Another poem...

I would like to call myself an occasional poet, who writes poems sporadically… at one point of time, I used to write poems regularly…general amateur poems…but as time went by, I was fascinated by the process of writing poems itself and tried to write ‘poems about writing a poem’… and I go back and edit or change or add a phrase…and so there are different versions of the same poem… I have already posted two poems in this blog…here is one more…

it is a tale…told by

Once upon a time

long long ago,

I felt

a tingle in my loins;

snakes slithering in my heart;

monkeys marauding the silence

of my mind.

Today, as I remember these,

the mind struggles to go back.

The tingle has left behind a searing pain

and an ugly scar.

scattered blood.

Snakes have vanished leaving behind

their venom.

Monkeys have abandoned the inert

mind to its frozen silence.

Exhausted, unable to think,

blood, venom, and thawing silence

coagulate and meander along

my veins;

laboriously metamorphose and

flow into this page.

The books I bought and read in the last six months...

This is an exercise that I carry out semi-annually ever since I started this blog; making a list of books that I purchased every half year…it helps me keep track of what books I bought and how many of them I read …they are roughly in the order that I bought, I sort of remember the order because this time, I bought more than 5 books at a time more than once……so, here goes…

• The Girl who played with Fire – Stieg Larsson (read)
• The Girl who kicked the Hornet’s Nest – Stieg Larsson (read)
• Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino (unread)
• Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings – Italo Calvino (unread)
• In the Castle of My Skin – George Lamming (read)
• Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Roddy Doyle (unread)
• The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler (read)
• Dave Barry Does Japan (read)
• Dave Barry Turns 50 (read)
• Dave Barry – Greatest Hits (read)
• Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys (unread)
• Penguin’s New Writing in India (1974) – Adil Jussawala (ed.) (read in parts)
• The Englishman’s Cameo – Madhulika Liddle (read)
• The Curious Case of 221B – Partha Basu (read)
• The Switch – Elmore Leonard (unread)
• The Big Bounce – Elmore Leonard (unread)
• Tishomingo Blues – Elmore Leonard (unread)
• Pagan Babies – Elmore Leonard (unread)
• City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit – Elmore Leonard (unread)
• Knots and Crosses – Ian Rankin (read)
• Strange Pilgrims (short stories) – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (read some stories)
• The General in his Labyrinth – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (half-way through)
• The Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (unread)
• The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (unread)
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation – Lynne Truss (read in parts)
• Yakada Yaka – Carl Muller (read many times over…this is my replacement copy, I lost my first one…hilarious…inimitable…)
• The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
• Tears of the Giraffe – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
• The Kalahari Typing School for Men – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
• Morality for Beautiful Girls – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
• In the Company of Cheerful Ladies – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
• Singing Emptiness: Kumar Gandharva Performs the Songs of Kabir – Linda Hess (read)
• BPO Sutra: True Stories from inside India's BPOs & Call Centres – Complied and Edited by Sudhindra Mokashi (read…hilarious…)
• India: A Wounded Civilization – V S Naipaul (started reading!)

A good haul I suppose…there could be a couple of books hiding somewhere…or maybe not…