Dream

Man in my dreams

Lost part of my heart

I see you

Tall and Strong

You lifted Me high off the ground

Your lips

Locked on Mine

Never to let go

Part of an air starved dream

I burn for you

Man of my mind

Man of my soul

I see you

But I don’t see your face

Never have I felt a Love so Strong

Or wanted something so much

You are Candle

I am Paper

And Together

We BURN

And the bliss unmakes mere ecstasy

Infinite times over

As we shatter

Into. a. million. little. pieces.

Dance With Me

Dance with me

Hold me close

as we float-dance

Around and around and around and around

the floor

One, two, three, four

My eyes never leave Yours

One, two, three, four

Your hand in Mine

Mine in Yours

Our feet move as one

Which is funny

Because I can’t dance...

Then You Stop.

And the music Stops 
with You.

You look down and smile

Eyes alive

Your mouth touches mine for a moment

Cut. Short.

And suddenly We lie

My head on Your chest

Your legs tangled in Mine

In peace so utter so complete

Life. Stands. Still.

‘Don’t leave me’ You whisper,

I reply, ‘I won’t’.

And I am snatched away from your arms in a cold cloud of noise.

Birthday Present Poem

Old soul
New body
Donut eating
Lasagna making
Agony auntie
Bear
Of the mad friends
Late night calls
Good profile picture
Taking
Lover of whiskey, cats, comics, Lego
And me?
Happy birthday
The bunny didn't say it
So I will
Over the top
Hooray
Late poem
Better better better
Better late than never
Panda bear hug.

The Blessed Curse

Pain 

is a fleeting thing

much like joy

love and laughter.

but the measure of a man

is not what he was,

but what he is now.

and what he will be tomorrow.

life is a moment

that lasts many years.

and it holds much pain

despair and heartache.
One feels lost

and alone.

but there is love

given away in buckets.

never received.

always just given.

but the love is there

in all the mended hearts,

the restored smiles,

the soothed souls.
where there is love

there is hope.

you just have to stand back and let it all in.
in every smile you save,

in every heart you remake,

in all the broken pieces you pick up

and make whole again.

in every new hope you create,

there is a person

who will love again.

there is no better payment anyone can receive.

your curse

is not the curse that it seems.

it's a blessing in disguise

seen only by the other souls

you save.

so turn the blessed curse inward

because

how can you keep saving others

when you don't save yourself?

Monday - A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day!*

As Mondays go, today was a really crappy one. Literally crappy because I had to wake up at 5 am to remove two large piles of dog poo off the kitchen floor. I went back to sleep because I didn't want to start my week on poop duty. But then I woke up late and didn't have enough time to shower or have any breakfast before I went to work. This made me grumpy (and no shower meant I was slightly sticky because I sweated in the night) so I was sticky and grumpy and hungry. Since I didn't have time to make breakfast, I had to buy mediocre sausage buns from a tiny bakery on my way to work. This did not alleviate my grouchiness.

Then when I got to work, a couple of people decided to show me the corpses of two pigeons that had gotten into the canteen and then either starved to death over the two day Vesak holiday or smashed themselves to death against the glass doors. I looked because I thought they were going to show me a puppy. It was NOT a puppy. Not even close. I wailed inside my head, 'WHY? WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS FIRST THING IN THE MORNING? WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS AT ALL???' But I didn't wail out loud because one of them was taking a picture of the poor dead bird. Such macarbness on a Monday morning! And come to think of it, in retrospect, quite fitting I suppose. It has been a dead bird picture kind of day.

There was a brief respite in the horribleness that was today when I got to my desk because a coworker had kindly gotten me a box of goodies - a cupcake, an eclair and a macaroon - to say thank you for finding her a nice hotel to stay at in Hikkaduwa. It was sweet of her and I was touched. I then went and made a cup of coffee like I do on mornings that I don't take coffee to work. But before I could drink it, I was ambushed by three different students and I had to deal with them so long that my coffee was cold by the time I got to it. I had to drink it cold because we have no microwave at work. And I was hungry so I had to eat my disappointing sausage buns. They we not delicious. Not even a little bit. They filled me up but did not please me.

Because of everything that happened in the morning, I thought I deserved to eat an eclair for breakfast. Having cheered up a bit at the prospect, I took a bite of the eclair in my goodie box only to find that the cream inside it had gone sour. I wasn't sure if it had cream cheese icing inside so I decided to leave the rest of the eclair on the table in the middle of the room for another unsuspecting soul to take a bite and confirm whether or not it was off. A friend took a bite. It was indeed off. I had to throw my eclair away. This was the most heartbreaking thing I had to do in a long time.

I should probably mention right about now that I missed a trip to Jaffna with my friends because of my students. They didn't turn up for classes all week last week so I had to stay back to teach them to make sure they won't flunk their quiz on the 28th. Not only were the rat bastards not there at the time the class was supposed to start, they were an hour late, and half of them didn't turn up for class at all! The unfairness of it all!!! I could have been in Jaffna right now! Gah!!!

I finally decided to cut my losses and come home. But then I got out of the bus a few stops early so I could go to my movie store and buy a copy of the Lego movie. I felt I could use some Lego awesomeness to brighten up my day. The movie shop didn't have it. Nor did they have anything else I wanted. And I found out that the movie where Tom Hiddleston voices a young James Hook (That I was incidentally waiting to watch) is for children aged 4-10. Such sadness! So I bought something I didn't really want and came home. Did I mention that I almost fell in a pothole in the middle of the pavement on my way home?? It was not there last Friday and I just managed not to fall in, but it was a near miss.

And finally, the horrible, fake, bottled cherry on top of the margarine based, eggless cake that was my day was that I just finished a class with a student who was not interested in a word I had to say! He looks everywhere but at me when I teach him, doodles and scribbles and mutters when I ask him questions, and stares blankly into the distance when I try to see if he understood something. He is one of the more frustrating, annoying, irritating people I have taught and he's too old to smack. I just got away.

Today has been a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day! So I thought, 'SCREW THIS' and looked at text from dog and laughed hysterically for 15 minutes. Then I decided to vent in a blog post. Which resulted in this little gem. My day just got a wee bit better. So I have now decided that I'm going to eat and sleep while I am ahead of things. I really hope that tomorrow will be kinder or I am not getting out of bed!

*The title for this post is a modified version of the title of the book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible,No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst.

1. 
   

On Missing You

I miss you like an idiot misses the point. Like the storm troopers miss the Jedi. After all these years, after all this time. You are still on my mind. I've never been good at the sentimental shit about soul mates and love being for ever. But this is not love. Not anymore I think. This is something else. Something I have no words for. Something I have trouble writing about. Something that makes me sit and stare at the words that have no shape. And I miss you. I miss the idea of you. The shape of you. The incredible, magical, utter pointlessness that is you. It is like trying to describe the smell of the number nine. And I keep trying.

Jerk.

I have no idea where you are. No idea what you're doing. This makes me sad. Not all the time. But once a month or so you make me sad. I wonder, did you give free reign to your mind? Did it freak you out? Do you even have a mind left anymore? And am I still around, wandering in and out through the corridors in your mad mad brain? Or are we running, holding hands, away from the descending darkness as your brain cells die in hoards and you forget one more day that you spent with me?

Blue lobster.

Do you know that I am real? Are you still real? Do you remember me, the shape of my smile and the way that I cock my head sideways when I'm thinking? Thoughts like this don't do me any good. But not knowing is an itch that I just can't scratch. I've always been curious. Always. And there is nothing that annoys me more than not knowing something that I desperately want to know. Do you remember this about me? How I love the internet because it has all the answers? And how I love Google because it knows everything? And that I love the TV and movies and books, and that I mutter and hum to myself when I concentrate? Do you read the book about demons that you stole from me? Do you wonder if a demon got me because you took my book and now I can't recognize or exorcise them? I'm safe. So far, so good. No demons.

Love Coconut.

You were my person. Even though, in the grand scheme of things, it was for a short time. We were so good while it lasted. An inspiration to love. "If you two don't make it, I don't believe in love." I was meant for you and you were meant for me. Both perfectly imperfect and beautiful in our flaws. We got us at our worst and deserved us at our best. We both ate with forks in a land of two spoons. But every good thing must come to an end. So we had an ending of sorts. Then another, and then another one more. And now, nothing. Radio silence. Not a word. Not a hum. Not a whisper. No news is good news. Oh no, he's ok. And I still miss you. A little less every day.

The Problem with Writing

It's really hard to write. I know. I've been trying to write for months. Weeks. Days. Hours. Until I finally thought, "screw this!" I actually need to write something. So here I am, trying to write something and what's horrible is that I can already feel myself running out of ideas as I type this. It's a terrible feeling, just waiting for your fingers to type, not knowing what to write exactly and never knowing when the ideas will run out and you will be left staring at a half empty page. I try to put off the inevitable. I fiddle with my spelling (something that takes a lot of fiddling with because I can't for the life of me, spell properly) I also check and recheck my grammar so many times that in the end (at the end?) I begin to doubt my own ability to express myself coherently.

I keep staring at what I've just written and think "what is this garbage?" "Ew, did I actually say that?" "That doesn't make sense, what was I thinking? This just in, I WASN'T"  Sigh. and so it goes. My two star signs according to Western and Sri Lankan astrology are Sagittarius and Cancer. Which I guess, technically makes me my own worst enemy. Why? Well, I'm told Sagittarians and Cancerians... and I got distracted by the eminent  return of Mr. Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and my desire to share the news I found on Buzzfeed on the wall of the Geek Club of Sri Lanka's Facebook page... So were was I, ah yes, I'm told Sagittarians and Cancerians don't really like each other apparently. I don't really know why that is, but apparently they don't.

And I'm waffling. This is why I'm having trouble writing these days. I wrote this post about my dad on Father's day, years ago and reposted it on Facebook recently. People tell me it's beautiful, and that it's amazingly well written and that it made them cry. My favourite comment was from a writer friend who called it powerful. She knows her thing. So I'm glad. I reckon I can actually make people feel something when they read my writing. and then I get the requests to write more.

And that just blows. It was hard enough to write one thing, but to CONTINUE writing is nothing short of torture. I feel like a liar and a fake. Sure I can produce a 'brilliant' piece of rhetoric from time to time. I do have my moments of genius. It's preserving those moments and building on them that's hard. Believe you me, writers bloc or is is block? is a very very real thing. Most times I just can't think of what to say really. Neil Gaiman says that if you want to be a writer, you need to keep on writing. But I'm one of those people who secretly wants everyone to like me and like what I do. Handling criticism, for me, has always been horrifically difficult. Sure, I'll grin and say "Go fuck yourself, if you don't like it", but I will remember for a long long time that you didn't. and that... bugs me.

I started writing a story recently. It's a madcap idea I found somewhere, and I've told many people about it, but it's going no where fast. I can't begin to figure out how to write it and what I have written is vaguely creepy and sounds like it's coming from a pedophile. And I don't know how to fix it. People are either quite incredulous when I tell them about my idea and say "but how will that work?" or "there's fantasy without MAGIC?" or they tell me, "make them meet in their dreams" "they should have a happy ending!".

That's just the thing, I have no frikking ending. It doesn't end. I don't see how it can end. Yay me! I'm about to become the author of literally the neverending story. Also, I hate that word, literally. I never know when to use it, the Oatmeal's comic helped some, but I feel 'literally' is the word version of the semi colon. I never know when to use it and I'm uncomfortable when I do. Because I'm convinced I'm using it wrong. I probably am.

The worst thing is that everyone wants to read it and I have squat. Less than squat actually. I have squa. Less than squat, squa... get it? I also keep thinking I should be funny or at least witty when I write. Sort of, anyway. It seems to be expected of me. I read somewhere that the ability to make people laugh is usually a sign intelligence and that someone who laughs at your jokes is more likely to like you and want to sleep with you. Well, I make people laugh quite often but my problem is that I'm never sure if they are laughing at me or laughing with me. I also don't think any of them want to sleep with me. Probably anyway.

So, what I've actually been trying to say all this time is that, writing is hard. It's very very hard. Just because I write once in a while, doesn't seem to mean I can do it all the time. Maybe I should start one of those 30 day blog challenges. Get into the habit of writing so to speak. But again, I don't know what to say. I also suck at endings. I can't write them. Every ending I write always sounds awkward to me. The happy ones, and they lived happily ever after rainbows and candy floss; the depressing ones, and they both died, messily, and in pain. The weird ones, prince charming found out that his princess was in fact lacking the pivotal 'ss' at the end of the word, still loved her/him and lived happily ever after. Nothing sounds right. So I'm stopping now. And it will be awkward and abrupt. That can't be helped.