Tamil Sentimental Lexicography (part 2)

A perpetual delight to shed tears leaving the Nadu
reading about a tree as a shrine, articulate Mandir,
the floor too abundant to be clean, all is grass for Nandi
and I'm flying away filled with the measured pace of Chiranbadam,
the revolt against deprivation and the color of a pagri,
out of scope in Mylapore, from which state do you come from?
My five elements, Kodumudi, and see the quick Nataraja
playing Shakti in the sands of Triplicane, so unsafe, so impermanent,
so far away from the smells of turmeric, from the Kural, from the crowds
that surrounded the fishing boat going east
across the ocean, a temple for the water and the salt
where we remove our footwear.

And a perpetual delight to see the skins smiling
around the landscape getting arab and then getting gora
Away, and inside my crops, I carry no weight
but stories that never conclude, like countries to be invented,
like all things that are not left out of Arunachala
because there is nothing like poverty but poverty,
it makes salvation in heaven impossible - for there too
there should be a thali for every immortal that perishes,
full of arousa (the Tamil origin of all rice) and full of sambar
to eat and to share, finger by finger, while we find the rhymes.

Tamil Sentimental Lexicography (part 1)

Last Sunday in Madras, koil, koil, koil, koil
a bonus Jain temple between nanak, jesus and shiva on the one mylapore side
and krishna at the end of tuktuk ride
we left our shoes in the autorikshah - in the streets that became temple
like going shoeless inside the san tomas temple full of national flags
and a christ between peacocks.
In the Jain temple, a special pooja, bowing to some random divinities
the doors had beatiful dravidian guarding sculptures and the smell was old
vanakam
Earlier around the ponds of the temple - outside it, not like in Arunashala, Tiruvannamalai,
tried to buy a Nandi for Gisel to break
it was at the vendor's improvised shrine and not to be sold
shrine and shops look the same from afar
and they look like cages
locking the pricey in

sem tonalidade

não é esperar a horta crescer, é arrancar as sementes
e por no lixo
o vento do ventilador, a água do umidificador, o fogo do isqueiro, a terra do piso de concreto do terceiro andar
e eu tenho uma ferida aberta que se corrói e sangra na guerra e em outros

abusar de um poema para vazar máguas frias

não sei nada de hortas, nunca arranquei uma semente
e já chafurdei o lixo procurando grãos, plástico e parafusos de metal
de onde vem o éter
do terceiro andar?
ontem eu fui a um templo com os pés descalços e pisei em sete farelos de prashad

ps: o templo de Natarajar, Shiva dançante, que pisa e não pisa

1729 and the Gannesh mouse

Sacred?
I wanted to be walking along the canal beside The Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Mathematics
in Chennai (it's opposite to the Cheipaulk Cricket Stadium, on a road that leads to Marina Beach).
The smell mixed with numbers in the way Ramanujan used to think of them (him but not even Hardy,
who got 120 theorems from him - but not the proofs) made me want to walk there.
Walk and carry on walking. I carry the smell with me to my clean lodge.
And miss it after the shower.
There is something in the dirty vestis that make me remember worn out talits for Jewish prayers,
but covering rather lower parts of the body, and with little mediation.
I don't like holy Gannesh in its splendour, although he is much more beautiful than St Thomas or St Francis, who would maybe promptly become an elephant on his smooth devotion.
I don't like the lord Gannesh always with too much aura for a wild elephant, circumscribed like the begging and blessing elephant in the Arunachala temple.
I don't like the cult of Gannesh in buses, tuktuks, private cars even though an elephant inspires my lungs more than the virgins.
Yet, there is a picture of him where there is a mouse hanging out under his holy feet.
Just a mouse
like several who where roaming over Shiva in the temple, looking for coconut and banana left overs.
I like the smell of the mouse in the picture.
The icon is the mouse beside.
I wanted to be walking along the canal beside The Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Mathematics
in Chennai (it's opposite to the Cheipaulk Cricket Stadium, on a road that leads to Marina Beach.)

Words, Wide Night by Carol Ann Duffy

* a poem by the poet laureate

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

Szymborska in the blog's birthday

It is an invisible blog
called a plog, but often treated as a dlog, a dream log.
Happy birthday.
Here's a gift for you:

Dreams

by Wisława Szymborska
Wisława Szymborska
Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains
with perfect infrastructures.
Without engineers, contractors, workers,
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—
raging highways, instant bridges,
thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us
and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,
without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—
on the path a sudden house just like a toy,
and in it vast halls that echo with our steps
and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—
a specific watch, an entire fly,
on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,
a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats,
conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists—
can fly unfledged,
we light dark tunnels with our eyes,
we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,
talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,
the choices of our heart, our tastes,
we’re swept away
by amorous yearnings for—
and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning
may slip through.

Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Barancza

Buca' s Birthday Guest Blogger: Fabi Borges

NO MORE REALITY
I WANT TO BE A DREAM
WITH ALL KIND OF MOON

NO MORE BORDERS
I WANT TO BE THE PASSAGE
CROSS ALL THE SOULS


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



I THOUGhT IT WAS A THOUGHT
BUT IT WAS I THING
I THOUGhT IT WAS A fight
BUT IT WAS just An OBJEcT knife







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Los Nadies - de Galeano, celebrating Waleska Reuter's new show

Sueñan las pulgas con comprarse un perro y sueñan los nadies con salir de pobres, que algún mágico día llueva de pronto la buena suerte, que llueva a cántaros la buena suerte; pero la buena suerte no llueve ayer, ni hoy, ni mañana, ni nunca, ni en lloviznita cae del cielo la buena suerte, por mucho que los nadies la llamen y aunque les pique la mano izquierda, o se levanten con el pié derecho, o empiecen el año cambiando de escoba.

Los nadies: los hijos de nadie, los dueños de nada,
los nadies: los ningunos, los ninguneados,
corriendo la liebre, muriendo la vida, jodidos,
rejodidos.
Que no son aunque sean.
Que no hablan idiomas sino dialectos.
Que no profesan religiones sino supersticiones.
Que no hacen arte sino artesanía.
Que no practican cultura sino folklore.
Que no son seres humanos sino recursos humanos.
Que no tienen cara sino brazos.
Que no tienen nombre sino número.
Que no figuran en la historia universal
sino en la crónica roja de la prensa local.

Los nadies.......
que cuestan menos que la bala que los mata...

PS: A exposição da WR se chama Galeria de Nulidades, ao lado da Galeria de Celebridades de tribunal

pangs

or maybe those bells from the Bow church
instead of the image of cut shish in Anatolia, Mare Street
the train I never catch - bubbles in the brain
i cut my finger opening cheese
pang, or maybe i revel
a direct line from London Fields to true grit

Leminski enviado por Lus

alguém parado
é sempre suspeito
de trazer como eu trago
um susto preso no peito,
um prazo, um prazer, um estrago,
um de qualquer jeito,
sujeito a ser tragado
pelo primeiro que passar

parar dá azar

Reading Rude Rhyming in a Grand Library's snack bar table

there are some aspects of thought
that ravel
i shiver, crumbled and fray
that strong bone amid the weak mud, or is it a tower?
i hear the sounds of the bubbling cities in the desert
my hermeneutics got overpowered by my trembling
that travels and carries nothing inside, chants, indigestion
all the noise that follows from moving outside inside
or the usual angst and fear of angst of the tide
or accommodating fear and angst of fear
i rebel

maybe I was meant to be the Brighton Pier
or i would be happy with a tidy George Michael
too many words in a library and we're left with the sheer mumbling
i speak as a worm, without worm words
without the wit
in the absence of the absolute-demolishing love

telling what life is these days

It is a big o, one after the other
changing intonation, accent, punctuation and length.
I figure everything is almost like an open treasure,
a treasure that treats me as a black box
I square, do you square?
The big o, the box, the Böks:
Snobs who go to Bonn for bonbons know how to shop for good corn or posh cod.
Or the small vocal, brief, contained, sheepish...
the o that almost doesn't leave the mouth,
a river of impossibles
that nevertheless floats underneath the turmoil of things
like a whispering earthquake
or a hidden terror attack
with no victims but the potential cogs
of the blackest of all boxes.

By Hamdy

This is Hamdy's work mentioned in the previous post.