Yellow wagtails

The young and females of yellow wagtails vary quite widely. I am putting all yellow wagtails together, as you can see the above pic is that of a yellow wagtail while the lower one is that of yellow headed wagtail. A typical male is greenish above and yellow below. They are found on the ground preferably on damp grassy spots or pastures about the rivers feeding insects. These birds are winter migrants to peninsula from Himalayas.

Pictures were taken at Siruvani waterfalls near Coimbatore, only a part of the forest is open to tourists. Make sure you don’t go early. I was here by 7am but it opens only at 10, roamed around the village for few hours (next junction has some education institution, one run by Chinmaya foundation others by evangelist groups). To reach the waterfall you have to walk about 2-3kms through the jungle, tribal settlements could be seen. A man in two-wheeler gave me lift. He happened to be a toddy tapper based in Palakad, comes to Coimbatore once in 6months for ‘purchase’. He said he makes it a point to visit different tourist sites every time he comes to Coimbatore. These are only few occasions he comes out of kerala, he keenly observed some plants. I offered him some money on the way back (I tagged on to him since there weren’t anyone around, and had a lurking feeling of being unsafe, further it was suggested by the guards since elephants were common) but he refused, shocking considering how easily he could have capitalized the opportunity. Marketer would say “geez what the world has come to. No enterprise”. In West they encourage children to make money quite early; quantifying actions as labor for money, otherwise it is classified as voluntary. I guess they cannot live without classifying action!

Charles Bukowski: an endearing poet

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) lived a life of a vagabond, moving from one job to another before settling down at US postal service- longest steady job lasting three years!. A menial job but gave him ample time to write, poems were being published in different journals on a regular basis, a massive collection of 40 volumes of poems is what he left

As The Poems Go
as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you've created very
little


His gravestone reads: "Don't Try", a phrase which Bukowski uses in one of his poems, advising aspiring writers and poets about inspiration and creativity. Bukowski explained the phrase
Somebody at one of these places asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.

Bukowski has delightful use of invectives, his irreverence vaguely reminds me of Kolatkar. Slur in poems are rare and needs deft handling so as to not reduce it to crass. I don’t recall bursting out into laughter after reading any poem in recent times. This poem 8counts did it. Charming!. Charles Bukowski has become one of my favorite poets. It is a great find thanks to internet. Oh by the way Bukowski was hell of a punter!!.

8 counts
From my bed
I watch
3 birds
on a telephone
wire
one flies
off.
then
another.
one is left,
then
it too
is gone.
My typewriter is
tombstone
still.
And I am
reduced to bird
watching.
Just thought I‘d
let you
know,
fucker.

Having the flue and with nothing else to do

I read a book about John Doss Passos and according to
the book once radical- communist
John ended up in Hollywood hills living off investments
and reading the
Wall Street Journal

this seem to happen all to often.

what hardly ever happens is
a man going from being an young conservative to becoming an
old wild ass-radical

however:
young conservatives always seem to be old
conservatives.
It’s a kind of lifelong mental vapor-lock.

but when a young radical ends up an
old radical
the critics
and the conservatives
treat him as if he escaped a mental
institution

such is our politics and you can have it
all

keep it

sail it up your
ass


Back to the machine gun

I awaken about noon and go out to get the mail
in my old torn bathrobe.
I'm hung over
hair down in my eyes
barefoot
gingerly walking on the small sharp rocks
in my path
still afraid of pain behind my four-day beard.

the young housewife next door shakes a rug
out of her window and sees me:
"hello, Hank!"
god damn! it's almost like being shot in the ass
with a .22

"hello," I say
gathering up my Visa card bill, my Pennysaver coupons,
a Dept. of Water and Power past-due notice,
a letter from the mortgage people
plus a demand from the Weed Abatement Department
giving me 30 days to clean up my act.

I mince back again over the small sharp rocks
thinking, maybe I'd better write something tonight,
they all seem
to be closing in.

there's only one way to handle those motherfuckers.

the night harness races will have to wait.

This poem “As The Sparrow” is one of the best I have read in recent times. So is “Cause and Effect”, “A smile to remember”. How much I love these poems

As The Sparrow

To give life you must take life,
and as our grief falls flat and hollow
upon the billion-blooded sea
I pass upon serious inward-breaking shoals rimmed
with white-legged, white-bellied rotting creatures
lengthily dead and rioting against surrounding scenes.
Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow
did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be
young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh.
I hated you when it would have taken less courage
to love.

Cause and effect

The best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
to get away
from
them

A smile to remember

We had goldfish and they circled around and around
In the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
Covering the picture window
and my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, “be happy Henry!”
and she was right: It’s better to be happy if you
can
but my father continue to beat her and me several times a week while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn’t
understand what was attacking him from within.

My mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile!
why don’t you ever smile?”

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled

Bukowski wrote somewhere that "My contribution was to loosen and simplify poetry, to make it more human... I taught them that you can write a poem the same way you can write a letter, that a poem can even be entertaining, and that there need not be anything necessarily holy about it."

Don’t we all agree with that?