Monday, April 30, 2012

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.

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

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.

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1 comment:

Soumi said...

The question raised here is a lot more serious than what it looks like. And every word in here fits me perfectly! Sad but true. But my sadness doesn't make the truth any less true. I just realised that.