The poet kills the liar

The moon is young and nubile still
cicadas all sing in chorus
the night is pure and so sublime
my perfect muse is porous

the whispering winds and willows conspire
a plan the stars concur
tonight the poet will kill the liar-
bury him under the silver fir

let quietly into the naval of hope
the dagger of truth be cast
be gentle as the moon, dear poet,
lest the night be left aghast

the elm, the birch and the mahogany lay still
as the horrible deed is done
for the poet's only weapon is the quill
and the liar is a friend of the sun.

Poetry, Politics and Poverty

Poetry, Politics and Poverty
Suraj Sharma

Let’s face it. Poetry today resembles the medieval art of alchemy. Not by the vice of being an exotic, esoteric practice reserved for a chosen intellectual elite but by the virtue of being one of the many arts nobody is interested in anymore. Poetry therefore, serves two purposes today, firstly as the benign indulgence for subversive minds who care not so much about the medium than they do about the message, especially when the message is their own; and secondly, as mild recreation for the mildly intrigued. Either way, it ends up on blogs, bulletin boards and so called “art-oriented” websites such as Deviantart.com where users believe that Poetry is now a “vocation” rather than an art.

Politically speaking, the condition is even worse, liberal democracy and its faithful sidekick – Capitalism, have done much to assign predefined roles for everyone including the poets. Their job is now to act as those delusional beings who entertain their counterparts by engaging in romantic discussions of revolutions which are never going to take place and the slow pace of country life afforded by a few people in this day and age. Poets, then, are little more than television sets who are very much a part of the very system that allows them to write and publish their anti-establishment views because that is the role it has assigned to them. Think about it, when was the last time a poet was censored/banned in your country?

Little wonder then, that the interest of the public-at-large has been slowly dwindling down when it comes to poetry, and deservedly so, it doesn’t achieve anything, so why bother?

Marx said capitalism is “nothing if not ductile”, and within this ductility lays its self-perpetuating elixir. Still, there are poets today who, unaware of this ductility, pour out their views in hopes of “expressing themselves”, this is a redundant exercise for their views are already informed by the world around them, so what they effectively end up doing is expressing the views of the system through them, instead of truly expressing themselves. What results is some sort of subliminal literary drivel, which nobody is really interested in, for it’s really not saying anything new. Hence the blame (if there could be any) for the lack of interest in poetry today, should fall squarely on the shoulders of so-called poets who write with honest intentions but end up polluting the mildly interested minds of amateurs. This is the reason why poetry is unable to “achieve” anything today because, as I once read somewhere, “if you keep on doing the same thing, you will get the same results”.

I’m not a leftist, neither am I a Marxist nor a Stalinist, but I believe that poetry is a profound tool that helps prevent stagnation and rigidity in a culture. This essay itself, I must proclaim, is a product of the very ductility I mentioned above. You must have downloaded it through Facebook or Google, it was written in Microsoft word, converted into a PDF by Adobe Acrobat reader and so on until it finally found its way to your computer. There is nothing wrong with capitalism or the ductility of it per se. What is wrong, however, is taking it all for granted. What is wrong, is the Kal-Ho-Na-Ho (Tomorrow may or may not come) attitude that seems to have caught our generation like a pandemic that inspires apathy and self-centeredness, because, believe it or not, there is going to be a tomorrow for the 40% below poverty line families in the world, and for those suffering from AIDS in Ethiopia, there is going to be a tomorrow, perhaps far more painful than today. So, poetry is obviously not the panacea that they need, it’s the catalyst that we need. We need to wake up from our hedonistic slumber and find that it’s high time we reinvented hedonism, and poetry- if anything- could serve as an alarm clock.

Mired in our naiveté, we have learned to relegate the truly profound means of social change to the backseat, disguising it as some kind of undesired ends. Have we forgotten the role played by poetry in the Russian and French revolutions, or how about the Struggle for Indian Independence? Almost every literate Bengali was writing something or the other at the time of the partition of Bengal in 1906. So the utility of poetry in times of political struggle is obvious, but what about other times?

The utility of poetry, in ordinary times, was explained by American Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky thus:

"I presume that the technology of poetry . . . evolved for specific uses: to hold things in memory, both within and beyond the individual life span; to achieve intensity and sensuous appeal; to express feelings rapidly and memorably. To share those feelings and ideas with companions, and also with the head and with those to come after us"

Essentially, therefore, poetry is a matter of evolution. Poets exist not because greeting card companies are running out of monkeys willing to work for bananas, poets exist because evolution is nothing if not the “naming of complex ideas”, and isn’t that exactly what Poets do? Plato banned poets from his utopian Republic because they concocted imagined worlds, yet one is forced to question: Isn’t Plato’s Republic based around an entirely imaginary word of “Ideas” or “Forms”? In this sense, Plato was a hypocrite. But we are on the verge committing the same mistake.

If the state of technological evolution of society could be measured by the kind of toys it makes, then surely, the level of cultural evolution could well be measured by its literature. Strangely enough though, we never bothered to ask ourselves the utility of toys, how then, do we have the temerity of asking ourselves the utility of Poetry? Utility is something that the evolution creates for us, not the other way around, we just go about seeking pleasure, not just any pleasure, but newer kinds of pleasure, for being so ahead in the evolutionary race has given us the curse of boredom, and hence if we’re not bored easily we’re not really human. I’m sure, J.L. Baird didn’t really wonder about the “utility” of television while he was inventing it, and who knew ARPANET would offer someday the kind of “utility” it offers today? Or look at it this way: who says “uselessness” is a vice? Utility is overrated. Let it not befool us into an immobile and decaying culture.

Ultimately, poetry is a tool that will help us evolve. Yes, it’s difficult to do something we hate but then, who said evolution was a painless process? To put it in terms of Gandhian philosophy: If I am to beat the crap out of my enemy, I must beat the crap out of myself first. So, if our enemy today is a mechanized, stagnant society, then all we have to do is quarrel with ourselves to show how wrong we truly are about ourselves.

The contemporary poet Adrienne Rich wrote:

“Poetry wrenches around our ideas about our lives . . . Poetry will always pick a quarrel with the found place, the refuge, the sanctuary . . . Even though the poet, a human being with many anxious fears, might want just to rest, acclimate, adjust, become naturalized, learn to write in a new landscape, a new language, poetry will go on harassing the poet until, and unless, it is driven away.”

But what is this “found place”, this “refuge”, this “sanctuary”? It is the now, the here. The idea is not to grow too comfortable in your environment, not to become too comfortable with yourself, for remember “pacifism is not something to hide behind”. So kids, do try this at home: pick a fight with yourself, see if what comes out is anything but poetry.

[Download A pdf version of this essay]

The battle against Existential Anxiety

The battle against Existential Anxiety.
Suraj Sharma.

It is not the fear of death that grips a thinking man and paralyzes his mind to the point where even the execution of routine tasks becomes painful and has a sense of profound meaninglessness attached to it. It is, in my opinion, the fear of life, that eats his soul alive. This fear, I believe, is ludicrous and absurd and has the potential of turning into a perpetual anxiety. This fear insinuates, in it’s attempts to convince the person, that the life he’s leading is meaningless and without purpose, what’s more, it suggests that even death is not going to be the end of this infinite injustice. His soul shivers at the thought of going through this random experience labeled “life” by the very people his mind considers to be “ignorant fools”. Although he reckons, that it won’t be “his” problem if he kills himself, even if he’s somehow reincarnated, the physical equations would change so substantially, that the burden would fall squarely and literally on someone else‘s shoulders. Someone who’s in a different situation. A different situation. A new start. Slowly and gradually, his vision (both of the future and of the past) narrows down until this new awakening remains as the only aperture open for hope. This is where he gets anxious. Existentially anxious, to be more precise.

Existential Anxiety is the fear of nothing itself and is therefore, the mark of lunacy. It is triggered by what Paul Tillich referred to as “The trauma of nonbeing.”. An oversimplification of which would be the very idea which, though vastly accepted in the annals of psychology (and in the common mindset), but is strongly refuted in this essay, is that it is simply, the fear of death. Another assumption that pops up in most debates about an existential crisis is that it mostly appears in cultures where one is not required to use most of his mental and physical energies to figure out ways to ensure his survival. Several people believe that a person suffering from existential dilemma has more often than not, lead a life of moral relativism or even nihilism. Others might argue that when looked at from a certain angle, existential anxiousness is just another manifestation of depression, which probably has it’s roots in the afflicted person’s childhood and/or a recent traumatic experience. These assumptions and generalizations, while not completely untrue, painted a bleak, semi-innocuous and incomplete picture of what the author believes to be “a man’s greatest enemy“.

It is therefore, that this essay was written, as a testament of personal experience and a record of judgments that the author arrived at after spending some time reflecting over his own condition (starkly similar to the condition at hand), the constructs that defined it, the situations that created it and the beliefs it instilled to finally arrive at a point in life where basic survival tactics and a thorough understanding of the problem enabled the author to leap out of this quagmire and to rid himself of the shapeless phantoms of meaningless thought. It must be understood, however, that the author is not a psychologist or even an amateur psycho-analyst. A mere dabbler in philosophy and psychology, the author is obviously in no position to assert the validity of his claims. Readers are advised to keep in mind the fact that this essay is what an endeavor in self analysis and some research has brought to fruition. It is not intended to be a serious whitepaper on psychology, nor does it pretend to be one. What it does attempt to be, however, is a manual of sorts for overcoming such anxiety and making sure that it never takes control of one’s life again. It was written in a hope to understand one’s own mind, and is published here with hopes of offering a helping hand to anyone who might consider his problems to be similar to that of the author.

The battle against existential anxiety, like all battles, begins with an understanding of the enemy. Where does anxiety come from? The answer to that is simple, it comes from an analytical mind. It begins with an over-curious attitude towards life. An attitude that seeks to destroy all precarious notions of understanding. This attitude however, generally and gradually fades away as life progresses (most children are more curious than most adults) for various reasons but we can witness the birth pangs of anxiety in the cases where this analytical mind is fed on rations of reason and logic to create the infantries of skeptical thought. When this skeptical thought intermingles with more curiosity (in a psychosomatic process that can perhaps be described as almost orgasmic) it upgrades itself from being the infantry of skeptical thought to the cavalry of false belief.

Judging only by personal experience, the author would say that this “up gradation” takes place somewhere between mid to late adolescence. The period where we often draft the constitutions of our lives. The role that social value systems play here is crucial and akin to the training nets employed to safeguard the life of amateur trapeze artists. It is not totally unfair, therefore, to say that this phenomenon is more common in cultures where the role of such social “nets” as religion and a strict moral codes has diminished over the years to make room for the pre-requisite confidence for evolutionary thoughts. However, nothing could be farther from truth than the assumption that societies with rigorously implemented morals and ethics, or social systems deeply rooted in religious beliefs are somehow invulnerable to these negative side-effects of a curious consciousness. Religion and morality may provide societies with check-nut like mechanisms to enable the masses to discern between order and chaos, but these are exactly the kind of contraptions that an analytical and curious mind seeks to reverse engineer.

In some cases, this stage is characterized by seemingly harmless tendencies that lean towards social rebellion. Teenagers often see themselves as exiled outcasts who are somehow above the norms of society. Upon finding no answers in the deconstructed ruins of religious philosophy, they bang about hither and thither like charged electrons in hopes of discharging themselves of the building storm of anxiety. At this point, most outcasts choose their false beliefs. Having completely destroyed the possibilities of accepting conventional false beliefs (e.g. religion, morality etc.) they venture out into newer arenas such as sexual deviance, self-infliction and narcotics etc.. The numbing down of sensory perceptions works out (for better or for worse) for the fortunate ones, but the truly analytical ones seek not to disengage from their senses nor engage them in forced beliefs and utter lies. They seek what they think is the truth, and end up being the loneliest of people in the universe. For junkies find other junkies, bisexuals, nymphomaniacs, zoophiles and pedophiles find release in fornicating with the “objects” of their desire, emotional “cutters” find interventionists to reinforce or reconstruct their false beliefs, but these ‘seekers of truth’ remain aloof, lonely.

Two things need to be said here. One, that these seekers can never be compared with nihilists, moral-relativists or hedonists, for they do believe that the ultimate truth exists somewhere and that it‘s not relative to anything, that it‘s the purest thing there is and hence the object of life. They believe it’s attainable, only that they’ve been unsuccessful in finding it so far. Two, what they don’t realize is that their loneliness is in fact, the last brick in the wall. Emile Durkheim said, "Man is the more vulnerable to self-destruction the more he is detached from any collectivity, that is to say, the more he lives as an egoist.". And egoists they are, so much so, that their ego fails to recognize itself, it’s garbed in innocent and idealistic convictions. This leads them to the point where it becomes impossible to discern between what’s true and what’s infinite. What they fail to realize is that the truth itself is the infinite, it can never be achieved, yet it’s right in front of their eyes and slipping between their fingers. But these sorry souls have already started having visions of looking at the world from the other end of the telescope and the only thing that remains infinite now, is their downward spiraling journey towards an ever absurd universe.

It is not death they fear now. They fear the very truth they sought because it‘s staring them in the face so they must run away from the very thing they‘re chasing. Such a condition, as one can notice, leads to an addiction to (trying to look beyond) moral paradoxes, which is much more worse than sexual deviance or drug abuse because it fails to define itself, yet defends itself with all the brevity that a human mind can conjure up. Chasing this recursive infinity can be daunting, especially when you’ve got nothing to believe in but the recursive infinity itself. The fine line between insanity and creativity starts to blur, allowing all the demons of a sickly mind to creep in. This is where moral-relativism and nihilism might actually enter the person’s mind. It cannot be ascertained with precision, whether a vast majority of victims accept nihilism or similar notions as the end of their journey or whether they try to take it apart as well, and frankly it doesn’t matter. Nihilism, once rooted deeply enough, is self perpetuating, taking it apart only reaffirms the non-beliefs it has to offer. One understands now, with painful accuracy, what Plato meant when he called religion a “noble lie” but can do nothing about it because, logic, reason, cynicism and skepticism all focus on the “lie“ and not on the “noble“ part of that aphorism. The welcoming committee for existential anxiety, ever ready to bombard everything that stands in the way of it’s esteemed guest. Including itself, if it has to.

A man suffering from anxiety will deconstruct every assumption of the physical world with such astute thought-play, as to convince himself that his anxiety is a controlling parasite which deems that it’s own existential perpetuation is far more important than the survival of it’s host. When it does happen, a man is forced to jump ship and abandon life itself. At this stage, visible signs of depression emerge from being dormant character nuisances to active physiological symptoms. Breathlessness, for one, was a major problem for the author. One feels acutely claustrophobic even in open spaces and the feeling of being hopelessly trapped obviously follows. In that position, the victim realizes that there’s nowhere to run, the war-horns have been blown into. Armies of doubt, ruthless, pragmatic and idealistic at the same time, threaten to devour all semblance of sanity. This is where one must not loose hope. Hope is everything.

In battling such panic attacks, the most common defensive measures often bleed into the beginnings of Obsessive Compulsive Disorders. But that’s quite unnecessary, it would be the logical equivalent of calling in elephants to chase away the mice. If one has enough hope, there is no need to induce changes in one’s character as means of self-affirmation. Resorting back to religion is also not necessary, but is highly recommended to those who do not have problem with it. Befool yourself into believing anything, that is the cure. It isn’t easy, especially for the smart ones, but it’s the only way out. “Once you stop believing in god, you can believe in anything”, goes the saying. One must invent one’s own god, if the readymade solutions invented and tested by generations past fail to measure up to one’s satisfaction. If we’re able to look beyond the mythos and the mysticism, one can find that religion does make us all saner for it defines the “good use” for madness (or what kind of madness might be considered as beneficial for the greater good) , thereby converting it into sanity.

But this definition needn’t come from religion. It can come from believing in anything but only by believing in it religiously. Western liberalism has failed in the past in this regard, giving the society of neo-conservationists a chance to rise in democratic regimes and push forward powerful myths such as nationalism and national chauvinism (not to mention, religion itself). Similarly, the Islamic world is torn between varied interpretations of it’s own beliefs, giving a chance to fundamentalists to try to coerce the timid into their strong beliefs even by using force. Mankind has yet to invent a healthier kind of nihilism and until then, religion can provide for a very efficient scaffolding like structure to give support to all other the myths we choose to believe in. In eastern cultures, people understand this. They do not ask for the literal proof of god’s existence because they know that religion is just a mythical tool supporting the grand illusion that is life. That is why eastern religions have survived brutal attacks from almost everyone else in the world. It is when these tools are seen not as tools to define the truth, but the truth itself that problems arise.

The battle against existential anxiety can be won. And fairly easily at that if one understands the nature of the affliction. The search for truth and meaning should begin and end inside one’s own head, for if it moves outside of the person, it tends to approach the dangerous realms of recursive infinity and the disorder therein. Irrespective of the tools that one employs, a strong belief in something can give ample courage and confidence to anyone who seeks to live a meaningful life. Not just belief but faith. Faith in one’s own self is the ultimate religion. People with faith will eventually come to be respected and loved and working out your own salvation can be much easier when one is respected and loved.

Traces of Misanthropy

Just because I’m boxing shadows
Doesn’t mean I don’t consider men worth fighting with,
Or fighting for, or dying for, or living with

I was never more misunderstood,
Never more cunningly condescended,
Never more humiliated or humbled or heartbroken

But since my lackluster love has failed you
Since my brazen blood is all white to you-
Injected with traces of misanthropy

I shall stay here no more, you can
Replace me with automatons,
Remember me by numbers

I forgive the viziers who have poisoned your mind,
But my queen, pray hark this shadow-boxer’s dying wail-
I only fought with darkness to enlighten my brethren.

Way of Chance

The hidden fermatas swelling under confiscated breaths
Heaving secret signs of serendipity soon
Shall all lie naked in their surrogate tongues,
When they sing through my gibberish and my muse jejune

And Nonchalance, How I envy thee!
And the Paris-green ennui of they unheeding retinue
And how those teenagerks and wannabe managerms
Wish they had the courage to be a little more like you

So they've enrolled in what I might call
"The benevolent indecision of an indifferent romance"
But I know its only just a crash-ing course
In the chorus of chaos and the chiding way of chance.

The time flies

Doom, to the dog of the goon, my friends,
Doom, to the death of the wise
Doom, to our efforts and amends,
Doom, to paradise!

Death, to the fog over moon, I said,
Death, to her innocent cries,
Death again, to the one who puts,
A death to our disguise.

Or our disguise to a death, I mean,
Or his confidential lies,
Or our lust for the color green,
Or the way the time flies.

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The games people play

And how I wonder, how I yearn
And how the movie stars burn
And how this magic taciturn
Keeps driving you a w a y

This is not confusion dear
It mustn’t be known for mustn’t we fear?
When the stadiums and auditoriums clear,
It’s the games people play

The rest is all up to you now
The universe ascends on you somehow
Asking: “to whom do you pledge your vow?”
What then shall you say?

This is how the plot twists
Your angry fistula and slit wrists
My angry fistula can beat your fists
Decide, fool! Yay or nay?

Better survive than sink or kneel
Better avoid the pain you can’t feel
Better is the adjective that makes people steal
Better is what you get when you play.

The loom of life

Now that the labyrinth has been made throughly numb,
all we have to do is follow
the malleability of ambition, risking of course,
the collapse of conviction

when we are on the edge push will come to shove
then we will find the abominable abyss we so dreaded
to be only an echo in the nightmare of history
inept and inconsistent with the waking propellants of desire

And those in the higher echelons shall beckon
And those in lower rungs shall be inspired
The trajectory of dreams will find congruence then,
And the threads of existence shall dance in the loom of life.

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Season's Greetings

Winter stumbles under the drunkard poet’s gratitude
The provenance of ten thousand trembling thoughts
Burning like the fireplace he can only dream of tonight

He’s smashed but the derelict has yet to disintegrate
Slouched, he thinks he’s aerodynamic for the gods who’re
Wondering if he’s hovering or merely levitating in delight

The threshold of pleasure retreating into the night
With promises of bitter strength injected at dawn-
Paracetamol greets him with the season's best

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Porn Star

Trashy porn star effortlessly slides
Around the well-oiled corners
Of my dirty mind

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In answer to her question

Your question will not make us wise
Some answers aren’t made for speech
But the truth is, eyes meet eyes
Souls find souls - there’s one for each

It’s not that the answer is any more clear-
Than the voices I hear - though they motivate
But who’s to debate over what fools hear?
And who may hear what fools debate?

You might be my long-sought twinkling star
Or maybe just a reminder of this romantic riot
You’ll be mine eventually- even if as a battle-scar
But for now, keep close and keep quiet.

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Autumn Migration

The flutter of autumn,
Birds in migratory excitement
Cedar twigs wave

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On Poetry

Poetry is for those with too much time,
To put aside
As remnants of our fleeting glory -
Words multiply and divide

But which word’s worth is more
Than the inscrutability of them all?
No, poetry is a mere amplification,
An exaggeration - however small

We are but an accursed lot
Us mathematicians of desire,
Though poetry gets us nowhere
But at least it gets us higher.

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Free

Que Sera Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The best things in life are free

To run away.

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The Oracle's Employee

When the fecund loafer said the world was not enough
That he could not outweigh the lies with truth - the heavier stuff,
Did you not feel the urge to peek inside his radical mind?
And repent for what you had was not what you had left behind

Supposing it was destiny that paved the path beset
With assumptions that we'll never meet - let's pretend we never met
Would you then, my queen, be able to derail from ways of quest?
To prove that you're destined to bend all proofs at your behest

As you revel in new beginnings pray hear my silent plea
Be dutiful and diligent as the Oracle's new employee
But be not swooned by the sword-wielders for they're not really men
Their swashbuckling isn't as virile as the swiftness of his pen.

Even Angels Speculate

Even angels speculate at the edge of reason
Within the twilight of a sovereign mind
Shivering at the sight of
Logical fallacies

Madness, they say, is simply a label
“thud” goes the voice in my head
Could it be that it’s just what I’ve learnt-
playing tricks on what I did not learn?


Silly me. I want,
The planet annihilated!
No misery then, would trespass our hearts,
Nor happiness but those cursed angels-

Will continue to speculate
On the edge of reason.

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Catherine's Typewriter

Catherine, the gymnast of type-written lore
Yes she knew her hyphen from her underscore
But words were fleeting, shivering and pleating
Between sentences she always felt they were cheating

Depressing plastic maniacal keys she depressed
Arresting her attention was the soul she addressed
For you see, Catherine’s typewriter was alive
It captivated her with it’s cacophonous drive

Then she met a friend through some wicked lemon fingers,
Who told her it was lust in the machine that lingers
But whether it devours the words that she reels
Depended on her telling the machine how she feels

On a windowless morning sometime in the future
Past stilted on the slate she had sewn with some suture
She realized her friend's conclusion wasn't ripe
For all the machine told her was to “type, writer, type”.

Unwinding with the tide

Fate spoke in palindromes
Of the language in which the blind
Found paradoxes, like petty thieves-
For the mathematically inclined

Paralyzed with parasites
I paraglided over fear
For fate seemed so far away
Yet future seemed so near

Uncertainties, they followed me
Unwinding with the tide
My spirit may have trusted me
If I could in it confide

Untrusting, as I grew weary
She came crooning by
Singing to me why it’s important
To learn to trust the lie.

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When The Pillars Blow

My feet lead me to the ebb
Of one silent, somber night
The crunch of trampled foliage, thus,
Reciprocated in my delight

Lilacs whispered, lyres sang
To the music that with me shivered
Huddling stars that cuddled darkness
Silent as my soul delivered

Out there somewhere I heard you shout,
“Qui vive!, Qui vive!, friend or foe?”
“A mere traveler”, I retorted,
“Friendly when the pillars blow”

Stalagmite

It’s not as if I’m moribund or chained to the ground
It’s not as if my pinions haven’t wrestled winds before
It’s just that I’m indebted to the soul I’ve in you found
Unabashedly unsubtle but yet delicate and demure

Psychologically, I am no rational expert
I barely ever make eye-contact with what’s true
Still when my mind wanders - my heart is all but inert
To the promised conclusions that the gods in us once drew

So let them know I’m on my way, let them hurriedly prepare
For exhaustion won’t mar victory as two bodies reunite,
Old ghosts are always welcome to where newer one’s don’t dare
To where I’m weighed down with a burgeoning stalagmite.

Gypsy Woman

Her face was a war-torn battlefield
Where I couldn’t tell the difference
Between the ushering cries of moles mounding up from flawed skin
Or the subdued sniffles of scars from the night before

I couldn’t tell the difference,
Between her areolas and irises
As they disappeared upwards, both folding between heavens
Oh! The battling eyelashes, shyly lashing me away

Clothed only in her shame
Now the lady sees the light!
She knows my name and beckons me
“Onwards”, “the hinterland awaits”

Another step as I move forward,
With a penchant to dream, perchance false,
Gypsy woman wriggles in ecstatic visions
I shudder at the very next thought of the very next sight

“Write!”, she said, “or writhe in agony”,
“as a cosmic loneliness descends upon you”
“from the clouds hanging low over these melancholy hills”
“as you spill desires over your expectations”

Crystal balls tingle my scrotum as it tightens
The fortune teller awakens the escapist dreamer in me
Onwards, to where destiny unites with fortune -
Ruined beyond repair, I’ve never been more resurgent.

I hope you're here to stay

When the tide is high and anomie spreads wide
Stranger your consoling thoughts then do abide,
By all my wishes born out of all those distant dreams
To put a face behind all my romantic schemes

When all your lovers and all your allies decry
For they can’t hold a candle to someone such as I,
Then stranger, your hopes for this dreamt-up fairy tale
Shall yield themselves to a passion which won’t ever fail

With that very passion I shall stumble through the odds
I’ve more than what it takes to steal you from the gods,
And stranger, you have more than all I’ll ever need
You’re the catalyst of fruition, you bring me up to speed

I’d rather stare at your face but I stare at blinding words
I think of talking to you when I’m entertaining turds,
I miss you most at twilight as the moon smiles at the sun
Sadly enough, stranger, that’s when I miss having a gun

I debate with what’s possible, I argue with this fate
Though time enfeebles greatly yet it does not irate,
For thoughts of you surround me when the truest of friends leave,
Then I roll my cuffs to find another trick up my sleeve

I hope you sink lower than the depths of childish rhyme
I’m a prisoner of poetry, my words describe my crime,
Stranger you’re the talisman that shoos grey clouds away
You’re the sunshine of my heart and I hope you’re here to stay.

Automatic came home

Read another sign on my forehead,
Smell another sigh escaping

Force a twitter of a dream unpacked,
Un-plucked unintentionally

Automatic came home tonight,
Forgive and it was all a bit too foregone,

Suede skies pressed against the moonlit gradients
of mysteries - unfolding one at a time

Automatic came home tonight-
To a semi-automatic universe.

Everything was tattooed

Everything was tattooed on my taboo skin,
Ghosts from outside, ghosts within
Ghosts of color - paled, impaled
Ravishing grotesqueness, unleashed when veiled

Everything was tattooed with needles grinding-
Muscle and bone but never finding
No crimson shores to fill my pails
With rising crags and falling dales

Everything was tattooed as everything must
Be it colored with memory or rendered on dust
Everything must be tattooed or else-
Let’s all just shrink to be lonely cells.

Moonlight General Store

Like the sodomite's sneezing farts
Our septic and susurating hearts
Should stop this madness fore it starts
Our soapbox derby racing carts

Like those nights by moonlight general store,
Ablaze in miscellaneous galore,
These friendly mysteries so impure,
Bring neither frienship nor it's cure

Yet some columns do still resonate
Can't will our wills to love to hate
As we're prepared by this debate
Of Debunking love, debugging fate

All my evaporating, smoking loans,
Nightly whispers or daily moans
Like Replicating rondures in the rones
Dreams are dreams and stones are stones.

This Is Your Captain Speaking

Running low on inspiration these days, so going to push some of my favorite poetry (all written by fellow poets and friends) through this blog hoping that the occasional stumbler enjoys it.

This Is Your Captain Speaking / by Sarku
(All rights reserved with the author, published with permission)

From far off over the porcelain wing

I see another midnight atmospheric sojourner.

The blinking eyelights of both steel birds wink across the blank air between them;

Empty miles leap between us, I and some unknown compatriot borne aloft in that other dreaming sky-barque.

Gold geometries of noctilucent netting spangle across the distant lightless prairie floor

(We sojourn in the dark subterranean kingdoms of the satrap of the preterite dead,

Where the whisper of cabin pressure is the only utterance)

Just beyond the arc of vision there are stars, a chorus of pinbright crystal distants, muy tranquilo.

Below now, I note, the voidfloor with its jellyfish townglowings has fallen away;

Only a rural will-o'-the-wisp suggests the half-real planet below.

A voice breaks into the shadowed gallery of my steel bird;

An intercom interloper, he is a novitiate in night musings (though a hierophant of chill levers and dials)

He does not know the solemn vigil he trespasses on

(As the vulture, a little padre, black canon of the plains does not know the dream of repose that he plucks apart;

As the foolish Greek does not know the dream of Sebak he ripples with his hand at the still jade pond beyond Sais)

Nor should he, indeed.

What is such an aeronaut's place in the twilit canyons and blue kivas of dreams?

Let him keep his eyes on the skyroads;

For my part I rove astral-bodied-

The night is vast, broad, and empty as sable.

Bound and Tagged

I've been specifically asked by a fellow blogger to answer the following set of arbitrary questions. Writing about my personal shit is an exercise I don't usually indulge in on the internet, but I guess this calls for an exception. So here goes:

1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it.

Right Knee. Looks like the map of Italy. Broke a bathroom window at my grandparents place while dancing on the window frame (go, figure). Quite old though, I would've named it after Peter Parker but it's hardly even visible anymore.

And I think stretch-marks are a total turn off.


2. What is on the walls in your room?

Final Fantasy X poster. This one in particular (sans the DVD titling, of course).

Taking it off and replacing it with something mature has been a well procrastinated task for about a year now.


3. What does your phone look like?

Black. Bleak. Crass. Like soviet technology is making a comeback through it.


4. What music do you listen to?

I've been asking myself the same question for quite some time now. The closer I get to the answer, the longer the answer gets. But since I must say something, here's a somewhat statistically correct (yet very very concise) list: Scandinavian Nu-Jazz, Acid Jazz, Alt-Country, Avant-Garde American Folk, Acoustic, Shoegazer, Underground Hip hop, UK Garage, Belgian Punk, Everything Rock and Post Rock/Indie, Downtempo/Ambient/Trip-Hop, World music...this is not a pretentious list of eclectic genres, this is as close an anti-genre statement as I can make without arousing offense.


5. What is your current desktop picture?
The following one on this PC. Click to enlarge.



6. What do you want more than anything right now?
Right now? erm. A cigarette!
A good job would be nice though.


7. Do you believe in gay marriage?
Allowing same-sex couples to screw legally is perfectly alright as long as they don't make another religion (or anything that resembles one) out of it.


8. Are your parents still together?
Yes. And god bless them.


9. What are you listening to?
Song: Nobody knows the trouble I've seen
Singer: James Morrison
Album: James Morrison: Gospel Collection Volume Two

Though my ears want some Geeta Dutt-esque bollywood shit now.


10. Do you get scared of the dark?
No. I like the dark. It presents more unrevealed opportunities .
But I do have a little (sporadically occurring) phobia of closing my eyes in the shower which lasts a few days whenever I have a nightmare.

11. The last person to make you cry?
The unenlightened self ;)


12. What kind of hair/eye type do you like on the opposite sex?
Err.. on the head?
Blonde and long. Simple.
If not blonde, maybe black but has to be long (>shoulder length).
Not that it really matters though.

13. Do you like pain killers?
Usually avoid popping pills. Uh.. which pain killers are you talking about?


14. Are you too shy to ask someone out?
Depends on who I'm asking out. And whether I'm having a good/bad hair day.


15. Favourite pizza topping?
Ice-Cream.


16. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?
Pizza with Ice-Cream topping.

Thank you Ishita, that afforded me some positive introspection. I tag the first person who comments (other than Ishita, of course).

you're crazy too!

two feet without the ground and their footprints in the air,
to feel the fear around and to feed hope to despair,
sins we've all committed involve our hubris and our grit,
since all of our resolve is often termed as all our shit

to break the chain of our morose we're hung with hope alive
allay this madness with our prose and poems is what we strive
but madness travels with our words and ideas are it's crew
you've read this crazy bastard's poem and now you're crazy too!



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Oh Tarantula!

Orphaned by what I’ve become
Fragmented splinters of star-studded plateaus
Bejeweled yet ever bewildered, I am not becoming-
The me I’ve dreamt and I’m not coming home

What method prevails in your connive?
Oh tarantula! How you can decide,
Yet never get tangled in the net you weave,
Deceivingly invisible and visibly deceiving

Pray fortune favors your threaded fortress,
Your mattresses hanging mid-air for food
Shrewdly awaiting an unfortunate evening catch-
You try your best to inspire me

For what it’s worth I’ve learnt nothing so far,
For the webs I weave intend to devour me
For you’re no ordinary arachnid - oh tarantula!
For I’m no descendant of no Scottish king.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Undiscovered

Down in the valley of long lost days
He still swims alone with the hormone waves
Laminated in ecstasy, an oceanic glaze
Splicing up stories whetting his craze

The words etched on the typewriter keys
Have all but dissolved in his melancholy seas
He types and he types for the one he must please
The gibberish is absolvable but the hurt won't decrease

Rustic phrases parsed with asymmetric vision
Insensitive jabs at the symmetry of reason
His words, like raged prisoners out of prison
Missionaries set forth to find him a mission

Honestly, it's not the flair that he lacks
His words, perhaps like hidden jewels in the cracks
Are peering out in hopes of a time to relax
They're undiscovered yet but on discovery's tracks



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Recursion

Two mirrors perplexed,
Gaping into one another-
Fixated, as if sedated,
wondering where reality-
shrank to accommodate,
their perception of truth

Closer, then as they approached-
Chasing the insufficiency of explanation
To realize, that to kill the recursion,
They had to lay, side by side
With nothing in between,
Not even nothing.



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Tomorrow

Dear miserable protagonist,
Future has sketched a suspect drawing
It resembles you the most when
You reflect upon it

Yesterday you were born at the ocean
Resolving to sink now, swim later
You tasted its ebb and the neutral flow
Curious, as to what the tide may bring in

Delayed sojourner, latent mourner,
No heraldic laurels are ever bestowed
To those who question the authority of time
Solace for us is just in the battle

May your maiden voyage of a thousand years
Never find an anchor smooching the breeze
Blinded by digital watches, may us all then believe
That future follows what tomorrow brings today.



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When She Flies

"reason is a whore", she said
as faith took a leap in her
holding back all explanations
she jumped to fly
spiraling upwards and propelled hopefully
muting all of logic

the azure sky turned upside down
the pallid dust on the ground annoyed
seagulls when they sang out loud, indiscriminate
incandescent, my heart then heard
the gleeful melee and chirp within,
allowing reconciliation.

come on, Pynchon

there was a booming across the sky
that screwed metal into clouds
with percolating light hammering on our eardrums
with the thrust and torque of a thousand angry gods

come on, Pynchon, let's run out of town
let's become refugees in a distant land
where we'll take shelter from this abrasive rainfall
under leaky sheets of tarpaulin, we'll sip some free tea
as we watch the sunset from this side of a barb-wired horizon

come on, Pynchon, before it's too late
evacuate! evacuate!


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The guilded house of Samarkand

We entered the cinema hall
At three in the night
All the halls were empty
Every odd light on

We came upon a door
That hid jeering voices
He must've knocked octillion times
Poetry was the password

The curtains trapped the conspiracy
A gramophone hushed the silence
Smoke seductively rose from cigars half lit,
Half unlit, the theater sparkled with secrecy

Alcohol, ammunition patrolled around
Like waitresses with naked intentions,
Making each man in the room giggle-
Over the inanity of the next

They called me “the mending bug”
For I could bend their storms
Or fold them into typhoons
Polluting all their plans

I made my request then,
When badly-drawn weapons floated around my nose
“let my friend leave”, I said,
It made more sense than insanity

Head-honchos all spoke amongst
Elders of the protocol.
They agreed to release my friend
From the gilded house of Samarkand.



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Raindrops

The monsoon winds whispered their urgency.
Thunderous and yelling nimbi with their rhetorical exaggeration
Beckoned, nay, urged for the saxophone lullaby,
we played as if just to delay the deluge.

Then the very first droplet on my moisture forsaken wrist,
asked me when i planned to come back home,
almost taunting and in belittling phrases not nearly as moist,
as the memories it's question brought.

That night gods wept through cotton pajamas,
as they committed their mnemonics to our dreams
aware, that the morning shall snatch from us humans,
all lack of control away.

We were only spreading caution over monsoon winds
for it was not the wrath of bed-wetting gods we wanted to incur
But we underestimated the fragility of monsoon dreams
for ashes to ashes and shit to shit, they all fall down,

Just like raindrops.



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The pious, the living

All that destruction,
That panicking around
Nothing have you glorified
But death

Sexy jihad aroused by pretty politics
Resurrected by the latent powers of hate
For the pious, the living-
Are nothing but a suicide apparatus

Violence manufacturers we beseech thee,
In the name of Allah, the almighty,
Never kill some of us again,
But please try to kill us all at once.



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Untitled

It’s nothing, I think,
You’ll fade away
Not before long, I’m certain,
It’ll all be gray

I have no idea, or maybe I’ve forgotten
What gray looks like,
What sweet suffering it envelops
But I guess, I’ll be okay

It’s such a shame,
That everybody will be everybody, again
I’ll miss you, sure
But I’ll invent explanations

We can feed regrets to the future,
We can tumble blindly
We can survive through it all,
It’s just the romance that’s dead

Look at everything we’ve learnt through this,
Torrid chemistry of neurological protein sequences,
Isn’t that all love is?
Isn’t it as complicated as it gets?

So goodbye, sweet dream, goodnight and sweet dreams,
I’ve got leaping sheep to count,
I’ve got rhapsodies to illustrate with your memories,
I’m sure you’re busy as well.



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A hammered heart

A hammered heart is the perfect percussionist,
Beating to the rhythm of rhyming allusions
Illuminated illusions-
Thoughts of her

The warmest may passes in a motion blur,
A mirage stirred by my hopeful breathing,
An impatient sun is seething,
Resolutions burning proud

I feel the music is a bit too loud
Trapping hope alive
The jazz and the jive
All dying a bit too slowly

Lying to a love laying lowly
Sinking as I speak
With all feathers and beak
Droning as I’m drowning down



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Ode To Linux

Oh mighty penguin - copied to the left,
I'd embrace and kiss your tender insides,
Oh but not the average Joe.

Joe likes to peer out his windows,
Or peer into an acceptable predicament
Nevertheless, you're not his compromise

Fedora shaped shell painted by a gnome,
Feeding a delectable kernel - invisible yet omnipresent,
I feel I need taste buds on my eyes

Oh and then you're absolutely free!
Freedom redefined.
Free as in "free beer"!



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