Complacency is the pregnant bitch you go to bed with,
Fondling her insured curves and stroking her financially- independent fur,
it is the phlegm our minds want to spit out but our tongues suck
complacency, is but a mephistophelian mercenary chewing mercury
corruption's cousin and im/maturity's rapist,
it hides behind words and sleeps under sarcasm
lest we forget its best friend, power,
absolute power corrupts with relative complacency
Complacency, both the cause and effect of formality
Breeds little hypocrite mutant puppies who can tweet
From within warm laps and hot laptops, but remember,
this kind of complacency has consequences
(other than veterinary)
On Complacency
Thermocol Marshmallow
1.
Us, cogs in the machine
digging their own grooves for it is them we shall later surf ,
like when they went behind enemy lines and called it their home turf
2.
Shall I project a friend on this lynch-mob?
This betraying fog that clears before lunch and arrives after dinner,
tonight we cast the sin away and haul aboard the sinner
3.
A government failing to sensitize, must hypnotize irresponsibly,
A love that is older than your civilization has seen this war before
governments against loving cogs thinking rotation settles the score.
static electricity
She wants in on it, but I'm too secretive,
My jarring eccentricities and bending-over-backwards
Flip her only love as it
flops to inform
again
That I'm too dynamic for this static electricity
I'm an amoral agent in an asexual abattoir, sipping airs
slipstreamed into existence to infiltrate and debunk
I'm here to slam balls across nets and scare
walls to their death with just my stares,
and my breath.
So stay, and you shall be avenged revered twilight
from my little white capsule drenched in an incandescent
fluorescence , i write, (knowing this promise is) powered by paradoxes
from this focal-point of indifference with its calm, apathetic shores
I see the distance, know the way, like the front of my hand
I shall go that way, and understand the powers of
prayers parading as poems pushing pragmatism under
precocious pretexts
which prove nothing but possibly,
are the pinnacle of the paradigm.
Pass
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.
Pass - by Akshit Harsh
(All rights reserved with the author, published with permission)
The silence was deafening, the breeze was static
Dark was the light, so bright, oh so bright!
Nothing is all I have got,
Happiness that makes me cry.
Behind the masquerade lies a man, guilty, foul,
but nothing is deeper than his soul
Look inside me, that's all i ask,
love me or hate me, it'll all just pass
As i walk along the path of life,
i remember those who gave up half way
My eyes are wet, me steps; sedate,
i walk this path step-by-step.
Tumbling, mumbling truth, asking myself
why am I the one who's left.
Into a reverie i drown, resurrected by my own
sorrows, my own frown.
Back to life, breathe, feel, see, hear,
its all gonna pass, its all gonna pass.
A Hunger Artist offers food for thought
 |
| "While Kafka's story came as a jolt to those who pretended to be moral. The so called civil society's antics come off as insincere" |
One spectacularly clear and direct example is his story "A Hunger Artist". Surely for the masses, the hunger artist's demonstration could not be a means to witness first hand the effects of extreme hunger on a male body. Harder still, is to accept the notion that the social purpose of his performance was to ease social anger by drawing attention to a distraction/nuisance. Just like Sh. Ramdev and Sh. Hazare, the hunger artist had no real reason to abstain from whatever gastronomical delights and proclivities he had grown accustomed to "off the stage", but he fasted because that was his "art".
While Kafka's story came as a jolt to those who pretended to be moral. The so called civil society's antics come off as insincere attempts at power-mongering at best and fascist ploys to go back to the Vedic period at worst.
The Nation needs perhaps a Fasting Act of some sort to preserve the sanctity of such tools involving self-inflicted denial of basic rights which the civil society historically used only when they believed in their cause.
the narrative at the door
Were we playing a game that once hung in the balance and now hangs
in silence as it draws to a finish and ends to diminish all the
trappings of desire and the tease that this fire once flared in our
hearts and our hearths now is branded a disease of a youth waning, please
just tell me, was it all a game?
Were we only keeping scores of our ignorance as it soared with a passion
for the boring and the asinine conjectures of a roaring late adolescence
when everything made more sense than it should have, retrospectively
but actively, we plotted as we jotted all the diktats of realities
of suburban localities where the cutting edge bleeds into the very mouth it feeds
while the hands that once rocked the cradle now folded in a prayer
are pleading for the biting to just stop, and the writing to just
drop the emotional-baggage on the floor and leave
the narrative at the door.
disaster porn
On top of the mountain when I blew my brains out into an atonal horn,
I was lost in childish rhymes, esoteric spam and disaster porn,
While the bandwidth-deprived savages plotted, without glory, lost, lovelorn
I merely meant to improvise and climax but never forewarn.
The Mystery of Godliness
Following are excerpts from the poem The Mystery of Godliness by Money-Coutts, Francis Burdett Thomas, 5th Lord Latimer (1852-1923), these remain some of my favorite words ever to appear in verse.
Who stamped us with the minting die
Of this unconquerable need
To know the unknown Deity
And name the nameless in a creed?
Whence comes our instinct, that behind
The flimsy furniture of sense
Inheres the undiscovered Mind
From which the world had emanence?
(p. 3)
And hearts responsive to the sound
Insidious, of persuasive sin,
Must carry, like the garden-ground,
A welcome for what grows therein.
Had Eve possessed a soul like sand,
Without a taint of aught decayed,
Unfructifiable as land
Whereon no herbs nor forests fade,
Then her Betrayer would have sought
An acquiescent ear in vain,
And all his careful tillage wrought
No germination of the grain.
Whence came that weed-receptive soil
That grants the tare such easy root,
And grows, for bread and wine and oil,
The blighted grain and cankered fruit?
(pp. 40-2)
When by the wind of Thought is stirred
Obscure Religion, throned in mist,
"She has not said her final word"
Declares the staunch apologist.
Is it not final, then,--her creed? . . . .
Whatever conflict,--trans- or con-
Substantiation,--supersede
Homo- or homoi-ousion,
(p. 52)
But thought that strives to reunite
In polished facets of the mind
The broken colours of the light
Baffled in mists of human kind;
Or weaves with reasonable hands,
Into a strong enduring chain
Of texture, all the separate strands
Of all the knowledge men attain.
(p. 99)
Sow not emotion; 'tis a weed
That grows in hedge-rows; every fool
Fancies his own emotions breed
The right to teach, the right to rule.
Sow not religion; 'tis a flower
That robs the sunshine of its hue,
To deck its own peculiar bower
With regal red and saintly blue.
But rare Imagination, caught
Like seed-down from the breezes, sow
In the world's garden; there is nought
Except this balsam for her woe.
(pp. 100-1)
Indian Ayatollah?
In 1999, Osama Bin Laden, and Ayman al-Zawahiri organized a press conference at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan to declare that USA and India were their biggest enemies. Reassured that the recent victory over Russia was a direct result of the assistance it rendered to the Taliban, the United States ignored this threat and paid for this mistake with the loss it suffered in 9/11.
Praveen Swami needs to be reminded firstly, that the violent fervor of the fanatic's mind does not make decisions based on the statistical leanings of economic or geo-strategic data. After all, the fact that Osama was a millionaire himself should wipe out every notion of the idea that an increase in per-capita income necessarily means fundamentalist threat is mitigated.
Secondly, to equate the fundamentalist with the religious is a grave error not only unworthy of an accomplished writer like Swami but also carries with it a whiff of fundamentalism of an anti-religious kind. Swami should note that "god's armies" are doing more good in the world (as missionary charities etc.) than bad and should chose his words accordingly.
Needless glorification of a below-par writer
Praveen Swami seems to be living in a distant fictional future which not only is entirely theoretical, but also extremely fascist for denying its inhabitants the fundamental right to believe and to live according to those beliefs. If how public money is spent or punishment meted out in a democratic country is tied up inherently with religion and culture, then any attempts at engineering social change by assuaging the masses to give up their ontological theories (which are as epistemologically valid as any other) instead of improving those political and juridical setups in a truly secular way (i.e. without the use of mind-control propaganda that tries to sway the public into either side of the faith/disbelief debate) smacks of nothing but totalitarian designs.
It would behove Swami to recognize that there are two kinds of secularism and the theoretical and dated definition that he ascribes to is not at all conducive to peace and progress, Instead what is needed is a vision that sees reality not through the theoretical lens but as it really is. Freedom of religion, not freedom from religion is how we Indians define secularism which is a part of our culture and heritage. This newfangled hard-line opposition to theism however, is ill-informed and ill-willed.
As for Rushdie, is his opinion on anything really worth incurring the hurt and heartburn of thousands (even lakhs) of Muslims? and Meera Nanda has already been criticized so much for her hatred of religion, that the article paints a biased picture of her career as a scholar by not mentioning the reactions her so called theories have evoked.
It would behove Swami to recognize that there are two kinds of secularism and the theoretical and dated definition that he ascribes to is not at all conducive to peace and progress, Instead what is needed is a vision that sees reality not through the theoretical lens but as it really is. Freedom of religion, not freedom from religion is how we Indians define secularism which is a part of our culture and heritage. This newfangled hard-line opposition to theism however, is ill-informed and ill-willed.
As for Rushdie, is his opinion on anything really worth incurring the hurt and heartburn of thousands (even lakhs) of Muslims? and Meera Nanda has already been criticized so much for her hatred of religion, that the article paints a biased picture of her career as a scholar by not mentioning the reactions her so called theories have evoked.
Intestines
When the artist becomes a teacher he begins to yearn
for another youth to teach and corrupt,
To instruct, for he thinks of himself as someone
who was anointed by the powers of the will to destruct
what he thinks is false, he thinks he's got the balls and the gall
to appall all those with twice the intestines
and half the guts.
In Circles
Raw - like the smell of boiling potatoes mashed to the pressure cooker's whistling symphony - i have hopped many rooftops, searching god only knows what but finding, the distant din of a marriage orchestra playing in perfect sync with the whimsical notations of a passing truck toting its horns.
The autumn winds - pierced by the lustful twinkling of the market lights along the horizon - carry with them an aeroplane, paying no mind to the clandestine match between illuminations above and below judged by the tip of its blinking tail.
Inanimate objects come alive through the twilight's feather-touch, the satellite receivers talk and the breathing pipes of overhead tanks listen, as i, transfixed, eavesdrop on their geometric gossip going round in circles.
The autumn winds - pierced by the lustful twinkling of the market lights along the horizon - carry with them an aeroplane, paying no mind to the clandestine match between illuminations above and below judged by the tip of its blinking tail.
Inanimate objects come alive through the twilight's feather-touch, the satellite receivers talk and the breathing pipes of overhead tanks listen, as i, transfixed, eavesdrop on their geometric gossip going round in circles.
Chaos Holds Us
The flamboyance of a frequently flying society
Discredits my regard for their notoriety
And blesses me with a sense of perpetual anxiety -
Of a peculiarly perplexing variety
I shall not feed off of their avarice
I might as well hunt my own discordant vice
And when I do find it, oh it shall be nice!
To give headache to aspirin and trap to the mice
The purveyor of all that’s possible and pure
Informed me that King-Kong had died from the cure
And all that disorder could never restore-
The pride of the prophet disguised as a whore
Eris herself did foretell this fable,
Baphomet resonated from her perch on the gable,
Threatening to pull the plug and disable-
Everything that relied for it’s life on a cable
It’s not that esoteric if you’re that erudite
Chaos holds us together so believe what you might
It paints a utopia in grey, black and white-
Where all that darkness renders, it surrenders to light.
Discredits my regard for their notoriety
And blesses me with a sense of perpetual anxiety -
Of a peculiarly perplexing variety
I shall not feed off of their avarice
I might as well hunt my own discordant vice
And when I do find it, oh it shall be nice!
To give headache to aspirin and trap to the mice
The purveyor of all that’s possible and pure
Informed me that King-Kong had died from the cure
And all that disorder could never restore-
The pride of the prophet disguised as a whore
Eris herself did foretell this fable,
Baphomet resonated from her perch on the gable,
Threatening to pull the plug and disable-
Everything that relied for it’s life on a cable
It’s not that esoteric if you’re that erudite
Chaos holds us together so believe what you might
It paints a utopia in grey, black and white-
Where all that darkness renders, it surrenders to light.
A (micro) Refutation of "Practical" Metaphysics
If we call metaphysics the discipline … that purports to define the basic structure of the world, then empirical metaphysics is what the controversies over agencies lead to since they ceaselessly populate the world with new drives and, as ceaselessly, contest the existence of others. The question then becomes how to explore the actors’ own metaphysics. - Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour takes it upon himself to suture the fractured and fragmented discourses on Ontology and Metaphysics by resorting to relativism to create what he calls a “practical metaphysics”.
Of course, by “practical” he means “plural”.
The question is this: even if a plural metaphysics as enunciated by Bruno is stable enough to theoretically examine all phenomenon and express it as a function of a most clearly crafted Ontology, will such a relativist theory of reality be able to survive the transition into Praxis? In other words, will my ability to gauge and measure the ontological weight of someone’s claim not break down my own subsequent attempts to affirm or deny the causal contingencies arising out of me being weighed down by the said ontological weight? Put simply, the first step in the exploration of the personal metaphysics of an actor is pretty much always a rejection and denial of the logic and rhetoric structuring the metaphysics of all the other actors in the network. Verily, the very possibility of a metaphysics arises out of the possibility of the metaphysics.
In such a situation, I presume, one will have to forgo one’s commitment to any relativism that is equally and evenly distributed over causality and choose to assemble a single ontology from the multitude of varying and contradictory metaphysical claims of other actors in the network.
However, rationality forces us to conclude that in a finite network ontological patterns will develop within all the local mediators preventing a state where any kind of near-absolute relativism (necessary for any pluralistic idea of metaphysics) may gestate. Latour, therefore, has given birth to a baby that’s stillborn if held upside-down but comes alive as soon as you turn it around and ask : “can metaphysics save relativism”?
A traversal of an actor's own metaphysics then is not much different than the traversal of his own politics. In-fact, such hollow multitudism will only thrive until the actor realizes that by short-circuiting metaphysics with pragmatism, he has all but extinguished both. All that remains thereafter, is to consolidate the (remaining) relativism for the sake of pragmatism and since democracy is the obvious tool-of-choice for such tasks, we can remain sure that one of the last functions it will perform as a human tool is the consolidation and reduction of empirical, metaphysical relativism, thereby giving birth to either a compressed relativism or perhaps even a pragmatic absolutism.
Now can you smell the totalitarian disaster that awaits us at the other end of pragmatic metaphysics?
A traversal of an actor's own metaphysics then is not much different than the traversal of his own politics. In-fact, such hollow multitudism will only thrive until the actor realizes that by short-circuiting metaphysics with pragmatism, he has all but extinguished both. All that remains thereafter, is to consolidate the (remaining) relativism for the sake of pragmatism and since democracy is the obvious tool-of-choice for such tasks, we can remain sure that one of the last functions it will perform as a human tool is the consolidation and reduction of empirical, metaphysical relativism, thereby giving birth to either a compressed relativism or perhaps even a pragmatic absolutism.
Now can you smell the totalitarian disaster that awaits us at the other end of pragmatic metaphysics?
Sniffin' Shoes
Yes, yes sir you surely snore and are imperfect and impure
But since you're called family sure, i love you, you brazen fure
Sometimes you stick out like a sore, Sight or smell or a kinaesthetic roar
But because blood binds before it blinds
I could do with less no more
I'm sniffin' shoes in search of a cure, you're high on inhalant abuse's lure
The side-effects of breathing have us shivering on uncertainty's door
Yes, I know I've been cruel before, but so have you and so much more!
But because blood begs for balance
The past is just mouthwash mumblecore
So on my forklift-funeral day, please bury me in the hole we bore
Beneath the tiny rivulet in the backyard of the house of the kings of lore
And like a treasure there let me rot, or like wine let me mature
Allow me to live in your memories and I promise to return for sure.
But since you're called family sure, i love you, you brazen fure
Sometimes you stick out like a sore, Sight or smell or a kinaesthetic roar
But because blood binds before it blinds
I could do with less no more
I'm sniffin' shoes in search of a cure, you're high on inhalant abuse's lure
The side-effects of breathing have us shivering on uncertainty's door
Yes, I know I've been cruel before, but so have you and so much more!
But because blood begs for balance
The past is just mouthwash mumblecore
So on my forklift-funeral day, please bury me in the hole we bore
Beneath the tiny rivulet in the backyard of the house of the kings of lore
And like a treasure there let me rot, or like wine let me mature
Allow me to live in your memories and I promise to return for sure.
Wikileaks didn't start the fire!
It can be credibly argued that the simmering discontent in Tunisia exploded in public anger when WikiLeaks published the cables on the U.S. ambassador's assessment of corruption by President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. The Tunisian uprising, then, was triggered by the WikiLeaks revelations, and fanned by the Internet.
My Response:
Its almost an insult of the Tunisian people and their revolt to say that they did it because a website (about which a handful of them knew) told them to. Wikileaks was one of the many factors that justified the revolt in the eyes of an Assange-worshipping media, but to say that it started the whole uprising is to make a dent in the causality of history.
It is highly improbable that the Tunisian uprisings were "triggered by the Wikileaks revelations" firstly because these leaks were hardly revelations for a public being ruled over by a corrupt dictator for over 24 years. That there was already a "simmering discontent" nullifies any possibility of Wikileaks being a cause for the uprising. Secondly, no country on the brink of revolt needs a Wikileaks to find out the right muhurat to end the lethal combination of poverty, unemployment and political repression affecting the masses for more than two decades. Wikileaks just happened to coincide very beautifully with discontent which was about to boil over anyway.
It is highly improbable that the Tunisian uprisings were "triggered by the Wikileaks revelations" firstly because these leaks were hardly revelations for a public being ruled over by a corrupt dictator for over 24 years. That there was already a "simmering discontent" nullifies any possibility of Wikileaks being a cause for the uprising. Secondly, no country on the brink of revolt needs a Wikileaks to find out the right muhurat to end the lethal combination of poverty, unemployment and political repression affecting the masses for more than two decades. Wikileaks just happened to coincide very beautifully with discontent which was about to boil over anyway.
In Defence of Cerebral Liberalism
Parts of the keynote address delivered by Lord Anthony Lester at the 17th Commonwealth Law Conference in Hyderabad earlier this month resonate strongly with the call for "muscular liberalism" given by the British PM a day earlier and seem quite insensitive to the cause for concerted tolerance which has propelled the cultural narrative of India this far into its history.
Lord Lester's opinions on the decadent and primitive nature of Indian Penal Code struck me as only partially right to the extent of his legal observation that the "IPC was enacted to suit British needs". However, his assertion that section 295-A of the IPC was spreading hatred and that it was against the spirit of free-speech seemed to me not only odd but grossly misinformed. For the following reasons:
1. Currently, Judicial decisions under this section tend to punish undertakings of "deliberate and malicious intention" towards religions or religious sentiments of people. If, however, our lawmakers decide to jump on the bandwagon of reckless liberalism and make amends to this part of IPC -- so that it becomes difficult to punish such acts -- it would clearly tantamount to a state of cultural lawlessness for the state will no longer be able to protect the dignity of its believing masses. While in an ideal regime of free-speech raising offence (regardless of context) can not be seen as a crime, raising religious offence is just as much a crime as mental harassment (and for roughly the same reasons too).
Moreover, attempts to ignore all offence raised by the letting-loose of free-speech standards will require parallel amendments in the law of contempt of court, and that will only mark the beginning of overhauling the whole legal framework under the constitution and ultimately reveal deep-seeded hypocrisies. A small but perfectly fitting example is the recent culling of the "I hate Ambedkar" page by Facebook.
2. Freedom of Religion, as guaranteed by our constitution, inherently contains a duty on every citizen to refrain from insulting the religious sentiments of others, there is however, a very human limit to how much the tolerant will tolerate the intolerant (i.e. those who do not perform this constitutional duty), Section 295-A makes sure that our civilization steers clear of indecision and confusion when faced with such a paradox of tolerance. Subsequent Judicial decisions upholding the need to be crystal clear about the secular nature of Indian multiculturalism have justified the use of Section 295-A as an effective legal tool.
3. It must be noted, also, that this section of IPC does not punish a person for mere criticism of religion or religious practices, rather it is the "wanton vilification or attacks upon the religion of any particular group or class or upon the founders and prophets of a religion"[1] that is/are punished with fine and imprisonment (up to 3 years). Even by European standards, I doubt this language or the legislation it frames will seem anti-humanistic to anyone. It isn't always easy to clearly define and ascertain the nature of a religious attack but that hardly warrants a repeal of the section on the whole.
4. If then, Lord Lester like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens (whom the Marxist Philosopher Terry Eagleton collectively refers to as "Ditchkins") believes that it is religion itself that stands in the way of more liberal standards of jurisprudence, he needs to be reminded that Section 295-A is also implicitly protecting the rights of atheist citizens and if interpreted broadly enough, it protects the religious interests of the entire gamut of believing and non-believing people of the nation (including the followers of faiths yet to be created).
How then, may one ask Lord Lester, is this Section of the IPC hindering free-speech or encouraging hatred? It seems only to be an innocuous legal step forward from the dark ages and seems only to protect the innocent from the wicked. It does not take a legal genius to realize that the reconciliation of the universality of freedom of speech with the particularity of religious discipline can never occur by lowering our guard against the malafide intentions of misanthropes; yet this is precisely what any further amendment (in favor of so called free speech) or repeal of section 295-A will bring about in this hostile ecology of conflicting world-views.
Liberalism may flex its muscles at European gatherings but in India we must take every 'ism' - be it seemingly good or bad - with a grain of salt and remember that "by reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all". For any blind adherence to instrumental reason will breed insensitivity and ingratitude towards positive and life-affirming traditions. For example, what Lord Lester fails to notice about the statement that the IPC was "enacted to suit British needs" is the fact that some British needs are also plain Human needs. Needs that humans have yet to outgrow. Such as the need for knowing with certitude that one's epistemological, ontological and theological convictions - however simple or complex they might be - will be well respected and protected by the community at large until science completely eliminates the need to hold (m)any such convictions.
[1] From the report of the Select Committee preceding the enactment of Section 295(A)
Success
over one soggy vamp riff
of a floorboard creaking to some
ancient rhythms
over ashtrays flooding with the dandruff of the dusk
and the musk deers grazing
over a heart shaped grassland
over jovial bovines playing hop-scotch in the dairies
and
over the lactose intolerant's morning after regret
i rise over
and above these things
there are,
seagulls in a song on a clothesline between tenement buildings
and skyscrapers whispering about
success.
of a floorboard creaking to some
ancient rhythms
over ashtrays flooding with the dandruff of the dusk
and the musk deers grazing
over a heart shaped grassland
over jovial bovines playing hop-scotch in the dairies
and
over the lactose intolerant's morning after regret
i rise over
and above these things
there are,
seagulls in a song on a clothesline between tenement buildings
and skyscrapers whispering about
success.
No, Dissent is not the essence of Democracy
With one smooth stroke of rhetorical fluency Badri Raina (Dec 19th, Open Page/Isn't Dissent...), with a little help from Voltaire, dismissed all the profundity of Arundhati Roy's anarchist statements by 'allowing' her the right to disagree with the official view of Indian state on the issue of Kashmir.
Like Arundhati Roy, the author's critique is unique only to the extent of articulation - and if it is novelty of articulation that counts as opinion these days, then I invite the reader to ponder upon a few inconsistencies and contradictions I found within the article.
Beginning with the title - I do not know what the inclinations of the author are on the ideological compass of the political landscape but even the moderately informed thinker will have a hard time digesting the fact that dissent is (being proposed as) the essence of democracy. Any dissent, I believe, pervasive enough to become the essence of any political ideology (not just democracy) will only dissolve that ideology - and the political framework it supports - into an order-less, hopeless mess. Dare I also mention, that for it to be a democracy in the first place, some people must "agree" with each other. Dissent can not be the basis for any kind of social contract except a mutually endorsed anarchy. Therefore, dissent is not the essence of democracy.
The same contradiction also resonates with the last paragraph where the author tries to point towards the First Amendment of the American Constitution as a possible solution for a more liberal inclusion of dissenting voices into the public consciousness. The author seems to forget, that in America too, the freedom of speech isn't absolute. The doctrine of "Clear and present danger" continues to protect the constitution and state but since they are the world's oldest democracy, their tolerance for radical speech is obviously higher than ours and the two relative values can't really be compared.
It is true that dissent is the humble acknowledgment that every decision can become an object of revision, but what is perhaps more true is that dissent for the sake of dissent will never allow us to find out when it is the right time to revise our basic decisions such as the decision to constitute ourselves as a democracy. Whether the ideals enshrined in the constitution are open to such revision remains a matter of debate until we're old enough (as a democracy) to express dissent against the basic structure doctrine of Indian Constitution or upon finally being in agreement that we have all reached the ideals we sought.
Its almost a dirty job but someone has to do it by reminding the author that perhaps in "India" Arundhati Roy is exalted as a revolutionary but in "Bharat" she has made the blood boil of many a tax-paying-citizen who is yet to understand the nuanced difference between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism. Religion and Nationalism therefore, remain for the majority of our country folk, the equivalent of what Plato called "Noble lies" and contribute more to the stability of the country than most liberals would have us believe. The Government of India has once again, swallowed a bitter pill by charging Roy with Sedition.
The author accuses the Indian state of sinking to a new low in democratic self confidence and I want to ask - was our democratic self confidence ever higher than this? A nation that was wrenched from the hands of a world power on the principles of non-violence and peaceful dissent must always be wary of those very principles working against it as it moves towards more emancipatory levels of inclusion.
To diffuse peaceful dissent peacefully is the call of the hour and although I myself do find the charges of sedition leveled against Roy a trifle extreme, I reluctantly acquiesce knowing the sensitivity of the issue and the fragile nature of our unity-in-diversity.
Rethinking Electronic Civil Disobedience
In a book published some 30 odd years ago titled ‘How Democracies Perish’ the French political philosopher Jean-François Revel wrote:
“Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is necessary to counter them… What we end up with in what is conventionally called Western society is a topsy-turvy situation in which those seeking to destroy democracy appear to be fighting for legitimate aims, while its defenders are pictured as repressive reactionaries.”
It is this author’s contention that the recent attempts at hactivism by the now famous WikiLeaks website and the controversy surrounding its owner Julian Assange is precisely such an attack on democracy as Revel predicted. What is even more surprising is the painful accuracy with which these attacks have been misunderstood to be acts of revolution against oppressive regimes.
This is especially true in relatively young and artificially-liberalized democracies such as India where Journalism - partly in order to save its face from the recent embarrassments and partly to divert the common man’s attention from its inherent moral corruption - has canonized Assange and his establishment and portrayed him to be the champion of a new technological media renaissance. But even in older democracies such as Britain, too much has been published in support of the WikiLeaks adventure while its criticism has been relegated to the back seat.
The irrationality and immaturity of the bias in favor of this newfangled mode of activism is revealed when one considers the message being sent by the whole WikiLeaks issue (and its media-hyped celebration) to, for example, organizations with a Jihadi persuasion. It is funny to see, that the liberal tradition in countries which are paranoid about their safety to the extent that they manually frisk high ranking diplomats of major allies are exalting the reformer-cum-revolutionary status of a person they know next to nothing about.
What is also not discussed enough in the news surrounding the whole affair is what the true import of the leaked cables is. Anyone basically acquainted with the geopolitics of the countries indicted or mentioned in the leaked cables would tell you that what is revealed in those cables is what is being talked about in diplomatic circles much more openly albeit in a more formal tone. It hardly takes a genius to figure out for example, that India is indeed a self-appointed candidate for the UNSC seat (and there is nothing wrong with that either) or that NATO countries are planning to protect Poland (that’s is precisely what NATO was created to do).
If then, the argument WikiLeaks is supporting is that Diplomats should always talk in formal, subjectively-desensitized and politically-correct, official language then it is basically tantamount to taking away the free speech of the diplomatic community - which already suffers from the official impediments of an over-neutralized language.
But most importantly of all, it is the response to the WikiLeaks by governments worldwide that has catapulted what should’ve been an easily overlooked nuisance into the ranks of major historical blunders like the Watergate scandal. Instead of having a calm and reasoned debate with members of the civil society and media, the Governments (especially the American govt.) launched themselves into attack mode against Assange and the entire order of underground Hacktivists. The redundancy of the leaks was, it seems, overshadowed by fears of what they might contain as opposed to what they did contain. It should be noted that there is a lot more messier information lying in the secret records of most major powers today and the inability of the Americans to decipher as to exactly what and how much of what was leaked was truly damaging to their repute led to their taking the overtly defensive stance.
But the American attack on Assange and the sudden rehashing of old court case against him in Sweden is as unjustified as the DDoS attacks on major financial websites by the so called “friends of WikiLeaks”. The term “Cyber-Anarchism” may sound like aural manna to the ears of some yet-to-be-disillusioned seeker of an anarchic utopia but for adults who understand the fragility of the cyber-ecosystem, the threat is more real than ever before. This eye-for-an-eye mentality of both parties involved will simply erode the protective fringes of the online-freedom that netizens around the world have carefully preserved for a decade or so.
By no means is this author denouncing activism (cyber or otherwise), [he is] merely stating that alternative versions of electronic civil disobedience exist which don’t threaten the politico-administrative foundations on which societies are built. Versions which demand accountability without resorting to any kind of anarchism and which actually seek accountability for acts of omission and commission. Turning the internet into a shoe-pelting party for the mildly dissatisfied will simply result in the slow and painful death of free-speech on internet. It is human nature to be fascinated with secrets but just because something is secret doesn’t necessarily mean it is important.
L’affaire Assange frequently reminds me of the day when my 4th standard classmate who had just discovered how babies came into this world used his mediocre language skills to spread this newfound and forbidden piece of information. Expectedly, the news started a mutiny of students against their parents. “How could they do something this dirty?” was one question that seemed to sum up the sentiment in the air that day. This analogy tells us, in a predictable way that the internet has reached an adolescent stage where it is particularly prone to bad influences. Any reasonable individual knows that geopolitics, international-strategy and foreign policy isn’t all unicorns and magic storks and any insistence on washing dirty laundry in open would ultimately stink up the institution of democracy.
This is not to say, however that any pragmatic notion of liberalism must come with an in-built system for repressing bad politico-strategic memories nor does it imply that the necessary evils of governing nation-states in a predominantly capitalist world should be ignored. All that is required at this stage is firstly, to infuse the idea of relevance and values within the networked ratio of consciousness of online populations of the world to the consciousness of bureaucracies which sustain them. Secondly, we need to educate people to use the powers of the internet wisely and instead of using it for nitpicking and hair-splitting critiques of governments for the sake of revolution “here and now” they must be taught to use the internet as a moderator of any relevance-to-values imbalance which might creep on our way to truly emancipatory technological solutions.
Lastly, In a world clearly divided between those who think Julian Assange is a villain from a bond movie and those who like to think of him as the “digital Gandhi” it is wise to point out that he is neither. He is perhaps little more than a younger version of himself hacking his way into the pages of human history. Governments around the world must wisen up to his accidental but insightful revelations into society, culture and the evolutionary stage of the internet, he should also be put on an international governmental payroll for investigating further into the nature and modes of cyber-activism and should be a member of every committee investigating ways to prevent and defend societies against cyber-terrorism. Needless to say he should neither be turned into a hero nor a villain and the ridiculous charges against him must be dropped.
The ‘Leak’ in Public Consciousness
The basic criticism of the latest WikiLeaks episode revolves around the notion that making sensitive information a part of public domain knowledge jeopardizes public safety as it can easily be used by non-state players to cause harm to the masses. This criticism, is however incomplete as it fails to address and check the philosophical and psychological grounding over which such immature attempts to democratize information thrive.
To understand the true import of WikiLeaks we must leave aside the fact that apart from the potentially dangerous revelations of WikiLeaks such as a list of “critical infrastructure“ sites around the world, much of the information under the CableGate scanner is unremarkable and deals with basic truisms (e.g. NATO countries plan to protect Poland); forget for a minute also, that most of this information is deliberative in nature - these are not acts of omission or commission that governments are generally expected to be accountable for; forget also the not-so-moot-point that Diplomats too have the freedom of expression and need a measure of informality as a tool to allay the over-neutralization of their language due to occupational hazards.
Now, even from this dumbed-down mode of reasoning, there scarcely is any revelation in the “leaks” that warrants attention of anyone serious about the real issues concerning the world today. The media attention given to WikiLeaks seems to stem from the mere fact that these cables were supposed to be official secrets. Its evident now that the internet has truly come to the rescue of everyone looking for instant gratification of their highly romanticized fantasies of a revolution.
In India, a comparison of “CableGate” with “RadiaGate” also gives us a clearer understanding of the main issue at hand. While RadiaGate exposed the modus-operandi of a morally corrupt media working from the insides of an institutionalized darkness of a gangrenous journalism, WikiLeaks radicalizes the notion of secrecy-in-accountability by undermining the importance of guarding relatively sensitive information from the eyes of a vigilant civil society. The result is that the masses get ever more paranoid in a world where the media cannot be trusted and those independent-whistleblowers and cyber-activists who claim to be the more responsible replacements for traditional media start broadcasting information which can potentially be used against the people themselves, thereby rendering powerless the very masses they proclaim to empower.
The roots of the CableGate spectacle seem to lie in a misunderstanding of the role and significance of the government in keeping secrets from the general public. Accountability in foreign policy of any country should hardly be a matter of concern to anyone without the means for understanding or processing the vast amount of information involved in the making of said policy. Needles to say, there are aspects of this information which, in the wrong hands can cause much damage not only to the country in question but to global order in general.
The advent of the internet and opening up of information, the general trend towards liberalization and the progressive nature of democratic reforms around the world seem to give some people the wrong idea that anyone with enough information can challenge the status-quo. What this heady concoction of information and liberalism seems to withhold from the thusly enlightened fellow is that there are facets of status-quo which must not be challenged for the sake of basic rights of mankind. Also, this has once again pointed towards the need for the internet population of the world to evolve models of self-censorship for the internet so that any “leaked” data may be protected before it reaches the wrong audience.
A clear, dispassionate analysis of the whole WikiLeaks affair shows the dangers of stretching the limits of accountability and transparency to the point of reducing them to the idealized rhetoric of conspiracy theorists. It also shows that secrecy (both at an individual as well as political level) is indispensable. Therefore, all that Julian Assange and his partners must be lauded for is showing us the limits of political activism. Having means to do away with secrecy does not necessarily mean we have to do away with it. Mr. Assange may disagree with me but I do not see his credit-card numbers “leaking” anytime soon.
To understand the true import of WikiLeaks we must leave aside the fact that apart from the potentially dangerous revelations of WikiLeaks such as a list of “critical infrastructure“ sites around the world, much of the information under the CableGate scanner is unremarkable and deals with basic truisms (e.g. NATO countries plan to protect Poland); forget for a minute also, that most of this information is deliberative in nature - these are not acts of omission or commission that governments are generally expected to be accountable for; forget also the not-so-moot-point that Diplomats too have the freedom of expression and need a measure of informality as a tool to allay the over-neutralization of their language due to occupational hazards.
Now, even from this dumbed-down mode of reasoning, there scarcely is any revelation in the “leaks” that warrants attention of anyone serious about the real issues concerning the world today. The media attention given to WikiLeaks seems to stem from the mere fact that these cables were supposed to be official secrets. Its evident now that the internet has truly come to the rescue of everyone looking for instant gratification of their highly romanticized fantasies of a revolution.
In India, a comparison of “CableGate” with “RadiaGate” also gives us a clearer understanding of the main issue at hand. While RadiaGate exposed the modus-operandi of a morally corrupt media working from the insides of an institutionalized darkness of a gangrenous journalism, WikiLeaks radicalizes the notion of secrecy-in-accountability by undermining the importance of guarding relatively sensitive information from the eyes of a vigilant civil society. The result is that the masses get ever more paranoid in a world where the media cannot be trusted and those independent-whistleblowers and cyber-activists who claim to be the more responsible replacements for traditional media start broadcasting information which can potentially be used against the people themselves, thereby rendering powerless the very masses they proclaim to empower.
The roots of the CableGate spectacle seem to lie in a misunderstanding of the role and significance of the government in keeping secrets from the general public. Accountability in foreign policy of any country should hardly be a matter of concern to anyone without the means for understanding or processing the vast amount of information involved in the making of said policy. Needles to say, there are aspects of this information which, in the wrong hands can cause much damage not only to the country in question but to global order in general.
The advent of the internet and opening up of information, the general trend towards liberalization and the progressive nature of democratic reforms around the world seem to give some people the wrong idea that anyone with enough information can challenge the status-quo. What this heady concoction of information and liberalism seems to withhold from the thusly enlightened fellow is that there are facets of status-quo which must not be challenged for the sake of basic rights of mankind. Also, this has once again pointed towards the need for the internet population of the world to evolve models of self-censorship for the internet so that any “leaked” data may be protected before it reaches the wrong audience.
A clear, dispassionate analysis of the whole WikiLeaks affair shows the dangers of stretching the limits of accountability and transparency to the point of reducing them to the idealized rhetoric of conspiracy theorists. It also shows that secrecy (both at an individual as well as political level) is indispensable. Therefore, all that Julian Assange and his partners must be lauded for is showing us the limits of political activism. Having means to do away with secrecy does not necessarily mean we have to do away with it. Mr. Assange may disagree with me but I do not see his credit-card numbers “leaking” anytime soon.
it only shimmers
This curtain now before my eyes
renders no service and does not exercise
any rights
Or left-of-centers
it only shimmers
with a pristinely dark purple hue
under the melancholy winds from the
Oriental wall-fans
with the hands of two shadows
sprawling above it like a giant bird
as if migrating
to distant shores
beneath the clouds from a fog-machine
elevator music above the velvet clefts travels
across the starry dust particles
dotting the vastness of the projector beam
as they dance to a voice from the darkness
of the wafting cascade
of the drape i gape into
that now is the dark blue ocean parting to reveal a countdown
once was the curtain before my eyes.
WikiLeaksLeaks
Another letter to the Hindu:
The WikiLeaks scandal shows how the cultural logic of late capitalism epitomizes banality and glorifies the redundant in its effort to allay the everyday ennui of modern life and redeem every last drop of sensation even from a scandal of marginal magnitude.
The latest case of leaking of diplomatic cables especially highlights how even the superfluous can be deemed revolutionary given the right packaging. That diplomats are also entitled to their own opinions is a fact as much in support of free-speech as the case made out to be in Julian Assange's latest tweets against amazon.
For most of us, therefore, Assange's megalomania and attempts at social engineering seem to be revealing little in terms of novelty and hold nothing in terms of innovation. All he seems to be telling us is that there are pipes within the concrete walls of our homes through which our feces occasionally flow. Well, we already know that.
(An edited version of this letter was published in The Hindu on Dec. 07, 2010)
The WikiLeaks scandal shows how the cultural logic of late capitalism epitomizes banality and glorifies the redundant in its effort to allay the everyday ennui of modern life and redeem every last drop of sensation even from a scandal of marginal magnitude.
The latest case of leaking of diplomatic cables especially highlights how even the superfluous can be deemed revolutionary given the right packaging. That diplomats are also entitled to their own opinions is a fact as much in support of free-speech as the case made out to be in Julian Assange's latest tweets against amazon.
For most of us, therefore, Assange's megalomania and attempts at social engineering seem to be revealing little in terms of novelty and hold nothing in terms of innovation. All he seems to be telling us is that there are pipes within the concrete walls of our homes through which our feces occasionally flow. Well, we already know that.
(An edited version of this letter was published in The Hindu on Dec. 07, 2010)
Relative Impeccability
The Following is a reply sent to letters@thehindu.co.in in response to this article.
Ex. Supreme Court Judge V.R. Krishna Iyer expresses great pain ("Submission of Suspicion", Dec. 1) at being "morally molested" by Attorney General G.E. Vahanvati's statement to a bench of supreme court that: "If the criterion [of impeccable integrity] has to be included, then every judicial appointment can be subject to scrutiny. Every judicial appointment will be challenged." But his reaction smacks of that typical preemptive defense that is usually found to have its roots in deep and vulnerable insecurities.
In-fact our entire Judiciary suffers from this "holier-than-thou" attitude that is derisive of the very institutions of equality it proclaims to promote and protect. For the astute reader there is nothing in Vahanvati's statement that warrants such revulsion and scorn as V.R. Krishna Iyer seems to direct at it. All Mr. Vahanvati seems to be saying is that the standards of integrity are relative and that no Judicial appointment is above a morally absolute and Ideal notion of integrity. Jesus Christ said something similar when he proclaimed "let he who is without sin, cast the first stone". The Attorney General is not in his naiveté proclaiming that the integrity of every judicial appointment is already compromised, but he is merely stating that should the standards of integrity be made ideal (as opposed to pragmatic) enough, then even Judiciary can come under suspicion.
It is high time that the Judiciary realizes that in today's world where nothing is absolute, and knowledge abounds and people ask more and more difficult and fundamental questions, its (Judiciary's) supremacy is not be something that will be taken for granted. Judiciary should no longer compare itself to Caeser's wife who was above and beyond suspicion ex-officio, instead judiciary today is much like Lord Rama's wife (Sita) who was not only suspected but also had to prove herself and her purity through a trial-by-fire.
The Hottest Future
The Hottest future is the hell woven into me
By the whips of your industry and its dismal decree.
I have been absconding and bonding with the Kings,
Who are homeless in your domain and queens
who are but concubines or things
like bad omens.
Yet, I am the necessity in your every choice,
I melt in all of your convictions
as you descend into your character - ready to plunge,
in the cacophony of my fictions.
The mongoose in the dream's navel
For the nth time i whispered
"got to get out of this mess"
to myself but yet the blisters
on my soul said "don't digress"
i could see a higher heaven
heaving hereditably
but as soon as i would wake up,
it would shake me up and flee
thusly with my fate were brindled
scratches of the days bygone
as if dipped in brine and spindled
with something made from nylon
i want in on the secret answer -
to cheat the sacred trinity
in this game of i life i want to beat
God, myself and the refree.
"got to get out of this mess"
to myself but yet the blisters
on my soul said "don't digress"
i could see a higher heaven
heaving hereditably
but as soon as i would wake up,
it would shake me up and flee
thusly with my fate were brindled
scratches of the days bygone
as if dipped in brine and spindled
with something made from nylon
i want in on the secret answer -
to cheat the sacred trinity
in this game of i life i want to beat
God, myself and the refree.
Triangles would
Do something.
Lock all doors and then loop through every existing exit,
Then calculate how far you’ve come
From where you started.
You Don’t have to go round in circles,
Even squares would do
Triangles would do
Open ended role playing games
Would do
Something.
Without me
She
told me to think about
what i would have done
and i don't think she forgot to add
"without me".
Impatience
To all disgrace,
How sweet thy sound
That raped a dog like me
I once was inert,
But now I've found
Inertia is the key.
mascara milk
the hunted became the hunter
the dance became an exercise
the story became a news as
i grew torpid, tactually comatose
an immature infant fed on mascara milk
clothed in the latex of language
(a putrid abstraction saddle-stictched to my skull)
cultured in a colorless confusion created by
catacombs of science and gutters of religion
what proofs do you speak of?
dear cyber-statisticians, you reek of
excuses, not to read the books you've never read
excuses, to not let the dead delete the dead.
Concerning my poetry
“Even a nonsense-poem is not nonsense in the same way as the babbling of a child.“
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
---
And each man hears / as the twilight nears / to the beat of his dying heart,
The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was it Art?"
- Rudyard Kipling
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
---
And each man hears / as the twilight nears / to the beat of his dying heart,
The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was it Art?"
- Rudyard Kipling
Approachability is not a function of obviousness. An approachable work of art may best be described as something close to an “expected surprise”. If this element of surprise is the central tenet of all art, then the key to producing good art (that also sells) lies entirely with artist’s skill to make the subject expect the surprise, and yet not be aware of her own expectations until the surprise actually arrives. This is the basic belief around which most of my poems have been written, it may also be seen as a statement of objective as far as my poetry is concerned.
The meaning of the works that follow lies somewhere within the interstices of their symbolic, real and imaginary interpretations. There is no single viewpoint that is endorsed in favor of the other when it comes to the definition of these poems. This however, does not mean that the my work cannot be enjoyed by an average modern consumer whose attention span has been hammered down by today’s media-rich environment where hip-hop music provides a quicker “release” than lines of structured verse. In fact, in certain senses these works target precisely the uninitiated, potential aficionados whose minds are yet to be cluttered with the filthy and restrictive canons of modern and classical poetry alike.
The idea is that if music has long outgrown its utility as “opium for the masses”, then its high time poetry be recognized as something more than just marijuana for the elite and be considered as a potent cultural force paving down the path for the evolution of language and intellect. An analogy with (hip-hop) music is also relevant in a strictly imaginary context here: you don’t have to get it to enjoy it and few will argue that although the overall meaning of many of my works might remain debatable and contingent on subjectivity, the flow makes some kind of transcendent sense and so does the meter. Au contraire, if music has not outgrown its use as opium, then that’s all the more reason for new art forms to emerge from forgotten or largely-ignored realms and present themselves as alternatives.
Poetry needn’t just be a mesh of empty rhetoric and the poet’s claims to moral superiority - it may just as well be a mode of communication that is so personal and sincere that it almost touches the boundaries of inter-subjectivity within the rules of language. So that the reader might experience what the poet already has, she must be lured with rhyme, confused with rhetoric and corrupted with reiteration and alliteration , dazzled with exotic motifs such as that of lycanthropes and Ragnarök before finally being subdued with reassurances of surprise.
Surprises will keep on presenting themselves before the reader - no statement needs more reassurance than this one when talking about my collected body of work. In my modest capabilities, I achieve this task of reassurance quite efficaciously and this might be tested by reading a random stanza out of a random poem from anywhere within this blog.
Other recurring motifs throughout these poems are those of twilight, chaos, alchemy, death, recursion, tautologies etc. and these are woven into a network of emotions characteristic of the human condition like love, desire, sorrow and the like. The idea of using presentation as both the medium and the message remains at the heart of this body of work and is its calling card. There is no reason to believe that this kind of poetry is anything more than clever word-play which reeks of a synthetic syntax and a literary sublimation of a literal confusion - but one must keep in mind that it does not claim to be anything other than that anyway. Therein lies its beauty, its meaning, its core character - all of which the reader is forced to relate with for she herself is constituted by similar (if not identical) elements of being.
Finally, that this collection of poems shares a direct aesthetic bond with the music and philosophy I was exposed to while writing it, cannot be emphasized enough. Therefore, these works should communicate to the reader a feeling similar to one generated by a (hypothetical) Britney Spearsian reading of Hegel where seemingly complicated notions like that of the dialectical triad are communicated as an expression of an embarrassingly innermost honesty (“I’m not a girl / Not yet a woman…I'm in between.“). Finding out the answer to whether or not the poet has achieved a clear reflection of this innermost honesty in his verse remains solely an endeavor for the reader and the critic.
∞
Friday Morning
Frustrated, festooned with shards of broken dreams
He emerged out of a mad and moonlit ocean, he was
Soaking in spit and a leeching fatigue, somehow
feagued and fostered by the same remorse
The shooting stars shot glances of pity, poised
in military formations against every undead soldier of fortune -
(Like him) Fed on rations of fear and fucked
till the numbing depths of their torture were
Subsided by the eroding heights of his pain
With the featherbedded twisting under freckled skies
He swallowed a fistful of the feckless night and
Fought with Friday morning all through the weekend
Fake or otherwise, he felt the need to falter
To Fess up to what was false and feeble and bow
Fore’ what was the fateful for only the free -
Are the ones who fuse following with
Forgetting.
He emerged out of a mad and moonlit ocean, he was
Soaking in spit and a leeching fatigue, somehow
feagued and fostered by the same remorse
The shooting stars shot glances of pity, poised
in military formations against every undead soldier of fortune -
(Like him) Fed on rations of fear and fucked
till the numbing depths of their torture were
Subsided by the eroding heights of his pain
With the featherbedded twisting under freckled skies
He swallowed a fistful of the feckless night and
Fought with Friday morning all through the weekend
Fake or otherwise, he felt the need to falter
To Fess up to what was false and feeble and bow
Fore’ what was the fateful for only the free -
Are the ones who fuse following with
Forgetting.
This twisted tale of love (in 3 parts)
part one: and all that jazz
happy, the saxophone player is smiling at my driver
milly on the clarinet here...
we respire through broken teeth and ears that could only hear
FIRE!
we took a left turn
we took a right turn,
i watched my cigarette burn through her defenses
those delicate defenses
built to be broken by me and me and me alone
or me with a little help from her
part two: how do you say no
steady now, we sneak together to get her to witness the winter
we escape from the smell of the sun on our beds
we took a left turn to a breakfast
looking back, i still want more waffles
part three: beyond the disgust
empty cyclotron, spinning steam and brewing lust
blowing dust in the face of a history of uneven numbers
days, these days are older and darkened by the color of
all mysteries once revealed, now treasured.
space-suits will never become fashion statements,
here, we learn to fly before we walk.
Origami Lion (A tribute to Mayakovsky?)
August Sun,
Crisp yet moist,
Quiet
yet a thousand cicadas
deliberating
agenda for tonight
My revolution, still,
on paper, between the sheets,
crisp yet moist
and pregnant with words
arousing hope
Spin me to deliver me, i say
but my origami lion
embraces my savannah skin
and says "five more minutes"
Do As Directed
The only gun that i have shoots diamonds
and my best friend has a scar instead of a smile,
If i'm only high on anticipation, i guess,
it'll come down to antiseptics in a while
I'm guilty by choice & miserable by company,
I lack the technology to turn on my heels,
Though opposable thumbs made me a sucker for her
Yet sometimes, i wish i knew how she feels
Still its no perversion, no trick of the skin, unlike desire
what i feel isn't ripped or torn at the seams,
'tis merely an effort to do as directed, to learn from,
to follow and distill my dreams.
The Blessing's Disguise
The blessing's disguise was a man screaming murder
out on the railway crossing one sharp may noon
Confessing my surprise while i was scheming under
a delusional disregard for the day that came too soon
What Pyrrhic victory lay in his design and what truth he saw
i could not say but i could hear him yell "The King Is Dead",
but for whatever reason he dared not to add "Long Live The King"
behind his wails of despair and dread
What Villainy of the gods had befallen on our heads
i wondered, as i stood in the shadow of that thug,
armed with the reluctance of philosophers i asked him
where it was that the logical grave must be dug
"Two years henceforth", he replied, and fell asleep underneath
the poplar which overheard more than he spoke
it is then that i saw that the fortune i had found
in his truth's hibernation was the death of my joke.
narcissistic cashew
dear cashew,
why so narcissistic?
there are, after all,
no mirrors in my intestines.
bring it on
In a shooting range i'm aiming at the iconoclasts of the silver screen,
as i'm marching forward into the darkness of cinema - our retarded queen,
laughing through its black teeth it
spits out (in a self-righteous style) our as-seen-on-tv maturity,
or perhaps our disgust for the same.
the suffocating zeitgeist's syllepsis should commit suicide in the script itself,
but the
butchery called the
box office can't be
bothered for the
benefits of a few
bastards have evolved into their
birthrights.
i still wants the buffs to bring it on.
why i love black women
once upon a second thought,
the third world sort of tripped,
upon the magic of its sudden darkness - tight-lipped
joyous and jubilant was its mouth, my only root
my only freedom gestured by its three-fingered-salute
it did not know its meaning,
cared little for time or space,
asked no metaphysical questions (while)
rearing our reptilian grace
i cannot ever repay it,
for how do you dissolve death's debt?
i can only love black women -
because it makes me forget.
indifference already
i sawed off both my legs to fall
in love with these crutches, i was
handicapped like my halogen dreams
haunting a highway
alight
under two headlights chasing
the marked lanes of
a perforated destiny
half-torn by the swivel
of her free, unhinging slaps
over a thousand faces of my history
halfway between now and the tightly trusted future
sleeping in the back seat, i was,
swallowed by signs of indifference, already,
flashing like red beacons and screaming
like soft sirens breaking
the rhythm of a deeply breathing night.
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