pehli baar mohabbat ki hai remixed by dj umer khan

I heard this song while I was scarfing, quite seriously, some chicken curry and baingan bharta. Enjoy.

	DJ Umer Khan [Songs.PK] - Pehli Baar Mohabbat - www.Songs.PK .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

poem; or, truths about having a sister

that you cried at her wedding reception while you gave your toast the way good brothers are supposed to cry at their sister’s wedding. that you cried the way bad brothers who want to be better brothers cry at their sister’s wedding.

that you would have waited for your baby teeth to fall out on their own had she not knocked a few out during races in the backyard.

that you gave her a scar on her finger fighting over which one of you would cut the apple.

that you never think to thank her until she asks. that that’s what brothers do.

that you are a better writer because of her. that the way she ripped into your middle school essays which made you literally rip them up then rewrite them and hide the second, third and fourth drafts from her, but turn in the best middle school essay you have ever written. that she believes in you and that’s why.

that you were nested in the same womb, listening to the same heart beat for nine months, the same experience five years apart.

that you both have inherited nagging.

that she resembles your younger brother more than she does you.

that she is, too, a gemini, and when you get along you are the same person. when you do not it is the end of days.

that you share gray-area truths, like both hating and loving a father. possessing a fear your brother born in the states never knew. and straight out dark truths about ghosts and wars and suicide attempts and hating your bodies and vomit and the infidelity of parents and men who are flawed who are uncles whom you despise and the love that ferries you through it all.

that she has more handbags than you do. that she steals your clothes.

that when she wants you to be proud of her it takes you by surprise, because you seek her validation as if it is the sound of your mother’s heart beat. that her pride is a version of your mother’s beating heart.

that she wants you to write a poem about her. you’ve tried and there was this: the poems display her in a light that isn't flattering. that it doesn’t address what she really wants you to do, compliment her. but they show her importance to you. that they end up being about more. more than her. but because of her.

pop and poetry pt. i

This is the first post in a series where I’ll attempt in the smallest of ways to bridge the distance between those of us who are enthusiasts of poetry with those of us who are either passively or actively disinterested in the whole rigmarole.

One of the arguments about poetry, and even poets wrestle with this, is determining whether it has a function outside of itself. Sure, there are plenty of ways of going about answering this, and it has definitely generated plenums of scholarly literature. For me, one of the greatest functions poetry offers is its ability to enable and/or facilitate the creation of other forms of art, and in tonight’s post, we will look at LADY GAGA (I put her name in caps for emphasis and as a homage to the greatness that is her legacy to come).

As I was wikipedia-ing the other night, as one does to avoid doing actual schoolwork at the computer, I was listening to Lady Gaga’s auxiliary tracks on the re-release of her breakout/breakthrough CD The Fame, entitle The Fame Monster. It’s an interesting read about a young unattractive quirky singer/songwriter who passes on Julliard to sing in underground New York cabarets, gets signed on to various record labels as a writer then becomes an international phenomenon within a year of releasing her own debut album. But all that exposition has little immediate concern: what struck me were her influences.

She cites, of course, glam rock as one of her main influences. You can see that in her styling, fashion, and over-the-top spectacular performances. Musically, you can definitely hear it in her recent ballad about convincing her father to get surgery, “Speechless”. Here is a side-by-side comparison of a Shudder to Think song, “Ballad of Maxwell Demon”, with “Speechless”. I believe they’re in the same key, share similar melodic moves, and stylistically glamorize Victorian fashion with science-fictional surrealism.





The influence, however, that really took me aback was that of Rainer Maria Rilke, an early 20th Century German poet. Rilke is interesting to me in his usage of Apollo, Hermes and—most prominently—Orpheus as reoccurring figures in his poetry. It would make sense that Gaga and her art would resonate with Rilke’s; after all, Orpheus was an integral figure to musicians and poets. She states in an interview on a German talk show:

Well, Rilke for me has been sort of my bible. Actually I have a Rilke tattoo on my arm. I got this in Osaka, Japan. “In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?”

I find this connection inspiring on many levels. For one, it gives artistic credence to an emerging pop icon whose talent I feel is continuously discredited solely by virtue of her success. Secondly, it contemporizes and makes relevant poetry to a generation of listeners of music and spectators of popular culture. Thirdly, the quotation is a sage, motivational prescription. I would die.

thanking in prose

At both of the dining tables to which I was privileged to have been invited this past Thanksgiving, toward the beginning of the meals, the usual suggestion was made of sharing for what each one of us was most thankful. Naturally, there was a collective grumble from the more pragmatic dinner guests. I too shrank away from participating in this activity, though not because I am resistant against such opportunities that serve as un-trafficked avenues for maudlin confessions that inevitably devolve into primetime-TV-esque saccharinities of friendship and love—quite the contrary, I welcome and enable them—but at the moment, I could only think about my recent job loss and, in turn, the confrontation with reality that is my failed adulthood. This hardly put me in the mood to entertain such holidayisms, so I diffused the activity at each dinner with my prudence and humor. I’m resolved to keep that act of diffusion vague to get into the meat, the reason for this blog post.


It wasn’t until later, a day later perhaps, that I realized that I was thankful for many things. My mother of course is one of them. What that poor woman has to put up with with me I can never gesture toward understanding. My friends and the network of support I’ve managed to fashion myself here in the Bay Area, however inconsistent the support seems to be. I am thankful for it. I am thankful that I attended Berkeley as it gets proven to me daily that the quality of my education there has put me ahead of a large percentage of the waking world, and that it is an asset that feels like a curse but is mostly an asset. I am thankful that I lost 30 pounds and managed to keep it off. I am thankful for modern medicine; more specifically, I am thankful for Propecia. I am even thankful that I am gay and that I am Asian and that I am brown. If I weren’t I don’t think I’d be as strong as a person, as eloquent, as educated, as fashionable, as tasteful, as cultured, or as special of a person. And I am thankful that there are enough politically driven people out there to fight for my rights so that I can focus on art, which brings me to a new thing this year, for which I am thankful, because I’m always thankful for these aforementioned things.


I am thankful to have poetry in my life. I am happy, and couldn’t be happier (the accuracy of this bromide deems it unavoidable), that I have decided to subscribe to a life of reading and writing poetry. I feel lucky to have fallen down the rabbit hole of this art form that most individuals only experience partially through the miscellany of audio and visual culture, or overtly and obsequiously at weddings and funerals, and that I get to—because I allow myself to—take it in in all of its awesome distillations. Even now, I am thinking in poetry.

the embrace - mark doty

Often, I will drive to work in the morning, while my brain is still waking and my emotions residing on the surface of my skin, a song will come on the radio compelling me to well up. I am that emotional. This poem achieves the same amount of effusiveness without the assistance of hypnogogia or fatigue.


The Embrace

You weren't well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.

I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out--at work maybe?--
having a good day, almost energetic.

We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative

by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you--warm brown tea--we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.

Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

barking, barking, barking

See-line woman
Empty his pockets
And wreck his days
Make him love her
And she’ll fly away

- Nina Simone

infinity doesn’t have a vanishing
point like i originally thought it’s more like a wall
that starts at the floor, at the bottom of
my feet, the tip
of my toes and then shoots
up super-fast like lighting or a superhero
past my face taking a little oxygen with it
on its way to never coming back down, leaving
me a little blind and breathless.
it feels like an impossibly stubborn
wreath of seaweed wrapped around the ankle
of a version of myself who’s a crappier swimmer, snorkeling
he will naturally begin to panic “calm down, me,
please. it is only seaweed. perhaps if you let yourself sink
a little, it may loosen its maddening grip, then
you can just float to the top, me.”
but all i hear underwater is the sizzle of fire-coral,
the swishing of sharktail and my eyeballs turning the face
of my goggles white-white

collide

worlds don’t collide the way we think they do most of the time

they are right on top of each other parallel not the way lines

are parallel the way things can be palimpsested the specks of dust

on a window pane and the blurry objects behind it, but the pane

dust and blur are all the same it may be the way dyslexics see

the phonebook or a dictionary text just bleeding in, on, around,

[more prepositions] each other bleed of each other, even the way

memories are stored a matrix of pathways in the brain that intersect

and re-intersect in bolts of blue recognition and epiphany

the worlds are so much more and so much less than what we perceive

for instance: space is like time, a constructed illusion relative

and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, something omniscient would

say we are in all possible worlds, which is impossible impossible

to understand we are too small to realize everything is within