3rd June

And here it is again, Washed in Rain

Drenched in Memories. June.

Big, fat droplets hanging on to

Dark Green Leaves and peeping through

Tangerine coloured monsoon blossoms

An exterminator is coming today

To put to rest some bugs,

and maybe some memories

Of a cold funeral

and the funeral of a wedding

But soon, the wastelands of June will disappear

in it’s own flood

And as I wade, I will carry you dry and safe,

As I have these past 8 years

To live my year

In tears of laughter, in moments of truth,

in old forgotten songs, on my next holiday

A lump in my throat, You will be

My Christmas, My Ouzo, In the spring of

My every victory. 

La Dolce Vita

There are some memories which are so perfect, that one is scared to pen them down. One is scared that putting them into words might taint them, lower their sheen a little. But on the other hand, I am scared that if I don’t write things down, I may forget them forever. So here I go, painting my impressions before the business of every-day living wipes my heart clean of the November love of my slipping memory “My last vacanza.” And the journey begins…

Venice: A medieval city wrapped up in sea and mist. Little bridges cutting across emerald green canals. Suitcases trundling over flagstones. Sunday washing stretched across crimson skies, crisscrossing from pulley to pulley. Small restaurants nesting by the waterfront,  serving all kinds of sea people.  Masks, Columbine, Pantalone, Arlecchino, made in China. A garden made of glass in Murano, an old lady spinning a lace wedding gown in Burano, the endless colours of Vivaldi, the strange nude in the middle of an Ocean, the only blemish on San Marco’s Square. Difficult not to be enchanted!

Florence: A cobbled city of palaces and art. Bangladeshi hawkers in San Lorenzo market promising to sell original Prada bags without labels. Dark taverns with drunk tourists. Some drunk on art, others on the chill, some on the opera but mostly people drunk on just being in Florence. Tutti shops selling winter fashion. The beginning of the Gelato trails. Mikhalangelo’s Dawn and Dusk crafted from stone, teasing out tears from many wasted hearts. A small city that makes you wish, you could spend a lifetime in it. Just standing on the Ponte Viccio, watching the sun set over the arched bridges of Florence.

Tuscany: A late orange tree in full blossom, resting against a yellow house crafted from old stone. A land bursting with colour. The colours of a season past, the colour of a season to come, the colours of waiting and then blue.  Blue of an infinite sky, reflected in a fall choked river. A smooth ride,  cruising up and down little lanes and resting churches. The many towers of San Gimignano, the world famous Gelato shop in the main market square, roast boar at the end of an immense curving courtyard in Castiglion Fiorentino , the open markets of Barbarini, and the valleys of orange and yellow shorn of it’s purple fruits; remnants of a summer wine in Tavarnalle, Chianti .

Assisi: Forbidding religion on white cliffs. The looming castle of the Dominican order. Friars, priests and nuns walking solemnly from cathedral to cathedral . A road built at 90 degrees. A lost car shivering in the night, bumping along.  Cold, dark, lights. Here lived the God from the Old Testament, all alone and then Rome….

Rome: A city of tourists and friendly taxi drivers. A mad lady in a bnb recommending lots of short eats. Little stores selling hot suplee, pan-seared risotto balls with fresh mozzarella cheese, fried fish, aracinis (rice balls with mince and cheese) , platters of antipasti and house wines from all over Italy. Bernini’s Rome, handcrafted with churches, pizzerias, fountains, catacombs, angels, peepholes, gardens and ruins scattered in equal measure across it’s many miles. Rome, with it’s umbrella pine trees still and endless on both sides of a languid Tiber. Rome, with it’s fashion divas packed into little cars rushing off to work. Rome, with it’s many mysteries. Why doesn’t it rain through the big hole in the ceiling of the Pantheon? How do you maneuverer your schedule to see all the wonderful sights in the short window when the Roman is not closed for breakfast, lunch, mid-day siesta, tea, mass or mass protest? And how do you manage not to fall in love with it all?

The Vatican: A city built to acclaim the temporal power of God On Earth. A city, intricately woven in marble legend and golden leaves. A city, filled with busloads of tourists, all queuing up in the immense courtyards for a glimpse of Papa Francesco. A city which does not belong to Italy but to  the world. A city of incense and more Bangladeshi Muslims, manning stalls selling Christian memorabilia.  A city of brotherhood and then… the Sistine Chapel. A mammoth work of fear imagery , invoking the punishment of the afterlife, and then the Pieta. The longing of the Pieta, the suffering of the mother and thehumanness of it all. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust under the watch of the Swiss guards.   

Amalfi: The coast of Amalfi is like a piece of wedding cake wrapped up in the foamy tissue of the sea.  Houses cut into rocks. Communing with the sea from a potty. An orchestra made of drunk limoncello bottles, bathing in the sober light of day. Prosciutto , wrapped in cheese, dipped in chillie olive oil. Sail boats on a sunny day. Porcelain shops selling painted jars. A lazy breakfast , which rolls into a long wintry lunch. A story book on a small terrazzo. Droopy eyelids lulled to sleep by sunlit waves and a full belly. A blanched almond coloured Moorish church glowing, as the sun slips into a roset sea. A ship glides across a silver ocean, which lashes and licks the house, while a descending night inks out shapes, horizon and perspective. The stars burst into being and the living God blesses all those who roar at the waves, claiming their life to be divine.

The Isle Of Skye

The Isle Of Skye

Broken pancakes of islands on a sparkling, sunlight sea

Cradling a little white church, the winding road rides

from Mallagh to Skye,

Light headed from excitement and salt air,

We set sail for Black Pudding Island

Skye, a Renoir painting of orange skies, purple land, virulent yellow and pink sheep

A hidden beach, 2 men kayaking, one goes bottom up

I sit on a broken stone wall, hair blowing in the wind

Tummies tucked in, I feel glamorous

The lens discovers two purple penguins flapping

The zoom finds twins in identical jackets

Brown haired babies, picking pebbles on a stony white beach.

Anne’s blue Clock Glass House, nestled in a cliff

With the softest feathered beds in the world

Hot scones for tea with 20 kinds of home-made jam

4 girls baying at a red moon at the witching hour

Fresh lobsters at The Schoolyard, with a bit of melting butter and parsley,

And then our journey to the end of the world..

Where the cliff broke into ridges and the ridges leaped into the Pacific

And we leant against ancient rocks, bathing in the pink of a setting sun

I hummed a tune and wrote a picture postcard to my “bluest self”,

Explaining to her why it was all worth it , this business of living .

In A New York Minute

The curtain unfurls and the musical begins,

The underground roars kaboom, kaboom

Costumes and masks weave their way through hurtling yellow trains

Beaded knots and broken hearts, brief-cases and painted-over easels

I-phones and straightened hair, accents melting into impromptu conversations

The stage clears…

An ice-cream truck parked in the middle of Central Park

Shorts, shades and picnics,

The resilient joggers run to a fitness trainer

On a tv show, who keeps time, kaboom, kaboom

That noise again. The ghostly steel scrapers of power

Silently dance on a still pond covered in fall colours

A pair of lovers lean against an iron railing locked in an endless embrace 

kissing little crevices and moles on arms and legs

Chinese dolls with weathered hands and my grandmother’s silver hair

Bargain with many camera’d tourists

A few coins drop into a pool, a few into a guitar case, a few in a slot machine

The stage clears … that sound again, kaboom , kaboom

A Show within a show, The Rock Of Ages- plays tribute

To that great 80’s notion called the lust for life and then

A recently found old friend in a jalapeno cocktail pitcher

As the naked man strums his guitar, kissing mid-western tourists @Times Square

The stage clears and a ballerina dances across an old museum

She is a dream, she is sculpted, she is a billboard, she is the muse, she is art

Donated by merchants and bankers, a tear kisses a damask cheek and says

Here he is with his lilies and his yellows and his blue leaves and then

Right next to him that terrifying silent scream

The stage spins around, an old musty basement in a bottle of jazz,

A trickle of happiness running down a frosted glass of whiskied laughter

Fingers wrapped around melted artichoke pizza,

The comedian insults four Indian girls into a little corner

While an Ethiopian beauty rescues them with mulled wine

and her infinite black eyes

The Stage of New York welcomes actors from across the world

To play themselves in the unfolding drama of a city

whose underground roars Kaboom , kaboom

Waiting To Exhale

Another summer is drawing to a close, and am I happy! I detest the summer with it’s bright skies and orange sun. Time loses it’s capability to birth exceptional  , exciting, unique days. Factory crafted afternoons filled with a heart breaking stillness.  This summer, work spilled over, cementing the crevices , wrinkles and gaps in time, deleting the reality of a mid-year break.
Some evenings did bring a bit of drizzle with them, but they were more fragrance than water. The earth perfumes herself for two hours before and after every light shower. Like a courtesan, all fragrance and promise and then …nothing. A smoke and mirrors act.

Three pleasures are left.

The promise of a performance in August, the gathering of the divas, the building of the mask, the men stuck in traffic. Juliet has been found.  Romeo has run away. All one needs is a waif who can play three parts: Apothecary, Nicholos and …..then I would have to kill you.

Natural’s mango ice cream. Little creamy chunks of flavored melting milk. The tongue leads the tango of itty bitty bits of mango dancing a swirl.

And a little pleasure felt in the longing…the longing for a black sky, fat raindrops, a missed heartbeat as one catches summer lightning streaking across the sky like a figure skater, and the deep roll of thunder….action,  momentum, happiness ......

Waiting To Exhale

Dark Summer

The Sky is streaked with endless summer

A still skeleton of a tree, gnarled, thousand fingered, stark

A green parrot hops between the bones

Probing into the empty ghosts of fruit

Long leaved brown husks still hanging

I am leaving this window soon

For another shell in an industrial park

In this city a thousand cancers are being removed today

And I sit here nursing my death wish

My blessings

Force me to accommodate

My Life

It has come upon me too soon again

This death wish

While I Float without Meaning or Reason or Purpose

Exiled to life

Exiled to life

The Revenge Of The Non Geeks

Every person has one large fear which they are obsessed with. For my flat mate, it is running out of bandwidth. We have 2 wi-fi connections, one which is 20mbps and can supply the needs of the floors above and below us. Just as a back-up , we also have a Tata photon and a Reliance dongle because lord forbid, both routers may conspire and go on strike simultaneously. However, since the single woman’s mantra is always “back up the back-up “, we have discretely collected all our neighbor’s wi-fi passwords. After all, you never know, on some dark night all 4 connectors might fail us and then we will be left with no choice but to become Bandwidth Hackers.

But we are middle aged women who like reading, writing and listening to music, we are not geeks.

I went for a holiday with my 3 of best girl pals. Apparently for a 20 day trip we did not need clothes ( one can just buy them along the way), we did not need shoes (one pair of floaters works fine) , we did not need trinkets (because they get lost on long road journeys),  but what we critically needed were

1.       4 cameras- A digital SLR, a digital which is almost an SLR, an instant with a Leica lens , an old non digital SLR and  a baffling number of other lens. You see, we had all been asked to take up hobbies to cope with the stress of our lives and everyone knows it’s really easy to look cool behind a camera. On the other hand if we had taken up yoga, we would have to spend a lot of time with our heads between our knees and our bottoms up. Not Cool

2.       4 phones: 1 Fablet, 1 IPhone, 1 Nokia Lumia, 1 Google Phone. We obviously  liked to distribute our affections and don’t want to piss any smart phone manufacturer off

3.       3 tablets: 2 IPADS and 1 Google Nexus tablet because how do you navigate without a tablet and check your mails and put Fb updates at the same time, so what if the GPS in the car is shouting itself hoarse , the only purpose that GPS ever serves…..is to second guess it.

4.       5 laptops: 4 regular laptops and 1 mini lap top. The mini is  for downloading movies from torrentz and the 4 lap tops are for that terrifying holiday minute when  one gets a call from office and one has to suddenly get out in the middle of nowhere and start building charts or do some complicated excel work on a balloon ride or at the end of a bungee rope.

5.       4 kindles: We started with 2 kindles and we bought 2 more as gifts because as mentioned before, we love reading and writing and know other middle aged women like us who do the same things.

6.       2 IPODS:  We call it force of habit, since they were all the rage 5 years back and our classics were stored on them.

7.       A  JBL “bug” as a back-up for the car stereo (what if a loose connection disables the surround sound and one has to drive without music )and an army of headphones and hard drives to back up all the content one is generating , downloading or copying.

However if you called any of these girls geeks , they would be shocked as would some of our male buds . When I was in the market for a cell phone, I was told by one of them “ You should buy an I-Phone , after all you wouldn't know how to use half of the android apps.”  For god’s sake, I have yet to download a difficult app.  it’s an app, its supposed to be super easy , don’t make it sound like it’s the last frontier.

 But what would I know , I am not a geek! Geeks have engineering degrees, drink beer and know all the right terminology, we are mere social scientists , drink wine , and keep nick names for our tech-wares. We can't be geeks.