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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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