Unfinished Goa

Sand swipes my eye
I cannot see
the fisherman’s trail

Boats wobble
till my eyes steady

Elephants of the sea
call out to giraffes of the sky
they are all grey

In mental combat
I drink hard glasses of wine

The road rips the field
the rain, the road
They are all mine

The food grows alive
in me

dawn arrives
as the first thought
on a second morning

A city confused,
a cousin of the village
- a disqualified town

Bartholomew James Jude
Sinners in ripe youth
Dance in music and
mandos

(c) Rochelle Potkar

Phook

Phoonk – the apparently best surprise comedy I have ever seen in years.

And they didn’t even tout it as a spoof-of-sorts.

It starts out all fine with the director believing in telling us right from the start who the perpetrators were going to be and by the interval what they were going to do. So all we are left with is to add up the trailer and the hype and there: you have just the execution and “the how” left to see.
So when it disappoints, making you chuckle instead of jitter you don’t even think ‘why’. Because everything has been already told!

I won’t go into the bickering. I am done. I ‘used’ few friends over a cuppa for that. All I really want to say is about the structure, maybe plead: Couldn’t they play with it? Like not telling us who the perpetrators would be.
Right. It would then become a thriller-horror or some ill-fitting genre but hic “Who cares?”

At least it would have entertained.

at Shah Farm

There was so much green on the outside
that you could be sick, land sick
like sea-sick.

And lost

And sad

And ‘in the middle’

And left to the chance
of a hot meal
when your survival instincts
revive

People spill over the house
like froth from a beer glass
- how well they adjust to
nooks and crannies
how barren are the rooms
- a mind with its ideas, a room with its furniture
gives character
It struck.

what remained weren’t words
but the rusty, rain-watered swing
and
Shah or Shah Impersonator’s bean-counting face

the grassy dirt paths home
and wet winding wheels

and the people at the back (of the car)
gagging you with rock songs

I told you
there was too much green

-Rochelle Potkar

[we won’t talk of the states of mind we carry.]

Be like my city/reverse justice

heartaches
quake
bombs and
bomb blasts

riots
rains
and loves that don't last

my city keeps moving

...

What is the distance between darkness to light?
A hair's breadth.

rat

when we were above the ground
it was sushi on the round

when we were above the ground
the rail tracks made an arresting sound

when we were above the ground
sound of a large sea surround

when we were above the ground
the wind sped abound

when we were above the ground
the rain fell sound by sound

the rainbow

What Billy thought was the magic of his birth was plainly a step-by-step procedure. His parents dated, fucked and had him. But that didn’t stop Billy from assuming for miracles. “Look for miracles and they are there everywhere in everyday life” was what a wise man told him when Billy still hadn't learnt of a new word called doubt. He found miracles in many things but when we came up from behind and booed him we found that they were all step-by-step procedures leading up to that result. So it was staid, plain, cold, hard negligible logic that was behind the things that looked like miracles and yet Billy did not cease to identify miracles.
Sometimes, it was in the not knowing.
Most of the times, it was in the not knowing. Billy never cared to know and always enjoyed a miracle or two. His auras opened up to miracles. His living became a self-prophecy of his expectations of miracles and we became a saga of a cold, step-by-step process.
We nodded over coffee.

But it was Billy who had a real, good time enjoying up each ‘miracle’ that came his way. In the end, Billy won and when we tired we started enjoying things just like he did. There were other people who went into the cold logic of why it happened. They took on the mantles of analyzing and the coffee.

We ran after the rainbow.