03/03/2026
When the world’s gone to s**t
I choose this
And this and this.
Something's brewing
I've been writing
Burning to move
with the text and music.
But who knows...
Yesterday I received
Three kisses
From R and I and L
And the news blurred, briefly.
Here's an old piece
For funzies
https://outofprintmagazine.co.in/2023/06/01/the-kiss/
And a fragment of
the new one...
"On the mountain I met a gum tree who had been planted in 1869 and I fell at her lotus feet, so gnarly and ancient. I circumnavigated her roots in a parikrama of sheer gratitude. Yet when I looked far, far up, craning my neck way back...her
leaves were the springtime, newly born, fresh. Pale green and light-spirited, framing the blue sky. She had been a new comer then, in 1869, same as the tea. A migrant, an ex-pat. And here she was, what could I make of her? How long does it
take to naturalise a tree? Should I denounce her, this lofty coloniser, or write her a letter?
Dear Miss Myrtaceae,
(That’s Eucalyptus to you and me.)
I’m not blaming you, this is not a lynch mob. It’s not your fault, the groundwater is gone and the sholas and grasslands, the blue-green mosaic of the Nilgiri Malai, blue from the kurinji flowers, struggle to hold their own. It’s just your nature to suck
it all up and grow tall and magnificent, outdoing the little grasses and wildflowers including the sweet, lost yellow and purple Thunbergia Alata of my childhood. Plants compete like mofos, I’ve discovered. In direct relation to the temperament
of their closely residing humans. Your land ancestor is the great Australian outback. By the 1860’s they... Who? The British. The tea was doing well and they, the British, now needed fast growing timber to power big factories and mills. Who thought about the little grasses that have been around for 30,000 years? Or the
Nilgiri sholakili, or the Philautus frogs, the Perrotet’s vine snakes or the Salea lizards?"
