Balloons

Here's a small balloon to the child in me.
I can't blow a big balloon here now, you see.

Not yet (Someday maybe).

Out goes the air . . . .

In the theater lobby,
Which looked a mishmash of lines and light, coherent colours,
He was talking to someone who is fast receding from his memory palace into the empty. To the left, he saw a woman, a striking woman, white haired, in an office cubicle, cut in half by the grey felted partition, looking at a screen whose black ubiquitous plastic back he saw clearly, concentrating, gesticulating, contorting her whole face every fraction of a second. Frown and Ecstasy were playing together. Something was being read.

Was it being lived at the same time ? Like music. It looked comical too. Like the sane-looking loony back in his hometown's temple, talking and reciting to himself. She was reading poetry. What other possibility is there ?

He opened his eyes at that point of manic realization and saw little of sun's rays in the room. He was surprised and slightly scared for a second. Soon formed a sort of fellow feeling. He kept enjoying the new feeling for few minutes. This feeling that he surmised must be shared by men and women who enjoy - within a banal life - the banality of life keenly, sometimes urgently. Who draw their power from it. He enjoyed it like how all children enjoy balloons. The fuzzy cerebral warmth mixing easily with the heat of the blanket and the streams of sunny light that reminded him of coloured glasses in giant cathedrals.

Tying the balloon's string is the hard bit. Every child who has tied a balloon knows that. Air always leaks out.

The night before, he kept talking with his friends. After a week of mostly solitary, he welcomed this flow of free talk. He kept gushing about poetry on and on like an infatuated teen. About its lens-like focusing effect on to the process of language and emotion and meaning unlike diffuse prose. As if he had been reading poems all this while on a crazy merry-go-round. They also talked about the other perennially moving circle.

"I let you breathe to me the potency of natural law. If you allow that law to govern your breath, then it follows that there is a nagging circle wherever you go. You become the chicken and egg for all time to come." Not the best thought before going to bed.

In the dream, the striking old lady might as well have read this :

When the thought and the word
Sparred with the sharpest sword
In an imaginary location
For their rightful station
On the circle;
In peace they enlightened,
In war they remorselessly burned
The brain in my cranium;
Burst all the happy balloons.

The string looks nice when in a clean ribbon knot.