It's strange how much I like burnt food. It's stranger when I find myself scrapping the bottom of the wok to salvage the burnt, the disfigured. And then promptly pop them in my mouth.

Yappy Noo Eeyar!

My dear friend Patricia Fermazi, sent along the most beautiful new year wish my way :)

"happy new year Ms. Mangalore. I hope this year love is everywhere and we both find courage for it this time around. huggs"

Here's hoping 2012 is filled with everything worthwhile and that we are at peace with ourselves and with the world. Cheers! *clinks glass*

Unread.

“Why do you look at me with those eyes?” He asks.

She blinks and questions back “What eyes?”

She quickly flips through pages, whole chapters and lands at something more appropriate to be read.

“Imploring, begging. Hurtful, accusing, questioning….I..I don’t know. It’s many things. Many things at a moment’s notice. I don’t get it and it disturbs me”

She starts writing another story, a joke perhaps. Full of mirth, good cheer and nonchalance. All la-la-la, sunshine and rainbows.

She laughs. “You are so dramatic. You know, you should star in a soap”

“You…you…just.” A pause. So pregnant, it threatens to give birth to more. More hideous offsprings, growing alarmingly bigger and bigger, fed on spoonfuls of accusations, doubts and anxieties.

All caught embarrassingly in a mucky, coital embrace.

Abort it. Now.

Desperately, she scratches at the pages, writing furiously. Some story ought to surface, regurgitate its way out of the tired bowels of the past. Something. Anything.

“See? Now you look distracted. What are you looking at the ceiling for?” he says.

With fluttering lids, she writes another story. Of a butterfly she saw in the park. How beautiful it was, red, yellow, blue gliding like a ballerina in the air. She omits the part about how she saw only its tattered wings, how it flew in jerks, how it sputtered and reeled, a taint on its graceful kind.

Keep it happy, she told herself.

The tattered wing part must have sneaked its way in. Frantically, he mumbles something and leaves.

She writes the last chapter, following him with those imploring, begging, hurtful, accusing, questioning eyes.

She closes the book. She slams it shut. Tight.

And then she binds it with every taught nerve in the iris, hurling it into the black hole of the pupil.

That’s another book he’ll never read.

When.

Feet never touched ground
On that grass of endless summer
Where eternal youth lay spread,
Gathering the sun into its body
Filling its lungs with memories.
See now.
Now there it lies
Framed in a sepia snapshot
Full-bodied, blood red
drunk with sun and laughter
Now it materializes
Gleaming, shimmering
on cold winter nights
A carnal reminder of all that we were
Of all that we could be.
And of feet that knew how to fly.

Charge.

Franklin, they say found it in a metal key

tied to a kite in a storm-filled sky.

Faraday sought it in wires and motors

Volta ferreted it in plates of shiny metals

Edison encased it in bulbs and what-nots.

Such fools, these great men.

Such tiresome workers, these wise men.

If only they knew

that electricity is found

Not in science and laborious calculations

Not by math or funny looking equations.

But in the locking of lovers lips.

For what can be more electric than a kiss?

Feeling like...

Someone's given my heart a warm, tight hug and let the blood rush all over :)

Blood Sacrifice

Blood red sprouts hang from green stems, like trickling down from a pricked finger. Bent down by a torrential downpour, water slashing this way and that. Experimenting, like it couldn’t make up its mind which lashing out would cause the most pain.

He walked, drenched in viscous maroon rain, making a gentle crunching sound. The gravel soothed the sole of his bare feet, like nature digging its rough fingers in for a deep tissue massage. He revered nature and it rewarded him in its strange little ways. He unloosed his tongue and felt the raindrops sink into every pore. He drank it up gratefully, this holy water from the heavens. The maroon robes clung to him, afraid to let go. They whimpered and clung tighter as the rain grew violent. The drops played a tap-tap-tap on his shorn head and he laughed at their juvenile composition. He wagged a finger at them playfully and laughed louder, letting the child within resurface for air. They took the cue and quickly drowned in the gaping hole between his teeth and he gulped them down. They were now somewhere inside him, caught in the labyrinths and voids within, making that tap-tap-tap with his blood.

He then plucked the blood red sprouts and breathed them in. They carried in their heart the scent of their agony, sweet and sacrificial. He carried them gently, his precious load. They would find themselves at the feet of a sleepy-eyed man-god, sitting still age after age, even as the walls crumble around him. Who would watch serenely, without emotion as the blood drained out of them. And there they would lie, till another rain, another time would obliterate their existence. They would have no more memories of their being then, just a faint sense of something red and alive trickling out.