Sunday, March 11, 2012

Seven Blank Shots in the Dark before the Comedy of the Arses Begin


Had a strange day yesterday
I saw a dead man’s head burning
The rest of the body was burning too
but I could only see the head from where I stood.
It was a good old Hindu cremation
There were people and there was smoke
The people would last long
The smoke wouldn’t
Now the strange thing is that
Had I seen the same thing three years back
I would have sat by the river that flows beside
The charnel ground
And I would have smoked
And I would have thought for a long time
of things that perish and of things that don’t
But now, it’s all just that
A head burning
The smoke tolling upbound
And people watching.


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When I was a kid I loved to draw like all kids do, or at least most of them,
Or, at least, as my socialist pretence tells me, like most of them from an upper-middle class background whose parents have jobs, at least one of them surely has one, and who studies in schools and etc, do.
Now I used to draw fishes, loads of them
Happy and sad fishes at times, but mostly nervous fishes
Who didn’t know whether they’re in hell or not
Mind, I had distinct notions of hell and heaven,
And I still have them
Hell is hotter than Aprils in Calcutta and heaven is coolblue
And I was sure that we can say if we’re in hell or in heaven
But fishes can’t, and that’s misery for you
But now I know that I was wrong
I’m here and I don’t know whether this is hell or heaven
This might be neither, but I can’t be certain
I think I have become one of those nervous fishes I used to draw
And the child me is still out there, drawing me.
And this thought shoots poison at my inside
because
I
don’t
want
to
be
a
drawing.
I just hope that the shooting stops someday.
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23 heavy years and my bones feel heavy already
I wish I were an assassin, or at least an assassin would get me some day
And so does my mirror
And as I lay sweating on my bed
I can feel the whole world reeling down below
Poor world, there’s only so much it can take
It might just burst out someday and everything will be ablaze
Or else, it might just get old fast and fall asleep and everything will be frozen
The days run crazy like drunken man on fire
The nights sink like boulders in the ocean
And here I am, sweating, fighting with the mosquitoes,
Fighting with boredom and hopelessness
Fighting for the snakes to leave me alone


I think I will give in
And dream of zebras and cherry-trees.
This allure is a sweet lullaby.

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We are so busy living that we forget the dead very soon
And the best part is that there’s no irony in this.
She’s lost an uncle, he’s lost a job, they’ve lost a match
And tomorrow, she’ll be attending her dance classes
He’ll be standing in the summer heat with the rest before the employment office
And they’ll be training for the next match.
Even poetry is a bit of that
A bit of you dies, you preserve the corpse
And you display the mummy for the passersby to see and love, hate or be indifferent
But what do you care?
You’re busy preserving the next bit that had died
These bits, they decay fast
And so this preservation work keeps you busy
Until the day comes when you get tired
And say “fuck it”, and stop and go away
And leave the bits that die alone to rot in solitude
And you observe them, too ashamed to let the world see those rotting corpses
You’re not a poet anymore.


As for me, I am no poet, and I mean it
I don’t preserve corpses, I just let allow passersby,
meaning you,
to see the carcass decompose and putrefy,
And that’s about it.
I don’t care if you love it or hate it,
Or if you are indifferent to it
I don’t care about the microbes, about the microcosm
Or the macrocosmic order
because this waste
is not for you
And neither is this for me.
Besides, liking is easy these days,
All you need is to drag your cursor and press a button
That doesn’t change anything, and I am least bothered.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

I remain awake all night listening to all sorts of music
Some playing in my laptop and the rest in my head
And listening to dogs barking their barks and to nightguards whistling their whistles to make thieves and robbers fear the Law.
And I stare out blankly in the dark, and I wish I had a friend to stare out blankly in the dark with me – may not be the same dark but his or her dark, but staring at it allthesame.
I read stuff at times, all words jostling for life and impunity
Words are like people, like people they’ve to pay high rents to get into beautiful places
And then there’s facebook with faces bodies and gestures all pasted within frames
And I keep on bearing with the madness till the chatter of the skeleton’s teeth becomes unbearable
And the ghosts keep on screaming on both sides of the divider within my skull –
A well fed vacuum teeming with bards and visions and spilt wine and cockroaches and paintings
And the ghosts scream out so loud that at times that I wish there was a lever or a switch to stun them into silence or maybe a burst of electricity would have helped.
Meanwhile, these people on facebook, all of them, eating, farting, shitting, fucking,
fearing inconvenience, retribution and God, loathing poverty, trespassing and fiery angels, nursing their bonsais of love and hatred, getting their heads chopped off by assassins who lurch in dark, admiring photographs of gassed babies being buried and starving babies crawling to food with starving vultures waiting for them to die,
I wish I could gun them and the stars out there down, one by one.
I wish I could think of the tits of the moon and jerk off,
Instead, I am being dragged along the dust to meet the many good citizens who offer their ballots to the false gods and fake prophets of the machine.
I just want to stick a sunflower in and jam this whole goddamn apparatus up, and I make plans for these while I am awake at night
And as I think of bumping them off, I draw towers with spinal cords and axes with throbbing hearts and cockroaches flying into the heart of civilization. Once these roaches get in, they’ll crawl along the walls of the heart and the heart will tickle and I will get to hear these people making funny noises that will erupt the darkness and the magma will come up and will engulf all marks that distinguish.


All these would require torture, would require me to stop trembling and kneeling before the altars that I have built for my self, would require me to stop thinking of the cleavages of fluid intelligence that can knock the horses and their riders down. Stopping things isn’t easy. It requires courage and strength, especially when one gets used to those things and to hating those things. So, I am waiting for that courage to arrive in its blazing chariot of red-hot fire.


Until then, I must let this drivel and this comedy of the arses simmer inside. When the right time comes, I will ride out with my flag and I will plant it at the center of everything and I shall fear no more.


However, until the new revolution and the new madness strides in, this night and these old madnesses of harmony that’s killing the tides will be here, and I will have to bear with all these. Luckily, I have my crayons and bullets to fend me from the sharks and from the one-eyed monster.
They’ll hold the fort for me.


[“Psychosis (from the Greek ψυχή "psyche", for mind/soul, and -ωσις "-osis", for abnormal condition) means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality". People suffering from psychosis are described as psychotic”
---- Wikipedia

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..


Many a god has died while trying to cross this bridge
I have read some of Plato and much of ill-paid columnists
Who are witty enough for one evening with a coffee mug
And even more of well-paid and fat journalists
Who are also dimwits and are thus inadvertently funny
HH Crane has jumped off from the starboard side
And Arthur Rimbaud had got his leg cut off but he had already lost his poetry by then
Bukowski didn’t lose his, he admired women with fine and shapely legs just like I do
But he died rich, filthy, obese and drunk, but he had his words and his sadness by his side when he died
I like Buddha. He was all blue, silent and placid.
And he wasn’t afraid of God or of the serpents
The waves were always as brutal as this
Many get their mistresses naked by the nightshade
(This is sexist, but so is your conception of history)


But the switches must lose out to probability
And the lines must stop linking the dots up because the dots are to be left open.
So I unsheathe my sword and I become the behemoth –
Monstrous, ugly and very very cruel.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….


There are too many people out there
Saying too many things
And thinking that each thing they say
Is vital
They think that their words and their thoughts
will provide the cure for the disease
which they think we are looking to heal
and the key to the puzzle which they think
we are all looking to solve.
Messiahs and rebels they are, they think
Assholes they are, a fine brand of assholes, all of them – I think
I hope someday they’ll understand that they are nothing
but cheap and lousy jokers in the mud, rotting
and doomed to be locked up in dungeons reserved
for the foolish.
Too many thoughts
have been thought and too many words
have been spoken
And too little has been done
for the world.
I wish all these self-declared prophets would just shut the lids of their feverish minds and
impoverished intellects and walk away to the zone of
dark silence. That’ll help the real Prophet to make himself heard
And he won’t say much, maybe he’ll utter a distinct word or two,
Or, at most, a sentence or half.
And then he’ll be silent.
And then we’ll be silent too.

He’s out there somewhere, but the fools are making so much noise
with their trashy nonsense
that we can’t hear him or distinguish his thoughts and words.
It’s tragic, but then again,
so is everything.

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3 comments:

Soumi said...

Nishshobdo amay prothom bhasha shikhiyechilo,aaj mawney hoy shekhanei themey thakley hoto.

Zeebs said...

You'd be a nice fish, says the fine branded asshole.

:)

Gina Gao said...

This is a really good post! I like the way you write.

www.modernworld4.blogspot.com