Purple Mind

A sliver of blue smoke is rising like a DNA coil.

Rising from the tip of a smouldering cigarette.

The smoke DNA is rising warmly, some of it is being inhaled, like tubed anaesthesia, by some dumb birds idling on the window sill.

Suddenly the idle birds are flying with the eagles. Flying like eagles. But not really flying.

I am sitting with Me and Myself. I am split into three and located inside three individual heads. Three of us are sitting around smoking weed.

We're thinking aloud loudly. I, the smoker, smoke with undisguised relish, inhaling the untold story of a plant. Growing green. And conscious. Buzzing with molecules of thought. Growing somewhere dark, dusty and nondescript.

Me is smoker-buddy, sounding board non-pareil. Indefensible in his defence of my failings and addictions. Our talk is a back-and-forth reflection of what one is saying, perhaps not very well, to the other. We are like two mirrors facing each other and in the process forming a corridor of thresholds. Mirror looking into mirror.

Myself is a non-smoking judgementalist, not quite friend in the supportive sense of the word but a grumbling piece of furniture. Unwanted and usually undisturbed. But he too is caught between the two smokers bent on joining the dots around them. Myself, not-quite-friend, piece-of-furniture is being pushed around. Mentally. Between mirrors. Being made to sensify a nonsensical world. Mental brilliance here assumes the form of matchstick sparks. Junked in two seconds.



I like a Hindi film revivee keep saying 'So where was I?' again and again: a refrain indicating a losing battle with short-term memory. Or the damp, wispy remains of it that float unstuck inside my head.

'So where was I?' I say for what seems like the first time but Myself, the furniture, catches up with me with his own mind-travelling. Surprise, surprise!

'In Hitler's bunker,' he says nodding sagely, unsmilingly.

'Aah yes,' I say nodding to Me who taking advantage of the situation has greedily puffed some extra moments of the magic DNA. Noticing me looking at him, he quickly adds, 'And what were we doing there?'

'We were growing there,' I jump to explain. 'Yes we were growing there… As grass... And the Nazis fucked themselves up smoking us.'

Suddenly, all three of us are laughing and rolling on the floor like schoolboys with a righted hunch.