Someone, engorged enters,

This room where I sit, Knocking the doors down. Bolts shoot from their hinges. And since I lay myself, crosswise like a log To hold the gate, I was broken in the middle.

You. Sweat flows into more sweat.

I reach out to touch and touch only that smell.

Skin slowly flushes with blood.

Fevered disbelief chars my flesh, This must be the secret recipe I had long begged God for!

Then firmly in place, he begins to swing

So firmly that I can’t miss or avoid!

a hammer, steel cold steel on these walls.

Half the time, my voice was like a hammer too With which I tried to nail love into place, I must have misread the directions of use, For I have knocked out my teeth instead. Ivory, precious ivory, dribbles from my lips, As I smile, my mouth full of red bone!

Flesh clings to flesh.

Its flesh that is weak, not love. Forgive us Father; we don’t know what we do.

Joining and cleaving, like Velcro, ripping out screams. Pleasure. Bursting pleasure!

My clothes unable to bear this, In imitation, rip themselves at their seams, and roll back Into bolts of cloth, so many bolts, Leaving behind so much, new and uncovered!

Spring moves grandly through these days, a sequence of days all shedding different flowers, First it was huge camellias followed by star magnolias. Now cherry trees seem to have brought with them an inch of pink snow. Why complain of tears then?

And then today breaking sprigs of mauve from Red Buds lining the avenues, I could not but wonder How those black twisted branches held such deep color Or how well they keep their strength hidden and didn’t let Judas down till he swung dead. Why complain of betrayal then?

The earth hurtles towards heat. Someplace now It is descending from the skies, falling as bombs on the ziggurats. Here we moth ball our woolens, switch on the air conditioning and prepare to wait this siege out, after the winters. Why complain of burning then?

This is a story of three people set in a seperate world that contains my whole world.

First we have the ringmaster, the tamer of beasts, at whose command even tigers crawl through fire, jump through hoops or sit on a stool and drool like a dog.

This is his universe and he knows how to control it: starvation is his secret tool. And for all those who care to listen he says,

"Never trust the world. Look at me, say if for a moment I let my gaurd down, go over and pat that tiger on it's head, I will be soon in it's stomach"

Maybe because he knows that we, men too are animals, pretty dangerous ones. Let's now not argue about this question of evolution, you might say "We don't have tails anymore and we even cover our privates. We have refined rules of etiqutte such as how to hold the knife and the fork, as if our unique opposable thumbs are't good enough!"

Besides none argues with the ringmaster, it's like in the Army where one doesn't argue with the drill seargent. Besides who knows one might wake up and find a tiger in the bed.

The ringmaster married (his wife sits in a cage called Home) and in time to him a daugther was born. What must have he felt? Pride of a male tiger? Wonder at that simple perfection, a perfection he dreams of achieving by that perfect taming of her?

....................................

The knives now begin to cut her hand, she withdraws her hand and winces in pain. It's all blood, her dress is soaked in blood. Whose fault is it? the knives? the knife thrower's for sharpening his grief to such a high edge?

He sees her climbing higher and higher, away from his deadly knives, the ladder sways and she keeps climbing into the sky and before he can cut the ladder into pieces she explodes high and becomes a star.

So when you see a knife thrower throwing his knives at the stars and see the knifes arc back to the ground tiny glints of starlight on their bodies, understand how hard he is trying to reach that one star in the sky,

that ringmaster's daugther.

The seed for this poem came after hearing Stephen Dobyns, a poet in residence at Tech, read a poem today at a poetry reading. The poem was about an orangutan shitting on the opera stage. This is a ploy or a staged trick, staged by the management, to somehow capture the attention of the kids(who would have been forcibly dragged to the opera ofcourse) as they would be the future audience. The fake orangutan led to the idea of a circus and then these characters centered around a circus started to take shape in my head: a ringmaster, his daugther who is a flying trapeze artist and an outsider: the knife thrower. And that is what this (incomplete) fable is about.

2/7 00:30 atl