World Dream Bank: Bollywood Love

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Bollywood Love

Dreamed 2009/4/12 by Wayan

I live in a Bollywood film. Rule-caged, I sing
and wait. True Love or nothing! Jeez,
what's True Love even mean?
Moping, I walk the flowered terraces between
Main Library and City Hall. A cruising crowd
loud and happy: all but me. O melanbolly mall!
Hoping, I gawk at flowered dresses, sweet skin,
but I won't answer girl-glances, reined in
by an innate grim Bollywood knowl-
edge: by movie law, I'll never be allowed
to love anyone at all--not unless
it's Bollyfidelity. A Hindu-censored mess!
Then I meet a girl with frizzy hair. She's
healing from Bollywood breakup hell.
We can't even kiss, though huge I swell...
Yet both of us would find a sexy fling
equally rebound-comforting.
But if we tear off clothes and play
won't the Bollyonic Code drive me away,
call her flawed? Is a girl I like enough?
What is the threshold for Bollywood Love?
Or might I ever sandblast
down its stark demands? I never asked
for a Bollywood life, or understand
this high romantic bar. And yet...
here it looms, a wall of fear
for me to leap, for her to clear--
to my sing-out, dance-troupe,
kissless regret.
Somebody spell out how much is enough.
What is the threshold for Bollywood Love?

NOTES

Sketch by Wayan from dream of being trapped in a Bollywood movie: a man with moustache and bhindi on forehead embraces a woman with bhindi in magenta top who turns her face away, apparently unwilling to kiss him. Click to enlarge.

Civic center, crowds, women: today I biked to the Main Library and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Crowds. Attracted to several women at the gallery--we liked similar pieces--but didn't talk to anyone.
Bollywood knowl-: terrible dream pun on Hollywood Bowl?
Bolly-fidelity: last year three of us stuck in a romantic triangle tried to solve it by declaring polyfidelity--basically a sort of three-person marriage. It promptly blew up.
Hindu-censored: I recently saw Fire, the Indian film on a married woman who runs off with another woman. Right-wing Hindu politicians openly encouraged the mobs who trashed theaters that played it.
Romanticism keeps me stuck: I just read Philip José Farmer's The Fabulous Riverboat. In it, all humanity's resurrected randomly on the shore of an endless river. Sam Clemens guiltily seeks his wife Livy for 20 years, only to find her at last in love with Cyrano de Bergerac. Meanwhile, all those years, Sam and a Celtic woman named Gwenfara adore each other, yet he won't live with her--can't quite let Livy go. A friend says "don't cheat Gwen by leading her on, if you're still stuck on Livy. Unfair to feed her hope..."
So do I guiltily cling to the past, like Sam? Our quasi-marriage is dead, I'm truly single... except in my head! Mustn't kiss da girl.
Romantic code: Twain's own books, like Huck Finn and Connecticut Yankee, explore the trouble romanticism and cultural brainwashing can get you into. But Twain, though his humor gets pretty savage, is always funny; Philip José Farmer's book was just grim. So after enduring 300 pages of Humorless Riverboat, my dream rebels with a truly Twainish absurdity...

Or is it absurd? Maybe it's true
that I'm stuck in an over-romantic view.
Some harsh evidence backs my fear--
since our triangle died last year,
I won't date. Won't even try. Do
I set my love-bar insanely high?
Living inside this film may keep
me sealed off, singing, til I die.

LISTS AND LINKS: other worlds - movies - India - love & kisses - frustration - censors vs free speech - dream humor - Mark Twain - Philip Jose Farmer - pencil dream-art - a second dream the same night: a girl breaks the Censor's Code, in The Golden Paw - a dryad's love-troubles in Hollywood, in Bleeding Heart - dream poetry - this is #51 in the Dreamverse Project - the next Dreamverse: The Great Wave

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