শায়েরী দ্বাত্রিংশতি Shayerii Dwatringshotii

Ekanto Nijer Jonno

রীগালের কোনার্সীটের দুটো টিকিট আছে। 
একটি বৃত্তের মোধ্যে অনোন্তো-শঙ্খ্যক অর্ধোবৃত্তো নাচানাচি করে। 
বাবা বৃক্ষের মতো
কোল্কাতার গণোরিআ শারে নি।
শেআর মার্কেটে দেখলাম মোষ-ভোল্লুকের দেদার লড়াই 
কে জাবি রে কে জাবি আজ?

এবারের পোঁচিশে বৈশাখ রিনা'স ম্যাসেজ পার্লারে উদযাপোন কোর্লে ক্যামোন হএ? 

Shiddhilabh o Tawdanushawngo

Poetry From Lucknow Volume 2

Couldn’t sleep last night

so i went to the balcony, naked as usual,

and lit a cigarette

down below

a bull was sleeping in this huge open space

amidst much filth

and suddenly, it woke up

and, like god, it rose above the grime

and sent its presence, brutally durable, booming–

lordbound and high

like heroes and monsters

that aim at the stars and settle for nothing else

that beast was standing, tall,

hooves rooted to ground

and shaking dust off its head and nostrils

it was all or nothing for it

it was all or nothing for me

as we stood, me, smoking

and the bull, shaking its head

as the world slept like a baby

and the night watched us,

all still and inanely silent

and that’s about it.

...................................................................................................................

There’s this guy who said that my each of my poem has many lives

Bullshit, i said

And bullshit, i maintain

Once it’s written down, it’s finished

With all its lives and all its death and whatnot

What do i care?

You can have all these and give me one life

One bloody declaration of mortality

And that’ll do. He didn’t understand.

He still doesn’t.

It’s springtime now.

The cuckoos are making sweet love.   

..............................................................................................................................

A few more stations to cross and that’ll be it

I’ll reach there and there’ll be a splendid virgin whore

Waiting for me on a splendid white bed below a splendid ceiling of a splendid palace

And she’ll come down and she’ll take me up and she’ll undress herself and then she’ll undress me and she’ll press my mouth to her erect nipples

And as she’ll turn her rotund back and smooth ass to me i’ll see three round red warts on her back and there’ll be a strand of hair jutting out from the top of each and a pearly drop of puss shall ooze out of the middle one and i won’t get my pecker up and no matter how much she kisses it it’ll stay there, limp, like a civilization beaten into centuries of clueless submission and soon she’ll give up and move to the other room where she’ll be waiting some other motherfucker who has also crossed the requisite number of stations and ticked the right number of correct answers and filled up the necessary blank spaces in all the essential forms and etc and etc shall be. Maybe the other one will get his one up or maybe he won’t but all these won’t matter to me and all these don’t matter to me.

Once i knew of a man who had three sisters. One drowned, one got the flues. So he raped the third one and strangled her to death. O did i ever tell you of the lion who got shot by this man who had gone to the bushes with his rifle to kill himself. Well, he just saw the lion approaching and got mightily scared. Of the lion. It doesn’t matter whether God loves us or hates us. What matters is that God loves a good laugh at the end of the day.

..............................................................................................................................................................    

I’ve become godawfully fat in the last few months – so much so that i can jingle my belly now

The world’s getting sadder every passing day and i can feel its silent serene grief trying to cut me in two straight halves right down the middle.

My bones are bending inwards with the weight of this night on my shoulders

There’s a guy in dusty torn clothes i cross every day on my way to office and he has his ears pressed against the radio al the time – maybe there’s a channel through which the universe enters his brain

But what do i care? I can’t even think of prophets and messiahs and of the great El now.

I am drunk now and all i want is a lady, a real lady with real flesh approaching me from across the alcove,

And wanting me to fuck her.

..............................................................................................................................................................

Whichever town I go chasing down pieces of bead and ass

And whichever hotel I check myself in – be it cheap of expensive –

One damn thing never changes:

These fucking walls staring at me, blankly, and indifferent to my blankness

And me, guzzling down my beer and puking on them, pissed off at their indifference

These are the times you get tired beyond fatigue

And hopeless beyond despair

And I forgive all, and I forgive you and I forgive these walls and this beer and these undigested bits of my 20 buck lunch thrown up all over the wall, the table, the luggage and the bedsheet. I forgive  wall, the table, the luggage and the bedsheet and I forgive the timepiece and the fairies and the whores and the empty streets outside and the dogs barking at erratic automobiles and i forgive the automobiles too. I forgive all as I stand below the shower cleaning myself of all this shit.

 I must rise above this.

..................................................................................................................................................................

Poetry From Lucknow Volume 1

Stuck again,

Staring, from the dark,

at oily faces of men;

wanting to drink all their wine

take all their money

fuck all their women

It wasn’t easy getting here, boys!

And getting out seems tougher this time

Back then it was a coffin

And i couldn’t see the outside

Now it’s a glassdome,

I can see everybody

And all the sorrow that the world

Heaves out of its belly

Fall flat at my feet

And there they lie in heap

To rot in a million hapless years of rain.

...................................................................................................

So I got down,

Took a cab to the hotel

Checked myself into this room

Drew the curtains down

And pulled the shades up

And slept throughout the day

And woke up in the evening to jerk off

And drank throughout the night

And puked the next morning

And stayed in bed writhing in fever and hangover and headache

Hearing the screeching tires,

The bleeding automobile horns,

The screaming brigade,

The mortal furore,

The hell in fury:

Hearing everything

And seeing nothing

And smelling

A roomful of cigarette smoke and ashes

Stale booze, stale meat, stale vomit

And sweat

And semen.

Together, they smell of me.

One of the one million spermatozoa lying dead and frozen

In the powdery white stuck to

The hairy fatty flesh

An inch below my navel

Could’ve been my child

And i have killed it.

And the city refuses to mourn for it.

And hence, i rebel against this ribald revelry

of the masses.

.............................................................................................................

This billion hued mutiny

Is strong

It can beat the shit out of the world

And make it bleat like a ship being terribly thrashed

It can rape the pallid maid

Who goes to the poet’s grave everyday

And it can chew up the rose

She carries with her, only to spit it out on

On the poet’s grave

And rape her again

And again

And again.

And kill her.

But it can’t kill the poet

The poet is dead. The poets of the world are dead.

.....................................................................................................................

See the blackness fondly waving down in loops

Inflicted, with sore sorrows that poisoned the apple’s heart

and Ariel’s eyes. See the guppies in aquarium, they haven’t seen

the machineguns aiming at your gut,

they can’t warn you. You feel peace in sunlight

Your dream walks the graveyards and kitchens

You pay your dues to the nebular wants, to longing

,to the harvest.

See the damned people, with twisted insides

Jumping off their windows

And straight into the lifeless black streets,

See rain falling on all dead men, alike

And now, you have seen the world,

You have seen yourself naked.

..........................................................................................................................................

  

Cockroaches fly like locusts inside my room all day and all night

Big, round healthy cockroaches – just the way their mothers wanted them to be

Feeding on the leftovers of my lunch

Crawling on the lightbulb

Like gurus of existence they are everywhere

I’ve give them names. The one that’s huge and of a somewhat violent disposition

is Nietzsche. There’s another big one that doesn’t move much –

It’s Aristotle. The one that’s roaming on the bulb

is Jesus. Then of course there’re the others. Gandhi is flying around

on its own. It seems lonely. There’s a horde of

smaller ones surrounding king-sized Karl Marx. Malcolm X

has found its place on the ventilator. Mozart just came in from the bathroom

And so on.   

Before long they shift positions and no one thinks of

Building giant statues of them,

of crucifying Jesus, criticizing Malcolm X,

damning Nietzsche, ridiculing Aristotle, appreciating Mozart, dedicating pistols to Karl Marx or flags to Gandhi and et cetera et cetera.

And now I am pissed. Big time. I take out one my slippers from below the bed, shake Charlie Chaplin from it and throw Charlie away and SPLAT! Saussure lies dead on the floor, white paste coming off its thrashed maroon belly.

Damn, I have flattened Saussure.

...........................................................................................................................

Everyman is famous for fifteen minutes

And shit for the rest of their sorry lives.

I want to be shit for the fifteen minutes

And famous for the rest of my life

And during those fifteen minutes during which I am shit

I want the world to turn into a raving mass of absolute, unqualified lunacy.

“I have noticed that the world magazine applies to both books and rifles”- Falguni Ray.

“o lady in red, kiss my hairy ass if it doesn’t!” – Atindriyo Chakraborty.

................................................................................................................................................  

To those lousy pricks who think that they are poets

I say: Fuck you. I spit at your so-called poetry,

I puke at your cocky poetic pretence

I fart in the general direction of your fellow-losers who pat your back and feed your ego. 

You never create, all you are good at is following patterns and footsteps

left behind by your predecessors. You have never done anything new

and not even anything old in a new way. The chicken-leg you’re chewing

has already been chewed by many before you

and will be chewed by many after you. You cower at the idea of failure

and hence you will never have the courage to stride out on your own

and stake your claim. You will never have the guts to fight duels with yourself.

What you write in the name of poetry isn’t art,

it’s craft –

at best, thoughtcraft,

at worst, wordcraft.

Creation calls for rejection. It calls for total decimation of the old shapes, it necessitates wrecking of old forms

and placing the new in their stead. You can never do that

Because what you call your ideas belong to everyone. You don’t own anything to give away.

Besides, you don’t have the patience to wait for it to come to you.

Instead, you grab anything and everything that float around you and use it as your crutch,

forever. You’re not gold-diggers and you’ll never be one. No one finds you startling enough.

The world wouldn’t have been any different had you been bankers or buggers or beggars or automobile-dealers or municipal clerks.

Nothing would have changed.

The sun would still have kept on rising through the east

And I would still have been drinking this beer and masturbating at these splendid monstrous butts of the Spanish pornstar spread across my laptop screen.

............................................................................................................................................

  

   

A Pointless Memoir

I won’t attempt to say things like “I try to write” or “at times I dabble in poetry”, because I am too pretentious to declare my pretentiousness and because I don’t think creativity can be based on trial-and-error: either you write or draw or make music or make cinema or take photos or you don’t. I am a poet and proud of it.

I am also a law student and I had gone to Bombay to intern for 5 weeks in a multinational company. I was staying in a locality famed for its infamy. My hotel was in a house which was once a stately Parsi mansion, now decayed to its ribs and lying in senile waste – redolent with the smell of cough-syrup and damp moss. The 7×7 cubbyhole that was mine was at the end of a long corridor on t he second floor, which had a 40 watt bulb filling it with strange vacuous yellow light. The ground floor seemed to be a brothel and god only knows what the first floor contained.

The battle used to start at 7 in the morning with me pulling my luggage up on to the bed, grabbing my towel, toothbrush, toothpaste, foam, razor, mirror, soaps and shampoo and rushing to the common washroom whose floor was black with the soot and grime of a very long eternity.

The train rides were motherly, the rising sun soothing enough. Getting down the trains made me fall in love with Malthus, Marie Stopes, the pro-abortionists and all advocates of family planning. The multitude, while jostling up the railway station staircase, would make boxer-fists and so would I. We were moles fighting to get into the sunlight from a crowded burrow.

Let’s not get into life in office. 13 hours of work everyday brought me to the brink of insanity. I could feel my neurons dancing to a fusion-mix of Dard-e-Disco and Eleanor Rigby. The hotelbound journeys were mechanical, with my neurons dancing to a slightly different tune – one seemingly co-composed by Bappi Lahiri and Beethoven. As for getting dinner packed, trudging upstairs to my room, dragging my body through the corridor and flopping on the bed, I wish all these feats could be accomplished in 20 words and 2 commas.

The weekends were different. I spent Friday nights drinking beer and chewing on beef-kebabs which had a tendency to get cold in a matter of minutes. My neighbours were inconsiderate to my mental peace. The TV sets would be blurting loudly in at least 5 different languages. It was the Tower of Babel. Saturday mornings were spent fighting severe hangovers and evenings were spent by the sea. On Sundays I would take long walks and bus rides and cab rides all around the city. I was fascinated by the slums: the diversity of sights, sounds and colours and the narrow alleys illuminated by green light emanating from the shacks on both sides. All these would perk my senses up.

My cellphone could not catch signals from inside my room. I was, for all practical purposes, cut off from the rest of the world. I didn’t mind. I was enjoying my sabbatical. I was enjoying the feeling of being marooned on a deserted island with my laptop – all wired up and lonely, just like me.

3 interesting things happened during my stay:

Once, while I was returning from office, another train dashed past in the opposite direction. After the initial blast of air, I could see a cloud formed by a mass of skulls. It was like a peak into the netherworld. My nerves were giving out. After the train went past I had to get back to worrying about those pending laundry bills.

Once, while climbing upstairs to my room, I saw an old man with dishevelled hair and soiled clothes opening the main entrance to the second floor. That was the only time I saw the corridor there. It was dark and still and had doors, which seemed to have been locked for a few millennia, on both sides. The locks were rusty and heavy. Everything was deathly silent. I got goosebumps.

When it was all over, I found myself in front of my lappy in the smoking chamber of the airport. I was thirsty. I was writing it all down. I couldn’t stop.

In the language of hearts, they shot horses, didn’t they?

published on The Youth Express. link: http://theyouthexpress.com/a-pointless-memoir/

পুলিষবোন্ধু, হ্যাভ্লক এলিস ও ষেইষব তেলচিটে ঘেমো পোকামাকোড়। Poolishbondhu, Havelock Ellis o SheyiShawb TelchiTey Ghemo PokamakoR

Aabha

Dogs of Love

While the best are too good to care

The rest are too weak.

Stuck here, between the monstrosity of

hope and doom – the alleyway seems bleak

Boy, so much beauty in the world

left to be seen!

And yet, we need more courage now

We need to burn the old down

And create the new. The best are good at this.

The rest suck.

And here i am, mortal, insincere and whole,

Puking out ill-digested emotions

through words.

That’s the only thing i am good at.

Nevertheless,

i am one of the best. I know what i’m doing

and someday the gods will love me for this.

.......

Aurora and her lipgloss – she’s an old maid now

On her virginity, i’m not so sure

I never bothered, she doesn’t turn me on.

She writes poems, mostly lousy

and at best mediocre

She claims to be suicidal, i don’t doubt her

I’ve had my lucid hours too

I told her to carry an umbrella

When she goes out shopping today

The weatherman forecasts rain in the evening.

And that’s how the world was born.

.......................

The phone rang

The sky was grey

A cockroach crept inside

my ashtray

It was seven o’clock

nobody asks the clock “why?” these days

Nobody wages war,

People are too scared not to wait for someone else

People abhor solitude

People suck.

The phone rang

The sky was grey

Things were cold

inside my head.

.................................

These go-getters can be rich and successful

And can eat drink and screw with the best

And can run the world with machines and money

can get away

with as many lies as they desire to

and can snigger at our laziness all the while

but one thing is certain.

They can never be poets.

........................................

Night falls

Wolves rape my brain.

....................................................

Had I believed in the soul

I would’ve written ten times more

And would’ve created ten times less.

It’s better this way.

And somehow, though i’m not sure

About the causal link,

I think writing and fucking are very much similar.

........................................................

Last night i was sad

And I drank a lot

And I started puking.

I puked at the sun

I puked at the moon

I puked inside holy places

I puked inside me

I puked on poetry and love

I puked on hope and faith

In this way,

I puked the world out

And then I puked my mother’s womb out

And then there was nothing left to puke at or to puke out

So i puked the entire nothing out on nothing

................................................

O god huge stony red-eyed god i am looking at you

I won’t shoot at you

I have spent all my shots shooting at sunflowers

And nightingales

O god big god looking at me from every blank place

One day i will be as numb as you are now.

........................................................

Charging thunderbolts at the world, little boy

You and your terrifying electric bursts

Charge against this cancer of the mind

This metastasis and decay,

Charge against the cards that say mercy

Charge charge against the lion in his cage

Charge against this harmony of asses

Charge against the spectres of filth, the blank silhouettes

And against this synthesis of the inane mundane

And against these tombs of entropy

Be the big bull the world is waving its red rag at

And charge against the wombs and the graves.

Do whatever, just leave my world alone

My life smelling of vomit and stale alcohol

And nicotine and poetry

And sweat

And semen

is my jurisdiction

My life is my life

And I’ll kill you if you charge at it.

...........................................................................

ChhoTToLama ShobujJama