Snakeskin on the mossy rocks
Left behind after a long winter rain
Her tears allowing, beetles in fight
Followed by cat ears, seated on the ledge
By the old kitchen fireplace
Tracing the smoke stone walls
Light of an old bulb hanging by a wire
The old magazines stiff, wooden cupboards and rafters
Kerosene lamps made of bottles
Red Mangalore tiles and red oxide floors
Just a day visiting, escaping
To old village life
Author: Rijul Ballal
There’s poetry in every cloud and a story behind every leaf that flutters down.
We’re all nomads under the eternal blue sky. Check out my work on rijul ballal.wordpress.com, like, comment and subscribe :)
Chariot of morning
I sat at the edge of my room, on that early night. I was by the French window not ready to go out into the cold and hostile air. Inside more habitual minds were asleep.
I too began to doze at my post, snoozing at the doorway, phasing in and out of the sunset. In a few winks I was deep into the night, the sounds of stillness all about me. I looked inside and out for answers still too drowsy to ask any questions. The ringing fury of a motorcycle came to my attention. That was with me as I woke up, maybe it was what woke me up.
My eyes drifted out towards it but I could see nothing on the street. Who was here in this outskirt hamlet? Why did the noise grow louder with any step I took? I looked back inside with hesitation. With the time taken to turn back, awake and explain the sound might be gone.
I took a few steps down past my compound and into the empty road ignoring the cutting chill of the night. Suddenly the Banyan on the corner shock with force and I noticed it had lost all leaves on it’s left side. Every breath felt like an icy cut and only then did I realise that not a light was on. Ever house closed and shuttered with not a single sound of life.
Suddenly from my right I head a roaring crescendo like a train barreling down on me. I turned back in horror but saw that my house was far, so far away and I was without any knowing step in the middle of the street. I turned expecting steel carnage but saw nothing under the moonless night sky.
Then with a shudder I felt it, first from the warm stream brushing past me, then hearing it from the creaking gears slowing through the rumbling machine. It was a chariot, steel and silver with no horses but instead four chrome plated Enfields. No riders sat upon them. Only a charioteer spoke to me, commanding me onto the carriage.
“Ascend”
I wanted to beg, plead and bargain. But I could not turn away. What of all that I was promised? The warmth and familiar home?
I looked at the un-reality before me. No dream I had was ever this clear, this long and discomforting. I held myself and realised my skin had never felt so cold in any dream, no I hardly noticed at all. It seemed like the steel and chrome were the very edges of being – like the linings of clouds ready to break and dissipate at any moment but instead of clouds there was only emptiness. I strode up onto the carriage and saw the reigns in my hands.
With horror, I realised I must not dare look back to where I came. With these reigns I could do no good and knew I could do no evil for I knew not what it was. It was from the beginning, my voice that the charioteer spoke with. I had turned back and in turning the reigns were already afloat. The engines driving the chariot burned and in red fury I left that shuttered home, the cold no longer something I could feel. Now at last the deepest night was silent.
Astronomer’s map
Two detectives looked carefully out of the apartments’ only window wondering if any clues we outside. Newspapers had reported that an astronomer was found dead this morning.
The astronomer was found dead in a room locked from the inside and oddly enough from the outside too. No one had expect her back in town. Her neighbours didn’t care for her and her telescope pointed rudely at their daily lives. They said she spent as much time star gazing as she did snooping.
Next to her was a sapphire and a serene Golem. The Golem was a mannequin coated in the rich clay from the northern rivers. How could she afford a sapphire? How did she find the clay this far south? The detectives walked all over her star charts as they returned from their tea break.
They knew exactly what needed to be done. Both sapphire and astronomer were gone. The Golem trashed and the rest were forgotten, never in the papers again. The detectives would return to the front-pages, wallets fatter with another case.
Arnulf’s dragon
Deep under the fortresses that Arnulf the crusader was patroling an egg began to hatch. The strong brown stones of the fortress were ancient rock seated on a cliff.
The cliff face was assailed by wind and rumours of war parties constantly but night after night only the moon came to visit. No villagers remained by the walls and the huts had been torn down long before. The palm trees swayed gently as dust drifted past. The ramparts oversaw steep drops and dangerous paths, nothing else was left. The guards were a nervous lot. They were sick and plauged by fever dreams.
They were the ones slowing down the forced marches. All alone behind the stone walls they were terrified of both being discovered by another war party and of being forgotten by their own. They would survive neither. Their armours’ cold metal was harsh against their gaunt, pale skin and many slouching figures could be seen periodically shuddering.
After the scorching day came the unbearably night with a cold vengeance. The rocks used to build the castle, to build back it’s battlements and towers were old. Long before a spring ran through here and it had a different name. Pilgrims came for a different God, one that lived in the deepest valley, and built shrines and monuments in his name. Those structures were pulled down, those idols turned away and the carvings worn down to faceless figures piled up to make a rampart.
With old myths forgotten what hatched under the castle, deep in the well serving the sick had no name, no cause and no reason. In the moonless night an old Norman crossbow man was the first to scream when he saw what was in the bucket of water he was drawing. He slipped and fell right inside.
The castle was overrun with panic as everyone rushed to remove the sickly Norman from the water. Lamps were turned about in haste and something was seen in the water. Nothing came of this, except from curses directed at the Norman. He would not last long, not even in the minds of the party that set off abandoning the fortress after they saw it had taken away more than it was ever worth.
Arnulf’s lean figure grew in power as the crusader’s ranks and bodies thinned. He was sent to bury the dead in proper graves far away from those who did not want to be reminded of what awaited them. The castle grew quieter, the food went by faster despite the hungerless troops frozen in unease and the water, the water was worst of all metallic and bloody in colour.
A year had passed before the main host returned to the fortress covered in sand. No one remained but overturned graves and signs of battle. That night they met Arnulf’s dragon. Crocodilian in shape with a short snout, a scaly limless body that twisted and turned in the nature and speed of a snake. It had defended him as the guards turned on themselves, he nurtured it and it grew fast, the length of three men with the strength of ten.
It came on a moonless night when the troops were sick from the water and already dreaming of marching to Cairo. It came with all the uproar of a small skirmish, skattering troops, knocking over lamps and sending entire battalions lurching out into the valley looking for the ambush that had caused the chaos. While the troops tried to gather their skittish horses their lying eyes saw Arnulf’s dragon slither right out of the gate, he called for it from the valley, cursing and screaming in Norman, only worsening the uproar.
Brave knights charged in lamplight and were thrown by their horses. Their axes and swords were not made to hunt reptiles, their lances stabbed dangerously into the darkness where their comrades squinted. Quickly they cleared a path and the next morning at least 5 companies had slain the beast, then 10 and many more as the weeks past. The worm under the castle grew with every passing month as the crusaders marched further and faster from the path to Cairo.
For a few hundred years or more as crusader kings were annointed and dethroned, brave knights returned to the valley. Arnulf was never seen again but his dragon slew Knight after Knight till one had their vengeance. Again and the crusaders would return to be slain till they implailed the dragon with their steely lances. Yet with every crusade the dragon came again. Arnulf’s valley always took it’s toll.
Cow headed
I am the minotaur’s unfortunate cousin, born with the head of a cow. I lack all beastly fury, possessing something much worse- self awareness.
I too am on an island but I hate it here. At least you get lost in the labyrinth. Here I’m sorrounded by a sea of dry grass, golden under the setting sun but dull under ever other light. It is cold and the sea weather invades every hut and run down stonework I can see.
I wear a black cloak, adorned with two golden stars. It resembles a priests habit and must make for a strange sight with my yellow hide and horns pointed at the sky.
There are only a few trees breaking past dry rocks, barely reaching past my shoulders. I have been sent here with the two stupidest woodpeckers they could find in the southern hemisphere. They have the arms and voices of women. They are not guards, not prisonkeepers. They are the cruel punishment. They follow me constantly. They bicker. They plot. They scheme when every wave over the horizon foams vageuly in the shape of a ship.
I cannot escape them. I am neither beast nor man and neither beast or man could bear them. Again and again they recruit me into their schemes. They throw hay in front of me and advice me to eat heartly. Why? I would know how to eat as both beast or man. Where I alone I might have some dignity. Instead I have two woodpeckers chipping away at my soul.
I trudge in circles following my footsteps praying for some adventurer, some shipwrecked crew to come here and slay the beast. Ah but why would such liberators come here to a rocky outcrop. I cannot go mad, charge or be a beast with these avians constantly announcing themselves. They are convinced they are blessing, King makers, maidens to wait on Queens. They look at me as though my bovine eyes should see blessings. I can never see straight anyway.
So I do my best to slither, as best a cow or half of one can. I stare at the sea when I can muster the courage and curse it. I melt with it’s waves. When the sun sets I wonder why I did not watch the horizons. When the sun sets the entire world is the colour of the dry grass, my hide, the rocks, the swaying trees all of us are cloaked in the light of another day gone by. I look to the sea and think “maybe one day…”.
Yearly reflections
When I was a child I felt so embarrassed by pictures of me that I’d carry out clandestine operations to angle photos and push aside picture frames. I never had friends over because pictures embarrassed me more than the stuffy places we lived in.
To slip by unacknowledged was a skill, it’s own reward. It felt only natural for me to be drafted by shadows and sneak away from any recognition. Why? Well I won’t go into the Freudian bits but being unformed, untouched by an passing childhood crisis was a kind of liberation. I could be anyone I wanted to be, be on both sides, the wronged and the victorious. I was a diplomat with no crisis to attend to.
Having nothing to trouble you makes you a bit of a day dreamer, why wouldn’t you be if you were uninvested in what happened around you? It also makes for a polite kind of self involvement, a enjoyable one but there’s only so much of it I could stomach. Cynicism, I think, makes for good reading in your adolescence, afterwards it has nowhere to go but to a capacity for destruction.
I read some Jung this year, I read him every year but I only made something of his suggestions this year. You’ve got to be willing to unleash a little naiveté, a willingness to hope that’s a little bit more around the corner to really enjoy him. It’s funny that he’s the one with the reputation of being unscientific because he’s the one’s who’s constantly trying to structure things. There’s a certainty that comes with pulling back the curtains, leaning into a day dream or just a regular dream. It’s also funny given how much they reveal when you consider how vapour like they are.
I’ve been journalling my dreams regularly, they’re pretty strange but honest in the most absurd way. Meeting and being terrified by a goat faced God is a strange path to self discovery but I’ll take whatever works. The one thing that amazes me about dream journalling is how it let’s you recall dreams more regularly as you go along.
There’s a certain kind of honesty and strength that comes with writing down what’s bubbling in your mind, or even committing to creating something. So next year I’m going to go back to something I’ve always been avoiding, writing long bits of fiction. I’ve always had the lurking recognition that doing so really stretches how well you write and reveals your hand. I’m also going to get back to drawing regularly, I’ve been meaning to practice my basics instead of trying to skip ahead to the fancy parts I can show off. I’ve done an okay job of it so far but I’ve still got a long way to go on getting the perspective right.
Exchange
It started with a name on my mind drifting as I read an email. A message. Someone’s shit I wish I had never borrowed. Dusty notes where only archaic doodles interest me. We met in an ally behind a bookstore.
Now it was a kitchen where a box radio was the only thing that worked. It was green with plastic posing as bronze. I was thinner with the beginning of a mustache. I had just thought of actually wearing such a thing. Ice with my drink, a sip. Directionless, I could never hear a single thing in the kitchen. My companion toyed with a paper box, a poorly pasted dragon on it’s side, in it a mixed up order of rice which I couldn’t eat.
I had a question, so did they. Spoon feed familiar nothings that rush to my stomach so fast I could feel it through my skin. It works, I stay hungry all through the night.
Boomers vs. beards
Beards aren’t that well liked where I live especially among older folks, which means I receive a long list of “polite” hints about shaving. Highlights include:
“You look like a depressed artist that hangs around parks”
“You look like someone who’s just been released from a long stay at a hospital”
“You’re more beard than face”
“You look good, you don’t need to grow a beard”
“I would say you look nice if I could actually see your face”
“What are you trying to hide under there?”
“I’m sure the barbershops are safe even with covid”
“Forget covid it’s worth the risk”
“The thing about these style fads is you’ve got to change them often. Very often”
Shiver
I feel the moon tide, in night rain
A bird calls
In the garden cobblestone, I see a shadow
Through the light of the sicklemoon
A bird calls
First a demon, then the Buddha
A storm cloud
Green box
Yesterday, the same day I came back from my trip home, I dreamt I was back in the manor I grew up in.
It is an old bunglow with old walls thick enough to beat a canon. I am in my parents room, old white paint lathered on crumbling and thick walls, dusty windows covered with stickers I put up twenty years ago. Water damage and cracks sneak along the corners but are never enough to bring anything down. The walls have been flaking and crumbling for years but the walls are deep enough to take a hundred more years of decay.
My parents aren’t in the room, because it’s a makeshift classroom. The are tables from my college and my English department too. I see a water-can in the corner filled with white pebbles and glittering deco. I reach it, examine it while I turn it over. A woman is talking about lost papers.
A professor, one who looks like a hippie met a gorilla with a personality that made him a few feet taller, is near by. Sitting on a bench close to the window with the thick iron bars. My grandmother is next to him reading the veins on his hands and praising the wisdom of the ancients.
I put the water-can back but I can’t get it back to the way it was. After I’ve examined it, it’s shaky and to my surprise twice as small. My grandmother is done devining disease and fortune from veins. She hands me a green paper box to place over the water can. The paper is a beautiful aged emerald green, with golden threads running under its thin and discolored spots.
It’s edges have sleeves, and when I examine it I find four smaller wood coloured papers tucked delicately on one side. It cannot be placed back, it doesn’t make sense that it was ever there in the first place. The 4 papers have fifteenth century Japanese art on it, painted with golden ink ingrained in the paper.
It’s not the kind of art you’d expect, fifteen century Japanese art was very close to Chinese styles, the more familiar variety comes after the Edo period. It shows the Buddha and his deciples being promised Buddhahood and Indian mythology probably the Ramayana. That was where the dream ended or where my memory fails me.
Rijul Ballal 