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

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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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