Oct 12, 2015 Original Poetry, Writing 201

Wide Awake, Dream in Lilac Time

©October 12th, 2015

By Vijaya Sundaram

Wide Awake*,

I shut my eyes

in order to see.*

 

Visions of

Outsider Artists

hang like menaces.

 

What lies

Within us, and

Within us,

What lies!

 

Between the lashes

Of your eyes,

Dream in Lilac Time:*

Illusions of perspective

Unmatched in translucence.

Casual waves from the

Pattern of punches.

 

Selfies might be another matter.

Here, then are faces!*

The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile
rock.*

How quiet the truth and falsehood

Of different selves!

_____________________________________________________________________

Note:  ALL THESE LINES are from the following:

A sticker for the Wide Awake Bakery (owned and operated by my brother in law) (on our refrigerator)

I shut my eyes in order to see is from Paul Gauguin– refrigerator magnet

What lies within us is from Emerson — refrigerator magnet

All the rest are from a magazine I used, opening randomly to lines and phrases in different pages — Artscope  Sept. Oct. 2015 (dubs itself “New England’s Premier Culture Magazine”).

“Dream in Lilac Time” is the title of Gail Skuder’s foot-wide scroll-artwork, described as a “physical manifestation of lyric and melody.” (from the same magazine, Artscope)

*Here then are faces and The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile
rock are lines from Leaves of Grass:: Poem of Faces by Walt Whitman

Tags: #Writing 201, chiasmus, faces, Found Poetry, Hallucinations, Visions, Walt Whitman

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