ground she wanders out towards the water.

The heart of the city pulsed and blazed. Lights, music, the streets of life. Never a dull moment. The cosy cafe on the corner of the street was dimly lit from the inside, the smell of roasted coffee wafted out on to the open road.

It resembled a mansion...one of those old mansions that was set out in the French colonial fashion, but there were so many rooms, and there were the tunnels too...And the lofts and the balcony's, the cracks and the loose floorboards, a single chair in a red room, an old chimney.

"Its complicated Officer", he said dismissively as he chewed noisily on a particularly tough piece of meat that kept painfully reappearing inbetween the rather crooked rows of his tar-stained teeth.

"There was a girl who lived in these parts some time ago, but I guess now only the roses would know."

"The roses?" The young officer frowned at him and handed him a serviette to assist him with the remains of his masticated meal that clung in clumps to the wiry hairs of his unkempt beard.

"They grow outside the white house on the fields and they seem to be changing colour" he replied.

"Trainspotting"

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself.

Choose your future.

Choose life.

-John Hodge