An essay on the long-term effects of permanent facial palsy.
Author: Red Balloon
I am a chronically ill queer artist and writer. I have a number of degrees in higher education and have spent most of my life interested and active in social movements against racism, militarism, misogyny and homophobia. Over the course of my life, I have worked in the world of alternate news, translation, law, teaching, and with progressive cultures, music, poetry, performers, and artists. I speak and understand a few languages and plan to share media in them on this blog. I am a poetry, art, music, and nature lover with an especial fondness for cats!
The Haiku Way
Is that your face I see? Or an old map of travels we took, each alone? Bussing the Sierra Madre, two travellers homeless, dreaming of return. River beside us sand beneath our flip-flopped feet men we did not know All haiku and artwork, Copyright Kaushalya Bannerji, 2019
Traveller’s Lament
I used to love the roads as well as blood loves vein fleeing from running to the geographies of other maps where my race charted like a cartographer’s fantasy finds itself obscured by the deviance of our desire in all my darkness i have never lost the way nor forgotten the words of this lamentation…
Signs of Disorder
the new season eats us with raw uncertainty even this weather has us guessing night’s frost a riddle chancing upon a newspaper a little bit of history intrigues between the fullstops lives collapse and transform nations turn upon themselves jobs are lost wars won and all our dreams made homeless everywhere there are signs of…
Blood in the Fire: A Cry from the Amazon
I’ve been aghast but not surprised to hear about the devastation of the Amazon due to uncontrolled fires set throughout mainly Brazilian territory. I don’t think fire will respect borders either. I’ve been remembering my own experience visiting the Amazon, a place that had always seemed magical and exotic due to the vast amount of…
Skintalker!
These haiku are inspired by music from the 1940s onward. I used to love listening to “latin jazz” and afro-cuban jazz. Years ago, when I had a radio spot, finding music to share was a delight, especially since it was long before the Internet! Chano Pozo revolutionized American jazz at a time when it was…
I like mine neat! More Haiku!
Rulers they want us to hate ourselves easy to dismember flesh bone memory Ether/real Chamber the internet is not yet full with dead minds the haul must be greater Politricks in the age of Electronic Voting Machines/DREs Press that button quick hackers must work wonders all hail the motherboard of lies Elites they have a…
Rainbow/Arco Iris
The colour Red is a bird with wings that shine. Yellow, turns into a sunflower. Grey, the colour of rainy afternoons when bodies love. Green, hope yet unreachable. Blue, the clear melody that cleanses everything in its wake. Pink, the tongue of a black cat. And Black, the open arms of night, although no-one, but…
Be Like Water
(Kaushalya Bannerji, 2019) flow, like water wave, like water cry, like water rage, like water rain, like water dry, like water still, like water one drop, like water becomes many.
The cat went here and there and the moon spun round like a top (W.B Yeats)
Cats are amazingly complex creatures. Beautiful, predatory, cuddly, inquisitive and also experts at being lazy. Our cat often enjoys the evenings outside and the moon with me. What her shining eyes see only she knows…
Deportee
The day brings so much more news about ICE, the U.S.Border Patrol, family separation, the dependency of multi-billion dollar corporations on undocumented labour and racism. The buying of citizenship (U.S.A) and the ban on migrants who receive social assistance from becoming citizens (Germany). And in the midst of these conditions, people still love and live,…
Strange Fruit: Death and Democracy in the United States
This brief essay looks at the change in racist violence over the last century, making links between state and non-state actors.
Duende!
Duende is the word flamenco practitioners and enthusiasts use to name the unnameable— the gooseflesh or shiver that you get when you experience the outpouring of passion and soul that is flamenco…But the soul of flamenco is rooted in its nomadic beginnings in India and its route through West Asia to its hold on Southern…
More Haiku!
Loving the haiku today! What a fantastic form. I thought I would share the classics. Here is my favourite, the tender and whimsical Kobayashi Issa: O snail Climb Mount Fuji, But slowly, slowly! Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) is another great haiku master: I want to sleep Swat the flies Softly, please. After killing a spider, how…
Haiku
I love the centuries-old tradition of Japanese haiku. Its economical style and breadth of material — observations on the natural, philosophical, and social world are astonishingly profound, and often, wry. It’s refreshing to see the power of seventeen syllables in an age of verbosity with so little to say. While my introduction to haiku has…
Ear to the Ground 