Tomic Riter

Tag: prose

  • Dirty eyes.

    Early morning. Heartbroken. Defecating this loneliness and shit. Irritated by the tap water tapping on the bathroom floor. Now, what else is there to do. My blood will be taken away in a short time and it will get analysed and I will be declared a lunatic. Not a bad consequence of being alive all these years. Somebody’s footsteps outside the bathroom door. My neck is aching, like an elephant sat on it while I was asleep. Anyways, I am done here and same goes for my writing.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • Days of sickness.

    What else about this evening? I am feeling better and that is all. Five days in isolation. Five more to go. The virus is a real bastard. Outside, days and nights roll away. Who really needs my permission or my advice? No one. With me locked in a room, the world went on fine. That is what I am and that is what you are. A nobody. Anybody can do what I do. No job is impossible to do. Anybody can be replaced. That’s the truth of an ordinary life. It keeps repeating wherever you look.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • In a day dream and whatever followed it.

    I am asleep. Sleeping sideways. Were my eyes open I would be looking left. My heart is a boombox. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. In dream I went somewhere. In sleep I probably dreamed. I went to meet a man. I know him and I know all the others who performed in my dream. It’s strange how strangers never appeared in my dream. We were sitting around a table. We were talking about me. Ridiculous! I told a man, ‘Hey! You have grown fatter!’ He smiled and said, ‘Yeah, it’s the job. What to do.’ He didn’t ask me anything. Nobody did. I can’t remember anything else, only that everybody was wearing clothes, nobody naked. I had to go somewhere else but I guess I ended up there. A cup of tea doesn’t seem to be enough. My heart is going BOOM BOOM BOOM. Is it my end? I could open my eyes but I don’t. I wait for the end and then turn to my right, my eyes still closed. It’s some time past midday. There’s light outside but not a lot. It must be cloudy. It might even be raining. Why do I care. I have nowhere to go. I am sipping herbal syrup and slowly coming back to life. I check my pulse rate. I have worsened over the months. I went to meet the gentleman who is no more here. In dreams, things go faster and you are back to yourself before anyone even notices. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM I hear my heartbeat. A result of eating bad shit and excessive drinking. I take a bite off a dried toast and listen to slow beats and sip tea. My heart quietens as if it has stopped.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • While the jazz plays.

    The buzzer is buzzing since an hour. For how long it will buzz, I do not know. Nobody cares to turn it off. Or that they are used to its irritating sound. I am not. I put on some jazz and wait for it to stop. Miles Davis. John Coltrane. It’s a blue world and what else colour will suit it. The trumpets play and then stop. Somebody turns off the buzzer. Thank God! I could pay that person, but I don’t know who it was and I do not care. Now things are quieter. It is like all the sickness suddenly left this place. Some murmuring outside the door. Some plates banging against each other. Hunger strikes at odd hours. Any hour is odd. I am reading James Joyce and he’s hilarious, like like Beckett. Both were Irish lunatics. I might be the next one, only un-Irish, but I can only hope for that. On my plate are three raisins remaining. For some reason, I am not eating them. They look infected but they are not. The really infected ones I have already eaten without much thought. My tooth aches. Maybe it’s the cold getting me. Maybe the early morning frigid shower, Maybe the beer. When you do not know, there’s scope of pointless thinking. The only noise now is of my own table fan. I never turn it off. Never. Once I died, and the fan was still running. And then it malfunctioned and I had to come back from being dead just to have it repaired. Now it is running fine and without any remorse. Some kid outside is doing its duty and shrieking for no reason. The speaker on my table stopped speaking at I don’t know what point. And now, its speaking suddenly has started me. I am startled and that’s what I am. I don’t know what to do. I pick up the speaker and inspect. Must be the loose wires. Must be. I push it inside the little hole in the speaker and it screams again. Scream all it can but I won’t be startled again. Coltrane is back with his sadness and the world is still blue. I walk to the other room and then come back to my chair. Everything appears quite clean. It must be somebody else’s home but it is mine and I could have sold it but I don’t own it. I look out the window and all is green and I am tired of it. Yellow must return. Or the deathly brown. Anything but green. The leaves can turn orange. The sky can turn maroon. The eggs have boiled somehow and now, they must be eaten. I cannot believe it. Eating boiled eggs. Or I could keep it for a week in fridge and then throw it out the window at somebody. I did that once. It was fun. The egg didn’t hit anybody. All I know is that it went out the window and then I ran inside like I was never there. Most probably, some pig ate it. So many stray pigs here. Last month one of them bit a kid or is that what I am imagining. Anyways, it must be painful. Even tearful. The kid must have screamed but not as much as my speaker. It’s a blue world and what else colour will suit it. Coltrane is dead and so is Joyce and what remains of them is consumed on weekends by rodents like me.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • Past sleep.

    A little rain makes the landscape greener. I look at the 20-feet tall pigeon sitting outside the glass window. It’s eyeball emerald studded watches brainlessly. Am I registered as an enemy? I wish a door was provided for an escape. But now I have to sit here under eternal watch. Its wings almost metallic. I walk to the window. It beats its paw on the glass, probably denying communication. I bite into an apple and sit in a chair. It’s raining again. The tree spread out their branches to absorb as much as they can. I finish eating and watch the pigeon. It is now looking away from me. Acknowledging the impossibility of an escape, I put my head down on top of the table and wait to run out of time. I wake up quite later. It’s still evening. A clock hangs but it faces the other side. I find myself in my chair with an empty plate on the table. I look towards the window. It’s clear. Nothing is sitting outside, nothing is watching me. It stopped raining but not long ago. I get up and walk to the window. I can climb out of the window but I do not. Were I to go out, where would I go? How long would I be gone before I am back here? Won’t it be easier to confront the reality of not leaving than to return to the same place? I move away from the window and sit in the chair. Maybe the pigeon will come back.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • This isn’t Kafka.

    Somewhere around one third of finishing this book, I start losing my shit. My speed decreases. My mind is somewhere else. I hate to think. I stop before reading another page. I keep the book down. Were it Kafka, I could have bought cigarettes and smoked all night. But this isn’t Kafka and I cannot buy anyways. I am kind of stuck. The remaining two third needs to be completed as well. I am not interested in knowing how it ends. Books with endings I hate to read. I hate stories that try to make sense.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • Once again through the act.

    The day before yesterday, I started second round of editing of my first book of poems. The first round I finished quite a while ago, like two weeks ago. Yesterday I could read again with a fresh eye and I was actually able to catch some more silly mistakes. So that went well.

    The poems keep growing as of now. Something more keeps getting added. I thought that I would become numb to my own poems on reading them again and again, but that is not happening. Strange. Really.

    Last two days brought a pleasant weather and it is that weather that helped me in going through my poems one more time. I am grateful to the winds for blowing. And of course great music. It is always there for me.

    © Copyright 2020 Tomic Riter. All rights reserved

  • A beginning in viral times.

    It is almost midnight. I write this to you as I step into another day. Everything is fine here for now. The virus is still far from here, but for how long I cannot say. In the afternoon, two folks, a man and a woman, visited my home with masks covering their sweaty faces.

    ‘Tell me your name,’ the woman said.

    ‘Why should I? Who are you?’ I asked.

    ‘We are asked to survey in light of the rapid spreading of the virus. Now, tell me your name,’ she replied.

    ‘Oh OK. OK. Fine,’ said I and told them my name and cellphone number.

    ‘Has anybody visited you from outside?’ asked the man.

    ‘Nobody visits me from anywhere. I live alone,’ said I.

    ‘Fine,’ said the man and took out a sketch pen from his pocket. He wrote a sequence on my door in big, bold characters. ‘What the hell,’ I said in my mind as I read the characters.

    I understood the idea of this exercise. In case I get the virus in the future, they can track my home and burn it down to ash.

    — TOMIC RITER