Driving home I see a playground but it's all wrong,  the swings are on the opposite side. 
"Oh Jack that's a different one" says Grandma.  "There's playgrounds in every town." 
Lots of the world seems to be on a repeat. 

Old Man

by C. K. Williams

Special. Big tits.

Says the advertisement for a soft-core magazine on our neighborhood newsstand.

But forget her breasts.

A lush, fresh-lipped blond, skin glowing gold, sprawls there, resplendent.

60 nearly, yet these hardly tangible, hardly better than harlots, can still stir me.

Maybe a coming of age in the American sensual darkness,

never seeing an unsmudged nipple, an uncensored vagina,

has left me forever infected with an unquenchable lust of the eye.

Always that erotic murmur,

I'm hardly myself if I'm not in a state of incipient desire.

God knows though, there are worse twists your obsessions can take.

Last year in Israel, a young ultra-orthodox Rabbi guiding some teenage girls through the Shrine of the Shoah

forbade them to look in one room. Because there were images in it he said were licentious.

The display was a photo. Men and women stripped naked,

some trying to cover their genitals, others too frightened to bother,

lined up in snow waiting to be shot and thrown into a ditch.

The girls, to my horror, averted their gaze.

What carnal mistrust had their teacher taught them.

Even that though. Another confession:

Once in a book on pre-war Poland,

a studio portrait, an absolute angel, an absolute angel with tormented, tormenting eyes.

I kept finding myself at her page.

That she died in the camps made her -- I didn't dare wonder why --

more present, more precious.

Died in the camps, that too people -- or Jews anyway -- kept from their children back then.

But it was like sex, you didn't have to be told.

Sex and death, how close they can seem.

So constantly conscious now of death moving towards me, sometimes I think I confound them.

My wife's loveliness almost consumes me.

My passion for her goes beyond reasonable bounds.

When we make love, her holding me everywhere all around me, I'm there and not there.

My mind teems, jumbles of faces, voices, impressions,

I live my life over, as though I were drowning.

Then I am drowning, in despair at having to leave her, this, everything, all, unbearable, awful.

Still, to be able to die with no special contrition, not having been slaughtered, or enslaved.

And not having to know history's next mad rage or regression, it might be a relief.

No. Again, no. I don't mean that for a moment.

What I mean is the world holds me so tightly -- the good and the bad --

my own follies and weakness that even this counterfeit Venus

with her sham heat, and her bosom probably plumped with gel, so moves me

my breath catches. Vamp. Siren. Seductress.

How much more she reveals in her glare of ink than she knows.

How she incarnates our desperate human need for regard,

our passion to live in beauty, to be beauty, to be cherished by glances,

if by no more, of something like love,

or love.

Judgmental Bitch

Judgmental Bitch sees all things around her in Black & White.

Grey is a silly little worm which is perpetually drunk on other people's blood. It prefers happy people because they are stupid and they taste sweeter.

Splat Splat Splat.

The Bitch uses an electric racket to swat worms like Grey on the reg.

Jo na jaane haq ki taakat, rab ne de usko himmat

Recreation

I want to write.
But I laze,
And let my fingers
Dissolve the words
In rounds
Of deep, wet circles.

Jazbaaton ka kya hai, aaj hain kal nahin.

I have discovered that I have a romantic inclination towards my new phone. It is my gift on post graduating this year. I realised this was more than just a new phone thrill when I caught myself the day before, laughing shyly and turning over in bed, my fingers sliding over its smooth sleek screen as if to push away strands of hair had it been a person. But it's not. I've even bought a dark purple cover for it. Purple is my favorite colour.

I take my phone for long walks in the park and I take my phone to bed. At night I listen to Chopin's piano preludes and stare at the beautiful screen long after its light has dimmed, though not dim enough for me to miss the slant of Chopin's nose that takes over the whole screen- my gorgeous baby, reflecting my senses that have been consumed by the artist. I change the music to Prateek Kuhad's, whose voice suddenly makes me think of several sad scenes simultaneously. But just as I begin to tear up, he croons, "Jazbaaton ka kya hai, aaj hain kal nahin."  The tear falters at the waterline of my eye, bewildered about what just happened. It chooses to stay in this night. 

How is one to explain such deeply moving experiences without the risk of sounding utterly ridiculous?

There's a bit of a complication however. I am unable write notes in it. I still need a real pen and paper to write. It's like you just cannot bring yourself to have sex with the person you love. I was devastated when I found this out for I could not claim my greatest pleasure. You know, the one that A. R. Rahman sings about all the time.

But like any other couple, phone and I will
 keep trying. 

Bite chunks out of me. You're a shark and I'm swimming.