Personal and Universal

This piece is inspired from my days in “La Maison des Jeunes” back in 2015. I was among the first batch of people to live there. The style of poetry is narrative in nature and has personal and universal elements in it. This form of poetry is the evolutionary child of linear rhyming forms of poetry. It often contains non-linear patterns and metaphors, almost becoming the love offspring of traditional poetry and narrative prose.

la Maison des Jeunes

it was morning,

sunrays seeping through

the early morning mist

that for the first time

seemed so selcouth,

smearing wakefulness

all over my face

and awareness all over the

endless clickety-clack of the

fifteen boggied Vellore express

as it mildly teased its passengers

into thinking that it would shortly

enter the vomitorium of

Chennai Central station,

but of course,

it took two and a half hours more:

(for those of you who’ve spent

those static three days on wheels

while traveling from the north to the south,

you know the agony when

the freaking train keeps getting delayed)

two and a half hours later,

as my car spent its first 45 minutes

snuggling its way around the city traffic

before finally letting its window panes

collaborate with my foresight and hindsight

in sketching newer dimensions of possibility,

before college placement shenanigans

and my disinclinations for them

became more irrelevant to me

than a blind two-dollar whore’s

unkempt pubic hair was to her,

the summer skin of the day outside

kissing me ever so gently

with its palliative care

seemed to promise me

a lesser known treasure ahead,

and i wasn’t going to

not believe in it:

now,

having learnt

different names for the same freaking thing

in the cocoon of my physics and chemistry pages

all throughout my adolescent years,

i wasn’t so sure what to do

with the “commesichiamo” greeting

i got from Riccardo,

the papaya-eating, dread-wearing

part gardener, part philosopher

caretaker of la Maison des Jeunes;

but, one thing i knew,

that i had come to the right place

for my mornings to retrace their origin

back to their fulfilled state,

for my sanity’s wreckage

to recover from all the

getting lost in translation

over the years of chewing

heavy books and their weightless lessons,

for my previously pusillanimous

inner ram flames to rekindle

its lost relationship with Krsna

as Prof Manoj would often profess,

for my fish scales to learn to master

its sense of clepsydra again

after years of Bhootnath and Blue-Door trips

in search for constipated chillum hay,

and for my late redemption

to take birth after having shed

the whole nincompoop act

attached to my previously held identity:

(you see, we mermen forever strive to

make you scratch your heads

the moment you think

you have us all figured out)

la Maison des Jeunes,

a house for the youth,

a howff for pasta addicts,

a community based on smiles,

on panglossian mornings full of

dark Italian coffee

and fruitarian meals

on afternoon hammock chortles

that brought back to awareness

a faint and forgotten recognition

of that sense of being

from some past life,

(we mermen have to

go through eleven past lives

in order to get to

the twelfth one)

on evening yoga postures

that made the wind in us

do the swan dance

before gently kissing

the setting sun goodbye,

on recurring potluck dinners

where my black sesame lemon potatoes

combined with the pasta pesto

would cause massive eruptions of

orgasmic tastebud volcanoes

and delay the night

into witnessing more laughter

than it had signed up for:

and now that

change has come out

of its camouflage

fully revealing its swollen cape

that turns river beds into

the archaeologist’s chance to get

a scrap of paper he calls his degree,

now that change has spun its wheel

that causes the embryo sacs

of aged mothers to rejuvenate

after having given birth to

triplets, quadruplets

and a couple of

back to back twins,

la Maison des Jeunes too

has become a distant galaxy far away

made of reminiscence and throwbacks,

made of feathers of the memory bird,

made of mispronounced Italian words

and hilarious gardening mishaps,

made of scattered hearts that were

once in sync with one another,

made of music that was devoid

of physical sound:

screw you, change!