It has been a while
With abundance of distraction
Concentration hasn’t been wild.

Give me a moment
Let me complete chores
And my unfinished task.

One of the hot words these days is work-life balance (one of those management coined terms). It wasn’t very long ago that I wrote as comment to one of my post that writing and reading is becoming increasingly difficult with the pressures of work. That got me thinking to this whole concept of work-life balance and how patronizing it is to life itself.

Everything that we do is part of life. So how can work-life be different from life itself? Isn’t working a part of life? Isn’t it as integral to our existence as everything else? Just because we have fun doing something else, does it mean fun is life and because work ensures that we compromise our time to “fun” mean work is external to life?

This whole attitude also gives rise to negativism towards work. I have so often read film star saying that it is fun to be paid for doing something that you love. This statement makes all other clerical and back office job seem deglamorised and abhorrent. Why can’t they simply say they get paid for doing what they do the best? As an accountant my skills are specialized. I can’t just go ahead and do something else that others do the best. Finance is best that I can do and that’s how I earn my livelihood. It is also my earnest belief that we all find means of earning from what we know how to do best. And if we do that best why not better enjoy it.

On a very personal level I enjoy my work. I enjoy dedicating my time and energy to what shapes my present and future. Yes along with it I also enjoy doing some things else. And my comment on my post set me thinking can I continue to do other things along with work and have a more satisfying day than just doing work.

All that was required was a little more planning and allocation of time. The result has been satisfying. I have practically been able to scribble my nonsense all through this week. I have caught up on my newspaper reading, my books, music, solitaire(I play it on my iPod on way to office), devote time to my research paper which is lying incomplete for sometime (I just started it and left it in between) and read my favourite pages on blogospheres. I have also caught up with long lost friends and have finally managed to complete a book that I had been reading for two months now. Yes a little less sleep but honestly I am not complaining.

Mother I want but still don’t
to know what’s conspicuous,
Conscious of the surround
and the world egregious,
With morning would it seem
all is worth hollow and capricious.

.......

Mother will you still
love me the way you do,
Now that I am you
tomorrow with form
that would no longer
hold me to you.

Mother will I remember
the dreams of your eyes
and unhold penurious minds;
Will I live to be obsessed
with light and will you
name me for the sight.

....

Mother I will see the world
through my nascent dreams
borne with me and
revel in the light ....
wallow through blood and
await the moment to arrive.

……..

Mother my acquaintance
has been long for world
he who knows will abide; and
The laconic small fellow
will remember what you read
to him all this while.

No I don’t remember
Your unpracticed grace
The aversion to conquest
Testifies my bequest.

Through the fissure of time
The surfeit of emption ruled
Even after - perilous churl
I decree all that you see.

Till not very recently contradictions used to irritate me a lot. It wouldn’t be too harsh to say that I abhorred contradictory statement coming from the same individual. But then we all grow in life. Sometimes the evolution is faster than envisaged and undermines the dictates of history. Such is also the contradiction of human mind. You never know what it might pick up down that unknown alley of future and when it would convert those misdemeanors into undisputable beliefs.

Somehow contradictions no more seem unnatural to me. Irritations at contradiction have melted away into acceptance of that which is unnatural. Today the colours of mind are no longer mired in black and white. The vagrancy of grey has come to stay with me.

He would refuse not but once
To tergiversate from the known
A man his age will learn
From eternal conquest
To lionize change
At every single stage …..

The night waits -
wanting as always
to transfer -
that what is his -
its inalienable right ….

And in the hurried scene
that follows -
her eidetic memory
sketches the light -
for a dawn tomorrow ….

Thus the smile that followed you
left me with no boundaries
of sky and earth and a thin line
through inconsequential time …..

The sporadic cloud -
The moments across -
Bridge abridge -
Matters cease ….

Thus the smile that followed me
through eternity ……

Sustenance in vagrancy is admirable
Only if I am able to reach
The definition that I seldom seek

In contrast I indulge and not live
In the relativity of moments
The meaning of which I seldom seek

The thrust of water and the thrust of blood
Both without colour worth that soul
Lust for heaven and of love decreed
That’s the life I have stopped to seek.

The veil of caresses never seem to leave
the semantic of our relationship over unwritten
unsaid, unheard and unspoken language.

…..

Left with a distance that never seemingly mattered -
on this other side of the world, - I wish a little
just a little, ..... after a long lost time
for another life, ... mirrored with you.

I remember those escapades willingly and wanting to
on those benches where questions were answered
with unanswerable questions …..and yet no complaints
ever followed the understanding that preceded every context.

On that night all along, when you were beside me,
basking in the light of that unsung crescent moon;
your soft touches and playful quibble
arrested my senses … devoid of percepts.

……

Boorish bacchanalia tortures my heart
and erotic exorcism fails to soothe my soul
entwined in conjured spirit of your spells
I am bewitched, all my way to the hell;

Splatter of blood all across the veins,
running tumultuous in frantic frenzied rain
as fire lights the sky and burns the moon dead
I cry foul over thy larceny, to dead ends;

......

Languid lethargic winds -
show some respect,
when thunder strikes within -
how can you be so suppressed,
banished chimera -- rise
I command you to rise -
she surely will take me seriously
once she sees thy ...

.......

If I wished for another life
amidst these gibes of lonely pillows
and neatly tucked bed sheet
it wouldn’t be for anything ---
for anything without you.

I look timidly from the window panes
Descrying the stretch of open vastness
Or is that the omen I am looking for -
The caw of the crow over running rooftops

The cusps of this nightmare
Occludes the path of that dream
Or is that the omen I am looking for -
Over the roads where chariots rolls on

In the four corners of this walled rooms
Obedience servitudes unnecessary veneration
Or is that the omen I am looking for -
To reinstate my abnegated freedom.

The house behind the backyard
Found and lost to macerate
In open fields the shadows lurk
Of interdicted foolish murky souls ...

Shadows lead path to my heaven
The credulous house withal
With soft dripping renditions
And sermons less unattended songs ...

Pause … look … Wait on the road
Hear shallow …. slow profundity
The house smeared with black paints
And impressive impersonated self gains ...

What a folly on a wee bit morning night
The teasing shadows of moonlit sky
Haven of consolation for lonely departed souls
In the backyard of the house with closed doors.

Into the moulds of sea moss
I lurched in the unwarranted
dusty laden storm, across
the thrust of rocky ledges
lay essence of dead grasses.

I followed its footsteps
from muskeg to muskeg,
perished in the storage
of peat and smoke, I walked
slowly, with weltered questions ….

Once a tree, the girth of the log
I could embrace with shame, today
its befallen pride lay dead
in a cabal of destiny or shall I say
observe … His matter of fact play ….