Aug 4, 2016 Free Verse, Original Poetry
Afternoon-Flight
©August 4th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
Flash of blue sails across sun-drenched air.
Japanese maple stands, glad to receive bird
With open branches and dappled leaves.
Glints of gold on green and flutter of leaf and feather
Gently open my tight-breathing heart,
With its Elsewhere just a step away,
And pour in peace.
Blue-jay, harsh of voice, but oh, so grateful
For air and light and shelter!
Traffic sounds from far away, a soft reminder
Of human time.
But why remember it?
Time is a thief.
Human time is bondage time.
Bird-time is peace.
And tree-time, endless.
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Tags: #Birds, #OriginalPoetrybyVijayaSundaram, #Peace, #Time, #Trees
Apr 5, 2016 NaPoWriMo, Original Poetry, The Daily Post
In response to The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt: Street
Street-Dream
©April 5th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
Gliding through the streets ‘tween dusk and dawn
Sliding past your eyes; you look; they’re gone.
Shining through your gaze ‘tween noon and night
Finding eyes so glazed, it’s hard to think right.
He walks, she walks, and they walk all in line.
When seen by you, or them, they all decline
Your pity, charity, and silver dime –
What they want is some of your free time.
Do you have time to spare, O Brother mine?
Do you have time to spare O Mother mine?
Do you have time to spare, O Sister mine?
Do you have time, as I stand in this line?
The street is harsh, and full of hearts that beat
A clock that ticks and ticks, but no hands meet.
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Submitting simultaneously to The Daily Post and to NaPoWriMo.
Tags: #Dream, #sonnet, #Street, #The Daily Prompt, #TheDailyPost, #Time
Dec 10, 2015 Uncategorized
Twist of Time
(A Surrealist Perspective)
©December 10th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
Came a multi-chorused Voice
From the blue-green sphere:
May I have some more, Sir?
Please? Could I, do you think?
My life’s running out,
My heart’s pumped out dreams
And fear, desire and grief
My pulse hammers and quakes
In rhythm, in time.
SynchroniCity is the place
I want to be, but the dark
Comes close on my heels,
And my candle gutters
And is unsteady; I’m spent,
Stumbling on these sands
Sucked noisily, greedily
From the shore, while my feet
Feel the pull of the ocean beneath.
So many breaths spent
On fear, so many breaths lost
On the dreary dark,
So many breaths tossed on
Foolish words, foolish thoughts,
Foolish deeds, for I am a Fool,
Filling the air around me with sound.
How could I do otherwise?
I do but live, it’s what I know.
My tasks, my busy-ness plague me
Where I come and go is Life
All around, within and without.
I need to know this,
And this is all I ask:
Could you spare me a little time?
One more life, perhaps?
Or at least another hour?
Sixty minutes keeping pulse
With my pulse, with the swing
Of the planet in orbit –
Thirty-six thousand seconds –
Could I have some more, please?
That’s all I ask.
And in the sucking whirl
Of the sibilant sea, the crabs
Scuttled and made for the shore,
And the Voice waited, while a clock
Melted somewhere, and a fading Ear
Leaned down to listen,
And a gale swept through space
And the Voice scattered
In feathery bits, till all
Of it vanished, while the
Slowing seconds fell into orbit
Around a black hole,
And fell headlong into
The place before Time.
And the Ear leaned back.
Into its winding passageways,
Flowed all voices, all spaces,
All Time, and its Face folded
Into smooth lines of sleep.
Supremely indifferent,
It dreamed on, while the seconds
In a decaying orbit that never stopped,
Became twisted and wound into
An eternal braid winding around
And around Its memory, and
All was still once more.
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Tags: #Original Poetry, #Time, #Writing 101 Poetry Day 4, #Writing 101, Poetry, Oliver Twist reference, Salvador Dali reference, Seconds, Surrealist poem
Mar 5, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries
Time, that is.
I know I do it. Shamelessly, ashamedly, confidently, diffidently, sheepishly, daily.
I should be mocked, put in stocks. There she stands, that bad thing, they would jeer. Look how she stares into the middle distance.
I hear them, and pretend not to.
Don’t reinvent the wheel! says an earnest well-wisher.
Oh no, I never do that! I hasten to reassure her, myself, and anyone who might be listening.
Beside me, invisible to all, stands my prisoner, who smiles grimly. The stocks and manacles seem to tighten.
Thief! Thief! Thief! whispers the voice remorselessly.
I am silent.
The aeons whirl around my head. Eternity waits.
————————–The End—————————
Tags: #Time, original short, prisoner, short short story, Thief
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