Faith healer

Oath:

We shall weed out poetry with justice
We shall weed out justice with news
We shall deliver
We shall fry our livers

Declarations and prayers:

1.
all hail the flying spaghetti monster.
i am mad, so is my head
either you are crazy or i must be god.

2.
demon demon demon
what did you with all the semen?
seldom serendipity suffered you
not until she buffered you
on her ice stream.

3.
intelligent design
you may prosper
but i will still whisper
my lord's name,
the flying spaghetti god-head.

4.
o my country
you are filled with horrors
of nationalism
why don't we lose our virgin teeth
and start eating landmass
like what we did to the pages of Malthusian recipe book?

5.
o terror of space
tyrant of lace
my mind is opium
vast and empty
silver and chromium shell,
product of confused metallurgy

6.
all hail the status message
and the ceremonial passage of time
as if it ended in few words
like "hey ram"
after he mistakenly shot my jilted lover
at a video game contest
with a laser gun.

7. Enough is Giraffe
Enough is Steffi Graf
Enough is Telegraph
Enough is not Enough.

Crude

Image courtesy: http://alchemyandenergy.com/energy_work/shamanism__soul_retrieval

An astronaut turned shaman was fasting in a lonely asteroid. The celestial body in which the Shaman lived had long been imagined by his generation as a diamond mine. The spaceship’s departure in 2112 C.E. was celebrated across the Earth, which would have ended all the strife around these precious stones. But after four years since its departure, diamond lost its position in the hierarchy of all the desired stones. The mystery ended when his spaceship landed in this asteroid circling around Saturn. The market for diamond had shrunk, humans were more keen on preserving themselves on fine exo-silicon devices mined from the lunar surface and distant moons of Uranus.

The central figure of this ploy is the last survivor. One night his old transistor cracks up, he hears recording of the desperate SOS of his colleagues reflected from the diamond mines on his radio channel, as if the asteroid had entered a time warp. The transistor tunes itself and plays back the same old message in which corporation that sponsored this trip to start the diamond mines, abandon it. The corporation announces that bringing back the astronauts would be too expensive when the preserving the humanity is the immediate need. Billions of people wanted to sign up for self preservation inside worlds created by silicon chips. The central figure keeps fasting so that he could save up on his ration hoping one day a spaceship would come back and but the act of fasting creates delusions. He feels the presence of a ghost, which wants him to finish his rations and break the fast and on the other side, he sees a portal opening to take him to distant time in which he is rescued.

The ghost is obviously a need that becomes an obsession and when one identifies it, it emerges out as the significant other. This significant other, as the shaman imagines, is often responsible for all the other corporeal adventures. The portal is the future and addressing him in the first person. Breaking a fast is then a spiritual exercise say, a end of the meditation to cultivate the hunger for more objectivity, sublimity and refined taste in the nature of things. And after the Shaman stopped fasting:

“Till the hearth cools down
there will be no rice”
“What?
Who burned the rice?”

These dilemmas were platitudes
of my time,
when you said
you were kneading the dough
and my hunger behaved like a ghost
who wasn’t keen on leaving me
mortified of his own presence,
Because I was breaking my fast.

The ghost imagined:

“How dangerous does it seem
A man breaking his fast in presence of million stars
Why should I care what they think
I cannot let this sink.”

Then the portal opens and says:

“The newsmen wearing lens caps
strolled in the landscaped gardens
they were the masters of this time,
and I was a performing my feast,
a definite charm,
don’t blame those delighted hands
dressed, acetate laced fingerprints
slowly washing away particles
discharging colours
as if Curie was inside the portal, by me
all this while
imagining my face as a radiating mineral.

They called it crude
when they dug up
they called everything
unrefined
but stopping at the word,
Pure,
their slight hesitation
enforced a certain lack of --
and they thanked the earth,
almost with their half hearts
“no morals in the crudes”
they say,
they just named it,
the irrational
the red sun from the black hood,
planted in the far side of the moon
land with no forests,
azure lunar soil
legitimate land for the mines
a resource not of nature
stark in contrasts
and on the other side,
an eternal shadow
refining light
evoking poetry,
the world of fancy
likened to a piece of cheese.

A child that he was,
infernal and brimming with
million Volts of energy
no diamond could reflect
nor prisms of sand
but this fine dust of Uranus
served his land of plenty.

Welcome to this interplanetary muck
shared by the sons of Debris.

We now live in our dream called heaven
washed everyday by a little sea.
The water crystals
sing about the stories
of heroes who refused to be.”

drop

drop your gun
drop words
dropping names
dropping bombs
perfect and integrated glory of this state
but there is fascist poetry on sale.

Cities

every night, a city limps back to its glory
cities are full of stories
of bye lanes and fast moving trains
cities weep at night
between neon and ozone
cities flock together
discuss their careers
they exchange smog and rubble
leftovers and sewage
cities analyse their statistics
and print newspapers
finally cities mockingly smile at each other
and go back to being unconscious.

Stories

A short story
once met a long story,

they were written around the same time

about the same people

the shorter one narrated his story

precisely to what longer one described

elaborately

but the shorter one

ended quickly

and the long story went forever
and then the short story fell asleep.

dream

This poem comes from an old habit of writing the dream immediately upon waking up from a vivid and a lucid dream


i should tell everyone
not anyone in particular,
but everyone
all of me
and then all of us
and them
who are here
and present,
but i should tell everyone
not address one among all the particulars
not even talking about the whole
but just me and all of us
and the multitudes of
quiet people who are living within us
and the disturbed thriving within my own,
i should tell everyone about my dreams.

*****************************

the dream

i dream like all of you
as if all of you and I were dreaming
the same thing.
seeing same images,
same exhibits,
intended but unaware
deliberate yet lacking in purpose
the dream of all dreams
of seeing everyone else dream
like how I do.