Feb 12, 2016 Uncategorized

Away!  (An Aubade)
©February 12th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram

Night comes quietly,
Eager to court me,
And pay me tribute.

Soft is the pale cloud
On which we both lie,
And converse, entwine.

Colors flow like songs
And music slides in
Hues beyond my ken.

Sleep is my lover.
We keep our dream-tryst,
Short though it might be.

All is color and wild sound
All is tapestry and string
All is narrative and haze,

Till you arrive, Dawn.
What mean you by this,
Your rude intrusion?

Take yourself back to
Night, where old Tithon
Awaits you, trembling.

And tell your brother
We no longer need
His bright chariot.

Goodbye, O Eos!
Goodbye, Helios!
Stay, O Oneiros!

Let’s go through the gates
Of horn, and never
Come back to this world.

______________________________________________

For those who wish to know, an aubade is a poem about lovers who separate in the morning after a tryst.  For more, see Aubade.

Glossary:
Eos — A Titaness, the Greek Goddess of the Dawn
Helios –A Titan, her brother, the Sun, who draws his chariot through the sky
Tithonos — the immortal, but endlessly aging, husband of Eos
Oneiros — Dream personified in Greek mythology

Tags: #Aubade, #Original Poetry, Eos, Greek Myth references, Helios, Lovers, Oneiros, Sleep, Tithonos

Dec 9, 2015 Original Poetry

Morpheus Dreams of Sleep
©December 9th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram

I sift dreams, and drift through souls
Bringing stasis, wafting through
That place where poppies grow,
Whose redness, like blood,
Makes me nod, and nod,
But I never sleep.

I ache with desire for sleep.
I search, adrift, through worlds
Seeking sleep.

I cast my nets far,
And capture stars and ride the orbits
Of planets, and swim through space,
Seeking sleep.

Making myself small,
I fall headlong into human time,
And fly through their tiny,
Powerful lives, so full of fury
And so full of grace; I fly,
Seeking sleep.

And then, I reach your bed.
You lie awake, lost to all, lost to me.
Your eyes are full of moonbeams.
I am ensnared.  I approach.
You don’t see me.  You are elsewhere.

I cannot shake you.
I stand beside you, spellbound.
Dreaming with eyes open,
You lie on your bed, and weave a cosmos,
Expanding galaxies of voiceless dreams
Larger than a cranium, larger than
My cloaked, moon-dark self,
Larger than the edges of all that’s known.

And the threads pull me towards you
Like a lover pulls with the moon with her blood.
I see you, and I desire you,
Weaver of spells, my keeper.
For now I know
Why I didn’t find sleep —

I hadn’t found you.

You spin worlds, and I spin headlong
Into them, spiraling into
Quiet breathing, flow of air and blood,
And you draw me within you.
And I find what I seek:  Peace.

And the power of you, your sleepless
Dreaming mind, your clenched griefs
Your love of sleep, and of me,
These pull me, and I, Morpheus, helpless
Like a leaf in a current, zigzag towards
Towards the shore of you,
Seeking dreams in you.

You see me now.  Your eyes widen,
Draw me in.  I am home in you,
Come to rest at last
In the curtains behind your eyes,
Poet of my sleep,
Dreaming of me.

___________________________________________

Tags: #Love, #Writing 101, Dreaming, Morpheus, Poetry Day 3, Sleep

Jan 15, 2015 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries

Nap-Time

©January 15th, 2015

By Vijaya Sundaram

So sleepy.
Washing over me is pure lethargy.
I lie in bed and type these words.
I cannot believe I’m going to … gasp … take a nap!
A nap?
Really?
Try going on a few hours of sleep every night for three nights in a row.
So, okay, it’s my own fault, I admit.
However, I insist that I was possessed by an evil spirit, which made me stay up till 2:00 a.m. last night, doing laundry and sweeping the floor.  Why?  Ask that evil spirit.  In any case, going to sleep at 2:00 a.m. was fine fine, except that I had to get up at 6:20 a.m. this morning.
So, now, I am wafting on a petal-pink magic carpet that lifts me ever so gently, ever so tenderly into a land that beckons.
And here I am, still resisting it!
I look around me, and I’m purely a creature made of a body.  My extremities tell me where I end, and the sheets begin, or the computer keyboard.
I feel my blood circulating sluggishly and contentedly through my veins.
Pure body.  Who cares about the bloody spirit?
Here are bones encased in flesh typing these words.
There are eyelids half-narrowed to take in blue computer light.
My skin feels happy, with coolness and warmth both.
I shall NOT think about those who are suffering right now.  I do it all the time, every day.  I shall enjoy these sybaritic moments.
My body is the only reality that IS.
This computer is ephemeral, though.
It’s going to go out of my reach now.
That’s actually nice.
See you later.

Tags: Being in the moment, body, in my flesh, napping, Sleep, spirit, sybarite

Oct 3, 2014 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries

You know you are fully grown-up, when your child turns to you at bedtime, asking you to stay near her, because she’s newly afraid of the concept, the spectre of death and dying, because she’s read a book about Hades.

And when she says, “Parents make everything all right,” you hug your child and say, “Yes it will be all right.  Go to sleep, sweets.  I’ll stay near you till you’re asleep.”

And you sit next to her, holding her hand, reassuring her with a song and soft words, then with companionable silence, till sleep wafts her into sweet oblivion, and you know she’ll sleep until the day comes, and she will be all right, because you made her fears recede.

By Dreamer of Dreams

October 3rd, 2014

Tags: #Mother and Daughter, childhood fears, reassurance, Sleep

Mar 29, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Reading, Writing, Thinking

Death, and all that Dark Stuff …

©By Vijaya Sundaram

March 29th, 2013

The dead are never really far from us.

I imagine them around me every day.

When I shut my eyes at night, and sink, awake, into the blackness under my eyelids, I feel a momentary sense of terror, as if I’m floating away, unanchored, into space.  Then follows a quiet exhilaration.  I know sleep will follow, and that’s a lovely, glowing, cushiony thought.

I wonder whether the dead feel this way upon dying.  Do they float around in inky blackness, wondering when they’ll awake, but knowing they never will, and so, they burrow under our subconscious and visit us in our dreams, just to feel at home, if only for a night?

Or, do the dead just drift away? 

Can we accept the word of those who’ve “come back” just because they came back?  How do they know what happens after?  They’ve come back, haven’t they?  So, they didn’t venture that far.

If only one could write after death.  I would love that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~That’s all, folks!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Death, Dying, Forgetting, Returning, Sleep, Writing

Mar 29, 2013 Uncategorized

Day-Night-Quiet — Pune, India

©By Vijaya Sundaram

Written in India, on Friday, July 16, 2010

And the hills coming closer

Closer, closer

Marching towards the buildings

Being built

And the sky reaching

Towards the claustrophobic

To pluck them, gasping, into open space,

And the slim bais walking along the road

Not yet bent by hard work

In the houses of the rich,

The not-so-rich, and the toilers,

Walking proud, strong, upright

Knowing it is they

Who keep the dust at bay.

And the blood streaming

Through my arteries,

Through veins, dreaming

Along the shores

Of my being, reminds me

Of all that goes on, while all

This toil proceeds in the world

Around the edges of my skin.

And the crickets chirping

And the dogs yelping

And the buses hooting

And the rickshaws snorting

And the trucks squawking

And the light bulb humming

And the baby crying

In the flat below,

And my neurons abuzz

With mindless chatter

Non-stop chatter, flitting

From this to that, from thought

To feeling, from shapeless notion

To an idea taking form,

Taking up all my mindspace

And my mind craving quiet.

And quietness presses in

Opens her petals,

And the buzzing comes to

A dreaming halt

Drinking in the nectar

Of sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Original Poetry, City Sights, City Sounds, India, Night Sounds, Pune, Sleep

Feb 26, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal

So, school was back in session today, after a week-long hiatus, and as usual, I got no sleep at all, despite trying, really trying to get to bed, before 12:00 midnight.  As the hours ticked on into the darkness, and it was one o’clock, and then probably close to two o’clock, I lay there, watching the cars advertise their presence through their trails of light moving mysteriously across the ceiling. Their Dopplerian sounds waxed and waned, like waves coming close and receding into the distance, and I found them all madly distracting.  Yet, they seemed friendly.  Total and utter silence would have suffocated me, considering how awake, yet insanely desperate for sleep I was.  I needed those sounds.

An asonic and aluminescent world would be death.  I imagine all those spirits of the dead weaving about unsteadily through the utter and crushing blackness of non-being, unable to see, hear, feel, speak and touch.  How terrifying!  Poor things!  One day, I’ll be one of them, unless, of course, I push off with both feet towards the stars.

The darkness used to hold terrors for me when I was young, and (shame-facedly, I admit) even into my twenties.  My imagination peopled it with ghosts and demons, and even fantastical creatures out of Hieronymus Bosch or Michael Crichton.  Once I dispensed with the fantastic or the allegorical, I thought that lurking there, just beyond my ken, were humans with malign motives.  I used to lie awake at night, in my teens, after practising sitar or guitar well into the night, or reading and writing into the wee hours, and then trying to get to sleep.  I’d pull the covers right up to my chin, and lie on my back.  My theory was that if something or someone wanted to get at me, it’d have to look me in the eye first — then, it’d be slain cleanly by my vengeful guardian angel, who stood, alert and attentive, beside me.  Fanciful, of course, and considering I was a spiritual atheist, laughable in the extreme.

Thus, the child gets mixed up with the emerging adult inside one’s skin.  Magical thinking rules all.  Reality is always out on a cigarette break, or rolling up its sleeves to greet the day effusively and maniacally.

Meanwhile, my child-self lay in bed, until sleep came, like a gentle mother or perhaps a lover, and soothed me, or took me into its arms.

These days, the darkness does nothing for me.  Not much, anyway.  I am not afraid of spirits or lurkers.  Fantastical monsters have left my imagination for the nonce.   I miss them at times.  I have to be practical, pragmatic, pedestrian.  No flights of fancy, or terror for me.  I miss all that.

However, sometimes, I fancy I see a moving dot or streak of light between my half-shut eyelashes.  A ghost at last, I say welcomingly in my mind.  Then, I open my eyes wide, and realize it’s just a goddamned car on the road far below, tracing its passage across the ceiling.  At other times, I smile at it, and say, It’s just those floaters and flashes of light you sometimes get, when your eyes are overworked. Go to sleep!

Or, perhaps, it’s a ghost.

I used to tell ghosts to keep away and leave me alone.  Now, I miss them.  Still, time enough to be one of them one day, if I so choose.  They need a little oomph and goosing along to keep them from becoming despondent.

On the other hand, they might get too attached, and I would like to detach myself from everything when I die.  I’d float away like a balloon into the outer atmosphere, and contribute my atmosphere to the rest of the thin blanket that protects the earth from death.

And now, it’s eleven o’clock, and I AM jolly well going to sleep early!  I defy the gods of unrest to try and make me budge from my fell purpose.

In eight hours, I’ll be in school again, churning out learning and knowledge and fun and assignments to the assembled throngs.  Makes one cheerful, doesn’t it?

So, goodnight, dear readers, if you’re there.  And if you’re not, goodnight anyway!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Teaching, back to school, Death and the Maiden, Ghosts, Hieronymus Bosch, Imagination, Insomnia, Sleep, Sleeplessness

Feb 13, 2013 THE BLOG

Fritter and Waste – A Journal Entry of Sorts
©February 2nd 2013
By Vijaya Sundaram

So, today was a weird day.  I had pulled an all-nighter last night.  Entirely my fault, of course.  Plus, I’d slept barely three hours the night before.  Also my fault.  I called it “doing work.”  I could have done that work earlier on Friday, and more of it on Saturday.  One pays the price for dreaming it all away in activities that are well … time-wasters.

Here’s the confession:  I like wasting time.  I am a time waster.  There, I said it.  Can I be excused now?

It’s fun to do.  One has the sense of being a naughty schoolchild, cheating time of its due, thumbing one’s nose at the hours, the minutes, the days of one’s life.  Since it’s all going to separate and break off in gigantic glacial chunks into a sea of anonymity and pointlessness, why not play on the edges of the glacier?  There’s a certain madness and pleasure in it.  There’s a strange satisfying sense of self-destructiveness to it.   Guilty pleasure is the phrase that comes to mind.  Then, after I do it, I feel ashamed.

My shame at being such an idiot, and also, a deeply Hindu sense of duty make me work even harder.  If left to my own devices, I would sit for hours on a field of grass (free of deer tics, fleas and hideous bugs, of course!) that would stretch for miles, and I would stare into the endless blue of a summer sky, mouth open, drinking the light, inhaling the sun, feeling all that helium, hydrogen and whatnot forming and reforming into nebulae within me, making me give birth to stars.

I wouldn’t feel in the least bit bad about it.  I would let my limbs relax (they aren’t relaxed these days).  I would surrender my body to lethargy.  I would dissolve into a protoplasmic blob of pointless, existentially satisfied matter.  And those stars would burn bright in the deep night of my protoplasmic blobbitude.

Enough with all this universe talk.  Back to reality.  I’m afraid that if I let my limbs relax, I will never tauten up again.  And I need to have them be taut and ready to face the mad onrush of my days.  I see upwards of one hundred and seven students EVERY day, and make eye-contact, exchange pleasant words, greetings (we’re not in Dilbert-land here) with hundreds more in the hallways of my school.  I cannot be anything other than alert, happy, ready to serve and ready to drop my all for another’s needs.  And that’s okay.  I like doing that.  I don’t begrudge it — but it takes a lot of energy.  One cannot be all slack-jawed in such a milieu.  One needs to be all aligned inside.  I’ve perfected the art of alignment while drooping inside, ready to dissolve.

I love being lazy.  I love wasting time.  And I also like to work.  Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I am Walt Whitman.

I suppose I should learn yoga, she thought, indifferently.  It would help, she thought idly.  But then again, I could just use my time better, she continued.  Go to sleep, for instance, and wake up, dewy eyed, and not giddy and hyperbolic (like I was today).

Back to my old theme.

Well, goodnight, dear readers!

Tags: #Time, nebulae, Pink Floyd, School days, Sleep, Walt Whitman, Yoga

Feb 10, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal

Tags: almost-real, border-world, Dreams, Imagination, mind, Sleep

Feb 10, 2013 Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes

I am, first and forever, a dreamer of dreams.

In the real world, I am a teacher of eighth-graders.

I am a wife and a mother.

I am a musician, a singer-songwriter, a guitarist, a sitarist, a poet and writer, a keeper of beats, a tapper of taps on the side of objects.

I wander in dreams a lot, except that now, I have to be practical and proper, a mother and a teacher in the real world.  Leaves little time for dreaming, but I persevere, I persevere.

If I had my way, I would never wake up.  Never.  I love sleep, as one would love a lover.  I never get enough sleep.  This is a crazy world we live in.

I would love to find my way back to the stars, whence my atoms formed themselves.  I would love to curl up inside the tiny compressed state of mind known as the darkness before the Big Bang.

But enough!  Welcome to my blog.  Leave me a note letting me know who you are, if you feel so inclined.  Be gentle.

~Vijaya

Tags: Big Bang, dreamer, mother, musician, poet, Sleep, teacher, writer