A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep - while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

Hangout at Azimpur

Acquainted With the Night by Robert Frost

Acquainted With the Night
Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

A Lone Rider's Wish

It's always too hard to say about your future. And there are a lot of people who hate to talk about future. But certainly I'm not one of them. Here's my visualization of my future when I'll be 50!!!

First of all I'd like to be free. Free like a wild bird. I would like to be without any duty, responsibility. I would be a person without any friends, without any spouse, without any partner, without any relation, without any enemy. You may think I am out of my mind. But actually I've always longed for freedom. And I think I will only be able to taste true freedom when I am alone, lonely, desolate and have deserted everybody.

If the above words have sounded hypothetical then just hear what it will look like. I think I will end up living in a small apartment in Dhaka. There may be one or two rooms in it apart from kitchen & bathroom [hey no one can live without them]. One thing for sure all the rooms will be very much haphazard. Because I am not one of those who like to decorate their houses.There will be two chairs in that apartment. One for me and one for rare guests. There won't be any phone connection but there will be a PC for email purpose. It will also be used for listening to music. And the most important thing that will be in my apartment that would be lots & lots & lots of books& novels. I've already started collecting them. And if you ask what will I do all the day. I will just read books all the time.

So those are my dreams or wish for myself for the very far future. I don’t know if I’m going to make it or not, whether I’ll stand up to it or not. But certainly right now this idea seems very much fascinating and amusing to me and I would not waste any chance to make it come true.

E.H.R.

First Touch

The feeling at the first few moments holding her hand was maddening for me. It was driving me crazy. It was like unreal yet blinding. We were in a restaurant in Kawran Bazar. We had a bit of scuffle the previous night, so we were trying to reconcile each others thought. She complained that she had sleepless night (because of my behaviour) and was therefore very tired after a long walk to my office. She even said that she was trembling because of that stress. Taking that chance I asked her to give me her hand so that I could see if she was really trembling or not (it was a kind of joke we often shared). And then she forwarded her hand towards me. I clutched at it for a few moments and it felt awesome. I felt I had experienced a great moment in my life. But alas! She didn’t feel that way, as she was too tired and exhausted.

However, she did felt the same things but two days later. We were on a rickshaw and I grabbed her hand when we were passing through a nearly lone street. She said she was scared. But I knew it wasn’t fear. Her mind was troubled with this new feeling she was experiencing. Her whole body trembled and she couldn’t stare at my eyes. Later, she confessed that she couldn’t concentrate on the class she attended after that.

Now, after a couple of weeks, I think I am calm enough to review and give a second thought on the feeling that rattled the minds of both of us. Actually those feeling were too deep and vast to be explained in one word. The feeling was like the life and world itself. It was joy of doing something new. It had the pride of possessing someone. It was dreadful because society didn’t allow it. It was good because youth and young lived for it. It was sad because our parents and guardians never approved it.

As I had said those feelings were like existence of life and world in a nutshell. It had happiness, sorrow, courage. It was beginning and end at the same time. It had the rumbling and trembling of creation and devastation at the same time. And our life, life of each and every individual is a total of all these feelings.

--- 27/5 Bonogram Lane, Dhaka -1203 (Onik’s house)
October 2nd, 2003, 1810 hrs

Homage to Unpenned Thoughts (incomplete)

May be I was thinking out aloud or may be it was just a silly grunt but in a moment it was all clear; it all made sense in such a translucent and lucid manner like it had never done before. It was almost a year. Few more days and it would be a wholesome 365 days since my mind had struggled with the systematically strewn keys to put together glimpses of thoughts into a decent paragraph or something.

Playing a child’s game if my limbs were separate characters, who would be blamed for this barren spell? Certainly not the brain! It had kept itself brine with intermittent interesting notions, which occasionally got transformed into witty remarks and left listeners awed. Were the ten fingers culprit? Well, they never betrayed. Their support was always there; never denying when it came to forming articulate sentences out of twisted ideas. As a matter of fact, these fingers seemed almost eager to help even when it was not required, drumming away table surfaces, chair handles whenever it felt idle.

--- Sanchita – 203
June 6th, 2008, 1640 Hrs