One year, Mrs Mesquita, our piano teacher, had a lucky dip for christmas.
We each stuck our hands into a box full of gift wrapped objects; mine turned out to be a silver bowl and the most expensive thing she had put in. I remember my disappointment, and Mrs M, grim prophet, telling my grandmother that I was a clever one, had an eye for the main chance &c. On the way home my sister sulked, and jeered at my half-sincere offer to swap. But by then the disapproving praise had already begun to seep in, the bowl was glinting with the passing streetlights through the crumpled green wrapping and plastic in my hands.
I worried for days afterwards about whether i'd deliberately done it; i recalled seeing a gleam through a small tear in some wrapping, and stretching out my hand towards it; —it wasn't fair—I wasn't good—if it wasn't luck. An instinct towards something shiny was not excuse enough. The bowl was primly shut away in a cupboard as soon as we got home, and everyone thumped me on the back with an assessing look in their eyes. I wished I'd got the sharpener. 

an apt regurgitation.

I need to reassure my cynicism. It wavers, sometimes.

I need to read poems about deciding to be mad[ly] in love.
About using those clichees consciously, defying
Both those who use them ignorantly, as commonplaces,
And those who studiously avoid such pollution.
And so Proclaim to the World that our love Subverts Conventional Meaning-
Ours is Language and the World that's in it!
—While believing, beneath, that it's all just hormones anyway.

I need to attend plays of socio-political Worth.
Nod vigorously in self-righteous assent, like everybody there,
Be suitably dressed, nothing too bourgeois, like everybody there,
Critique State oppression, middle class Conservatism and Indolence-
But I can never prevent those popup points:
My family's Middle Class. I don't know who the State is. I don't see
What use it is to the downtrodden that I use my leisure time
To nod vigorously at their hurt.
I need to believe that they'd stutter, ashamed, helpless, without answers.

I need to imagine those scenarios, you know the ones,
Where my friends turn out to not give a damn,
The men I love forget me, my family dies on me
[The self-absorption reaches its peak here but,
Threaded through the shit, can you see the naive trust?]
I die, and nobody cries
[Wryly smiling, viciously reminded
That I am not free of the proverbs, Chinese, Yiddish, mother's]
I need to remember, grateful for the harshness,
How little I have grown, contrary to unreasonable certainty or hope.

I need to hear of people who have done badly
Despite being born with effortless perfection;
To despair, fear though never pity,
To throw up my hands, exasperated at the futility;
I need to Believe—desperately, and grasp at the familiarity of it, 

As though I never stopped doing it, and hope
My subconscious covered those bases, to mitigate the petty calculatedness.

I need to be reduced, to be crushed and trained to cringe,
Because-—one final confession—
I cannot live in the moment, extempore,
Steadily leaving the minutes behind, like emission trails;
I am tied to each one that passes as if I gave birth to it.
I cannot easily turn my back on
Lost friend, disappointed hope, on emptiness,
Without practice.

My friend says wearing shoes without socks is disgusting.
I'm beginning to see what he means.

Socks keep your feet clean and from breaking a sweat
and help in homeostasis. Kept in socks, feet don't get
dry and hard, or develop painful cracks, or stink. The socks absorb it all.
How this happens is both perfectly explicable by materials and conditions and processes,
and yet the happiness of feet is not. Perhaps we all need
something between ourselves and the surfaces we present to the dust:
Soulmates.

with guilt as my bedfellow.

'The Dummies' Guide to Being Strong-

  Step1: Realise that damn bed's been made.

  Step 2: Lie on it.'

It's bitter how the fact that

You'll have to let yourself sleep sometime,

And forget, just sometimes,

Turns that opiate from relaxant to sedative,
And bravery to charlatanry.

"Let the lying dog sleep", they'll say.

epic fail

People use the word epic a lot, to refer to something very good. 

It is the successor of awesome.

And I suppose it isn't going to matter that they're diluting its meaning because those sorts of adjectives aren't being used seriously much anyway.

Grand theory has been discredited. Grand narratives are a pejorative.

Grand pianos take up too much space. Grandparents aren't grander parents.

There aren't undiscovered territories to discover. I could do a trek or something,

but that's because I don't know, not because humankind doesn't.

And anyway, if I'm out of mobile range for a few days, people start panicking about me, or I about them.

If I commit a grand crime passionel I can't flee the country with the name of my love on my lips because I won't get a passport.

And there's enough troubles at the border already without unbalanced lovers queuing up to question their Line of Control. 

Oh, and there's no solving murders of international import on the Trans-Siberian railway either, because the train takes forty days from start to finish and I'll never get that many days off work.

I don't want to be nostalgic about the days before I was born, that's my parents' job.

Nor to long for TB to consume me while I breathe sea air and try to get used to my impending death. And let's not go into the plumbing and things.

And as consolation there's still racism, to deport immigrants with, and imperialism, to keep your car going,

And sinocentrism, because the -centrisms were getting too North-heavy. And Americanism, which should've been an ideology but instead stands for something so uninformed that only someone utterly internationally privileged could've thought so, and yet people can organise their words around it. 

There are still epic battles on ESPN every third Saturday in season, and some civilisation-sized observation waiting

in every expert's larynx for the right note to be hit in international affairs.  

Everybody's little drama is a big deal as we're all equal, and those who capitalise on it are an offence to humanism, which in turn only an ecological ignoramus could've come up with.

Not that I have an alternate future in mind, but discoveries are all to the scientific,

As battle used to be to the swift—or perhaps the strong—and the rest of us

are busy looking backwards and forwards in time trying to avoid human failings 

before we cross the road.