I am slowly turning back home,
all desires locked inside
a monosyllabic yawn,
as if i uttered charms,
of a distant time.
On the tip of a spear,
that separated my ribs,
into a forensic sample,
was marked with a sign
of wakefulness,
of forgetfulness,
of sleeplessness,
these were the marks of time
eternal, as they may seem.
Interesting exchange between a writer and a publisher:
“Publish me no m@%@#@%r,”
“Publish you! You are no piece of ass. What can you lend me?”
“Publish me, no m@%@#@%r, I have got a mouth to feed,”
“Publish you! You ogre, you stink of c$m and grease.”
“Publish me, no m@%@#@%r, I will write incest porn for you.”
“That shit is not ethical, even if your son is j@#$%#g off reading you.”
“Publish me no m@%@#@%r, this world is coming to an end.”
“You have balls of steel, son but it’s my pen, which is on fire.”
“Publish me no m@%@#@%r, I will bring money from the mafia.”
“I think you missed the plot, I am the mafia boss here, investigating every drop of your c$m.”
“Publish me no m@%@#@%r, else I will get you bummed off.”
“IN-timid-DATING meh, I will call the cops.”
“Publish me no m@%@#@%r, I will find you the best prison lore.”
“You are no f%$%$^g MANDELA, and Sodomy is not this season's flavour”
“Publish me no m@%@#@%r, at least let my son j#$k off.”
“Publish you m@%@#@%r? Go do some drugs, you peddler.”
How deep he dived for a coin,
was really the depth of your faith,
tossed from your fingers
of your hands hanging from a window,
in your struggle
to pray against the speed of the bus
crossing the rickety bridge
on the Holy river.
OR "How to imagine an apocalypse in two distinctly alien worlds by lighting two cigarettes and involving very few words."
Two writers bunked the local literary festival. The truth is they were considered a little more radical than everyone else. But they kept insisting that they bunked the festival, so they could go about doing what they like the best. Somehow, both of them agreed to imagine shorter plots this year. One was called the Bird and the more radical of the two was liked to be called the Camel. And this is how justify the ‘bunk’:
The Bird: Absolutely horrible! -- This whole idea of calling writers from everywhere and then..these discussions. I don’t want such patronages. Thank you very much.
The Camel: Readers, not patrons. Groupies, not fans. This fest is absolutely disgusting. I replied saying that that the dust from the busy feet of all the writers would be a bit too much for me. Writers walking together. Writers writing together, thinking together..
The Bird (interrupting): Sleeping together? ... I mean I don’t have a problem with people sleeping together. I am also open to orgies but it’s a bit funny. Come to think of it. All the filth in your body, that feeds your imagination, suddenly has to be washed. You are reduced to nothing but a complacent pink blob trading your favourite spot on the bed with people keen on raping you intellectually, molesting you verbally and then fucking you. They hardly match your exotic fantasies. They are filled with the insecurity of their anatomical crevices burning with desire to be loved, pursued, chased and then praised for their written word.
The Camel: Yeah..I mean, you could fuck or you can just read. You can’t fuck and read at the same time. I don’t think fornication entails reading a book.
The Bird: That would just appear like someone’s reading an instruction manual to fornicate. I am so glad I bunked.
The Camel: You know it now Bird. That was an easy deconstruction of a literary fest like that.
The Bird: I am thinking, we should stop writing complicated stories. The readers like it but I think they move to other complicated authors. And there are just complicated stories these days. Even simplest of the simpletons imagine a complex plot and then bring in elements which are not neccessary. I think we should not waste peoples’ time. So what have you got here for our little literary rendezvous?
The Camel: I like the last point. Your argument was very complex, though. People do not have time. We have all the time. So we could think of small and small plots. That would give us many, less complicated, even profound plots. I have one ready for you:
‘A shiny extraterrestrial mammoth walked past the helium balloon parked in the viscious landscape of Koban, the planet of swamps. The volatile atmosphere of this methane compressed terrain couldn't stop the smoker from lighting up another one, and that's it. Koban just blew up man!’
This is like the shortest plot that I could ever imagine in the alien worlds theme.
The Bird: Wow! When did this happen?
The Camel: Umm ... Almost instantly as we were speaking.
The Bird: But, I am not capable thinking so quickly and so minutely. Ok, minutely is not the right word here. I mean that was minimal and still was so...
The Camel: For those who don’t have time. But I am really afraid, what if they fail to grasp this connect between swamps and methane gas?
The Bird: You could replace with a race that survives on its own.. umm... gas.
The Camel: That’s brilliant. See you got it. So frame it up for me.
The Bird: Okay I will just stick to the same name for the planet. Its Koban, you said.
The Camel: Ya!
The Bird: ‘The lone stranger riding on the helium balloon across the dappled realm of Koban landed softly on its soil. But before the stranger even realised while lighting his last cigarette, Koban’s high and mighty, the only intelligent life form of its moist planet survived just by inhaling the gaseous content emanating from their posteriors. And then Koban was history, almost in an instant.’
The Camel: Classic! This ends our literary rendezvous. Thank you Bird.
How they dramatised information gathering with music playing in the background?
How they mimetised universe to build these exhibits for consciousness?
How they categorised all the plants and animals for a selective kill?
How they organised the self and built machines out of souls?
The waterhole was crowded with the presence of the experimental polaroid photographers distributing the pamphlets of repetitive imagery to the poor children on the street, so that they can use the pamphlets as paper roaches in their evening sniffing session. sniff... sniff ... sniff...everybody violated newton's laws and now they all want quantum leaps. the waterhole wanted us ‘to burn’ and its mechanised hands spraying yeast over the pungent fumes, promising a transcendental ride. And before you could take this quantum leap, a few questions haunted the thrill seekers in their visceral sobrierity. How did you form such intoxicated notions of science? How did spirit of the rational merge with the ghost of a believer? No answers please. Let them be open ended like your posterior, often very subtlely clothed and bathed, massaged and raided. Let your hands embrace such ugly questions, so that you can hang them high and dry in your living room. The visitor arrives and he is perplexed. You show him the Waterhole after all some celebrated social norm said that waterhole was for the visitor. It is not for you so don’t even bother going further.
The waterhole was blessed with the symbolic linkages, and past participles served as conduits linking you to the nether world. And then there were thrill seekers stealing words (so that they can ride the quantum leap of their imagination). For the visitor, this was an old trick. And then these stares, blank or full of mischeif. Stolen or otherwise, these glances will not work here. Stolen glances are for the poor children eager to see you making toys for their sniff sessions. Long aquiline noses waiting for this ephemeral barbeque. The visitor makes a comment, but nobody gives a shit. Nobody knows the visitor. His name was stolen from the tragic death of a cat. Low self esteem was his middle name, even though others, the less subtle ones, the more pronounced dwellers of this realm imagined that low self esteem is a car with self ignition. “Where are the gods when you need them?”, the visitor questioned the damp ether around him.
There were no answers to be found in this Waterhole. The big black paradise subsuming every naked men and naked women inside it. They were naked because they are a part of this hole. The monstrous close circuit television cameras bled that night when these people contested their own nudity by worshipping phallus for the state-sponsored cleanliness drive. Their disregard for clothes had something to do with the security of the eyes keeping a close watch on them. They were brave and suffered from fake diseases on the weekdays. The Waterhole lived between photographic images, robotic moves, and the desolate young lover who experimented with social apathy. Such was the misery of this dull black city, coming to life whenever traffic lights blinked, whenever their were people reading horoscopes, and whenever there were echoes of phone rings or the beeps for the messages.
“Hi! The scene is on. It is called loneliness. It is also called contentment and success. There is nobody to bother you visitor,” beeped the Waterhole’s alarm system, as it recognised a familiar pattern of disdain on his face. It may have detected the brain waves that rejected the idea of buying a drink. The resistance towards public drunkenness, therefore the no scene of profit happening here. “I am not bothered. I just want to go home, sleep on my borrowed quilt, my filthy rented apartment. Somehow, locate my own sanity in this barter of services,” the visitor answered. “But you need to pay bills, you need to eat tall claims of vigour and exhuberance, chew them with your teeth, may be masticate so that all the emaciated thrill seekers may follow you in denial ... of their own selves. They need a follower or a spa but chances they would like you to be their spa, provided you have chewed enough of your bills and shat through your pockets. How about ambushing some meat? Flesh pleasure, skin-dipped for your soggy posterior that can actually burn when on fire,” beeped the alarm system of the Water hole. It could offer just so much in terms of words, as most of the writings were just calendar dates, event promotionals and fire-fighting with the law. Law was above all but the waterhole was above the law, so the jungle rules applied here as everyone succintly referred to them as club rules.
“Yes I can throw a fit, call the fire fighters but what’s the use? You would rather burn this place down, keep it shut for a few days, get back all the money from the insurance claim. What if it made to the news, there were enough of us to make you come back, sign a few papers and exchange carburetters for jukeboxes. The show must go on but with breaks for rehabilitation and co-existence,” blurted out the contorted face of the visitor to the spirit of the Waterhole, now almost unresponsive like a computer post its shut down.
But someone knew, what someone said, but someone didn’t know how to end all. To turn things upside down or not? The waterhole was upside down for sure. It was a bat, hanging from a ceiling, probably listening to your mindwaves. Everybody imagined this waterhole to be a chandelier surrounded by a deep biblical halo. The city of the visitors, of those who went for a spellcheck of their names. The mis pronounced versus the more pronounced ones. The newpaper writers scrambled for a spell check, but often trying their best to sex it up, even their names.
“Sex who up?” suddenly the dead alarm system came to life. The visitor never imagined that the waterhole would be..so...responsive to this thought of ‘sex’. But as long as sex was taboo for teeming millions secretly fornicating anyway, there was this mechanical excitement. The guess here would be that this excitement has been recently passed on to the machines by humans.
“The newspaper,” and the visitor swallowed his own spit. The waterhole’s cameras could detect spitting people and instantly evict them from their premises under the charge of spitting and public nuisance. Then, one day as a name like the visitor’s thought it would be nice to organise a vomit fest, the culture of spraying yeast over the fumes was suddenly mainstreamed. But spitting was not allowed, literally or figuritively.
“Ah! Now I see. You are with the resistance,” uttered the machine, that sounded like an imitation of a celebrity waiting in the queue to get her name pronounced. Resistance is the only one thing the Waterhole was scared of. What if the resistance came and took away all its pleasures, incestous or otherwise, exposing for what it was worth. The Waterhole, witnessed a protest last year, when other men and women desperate to get inside, suddenly decided to un-belong and burn a copy of the club rules. Waterhole immediately shed its sectarian shell, and a newer monster appeared in the span of six months, impressing every living being in the vicinity.
Men wanted to be hairier, women wanted grow more boobs and others wanted what other wanted and that would go on an infinite loop on this madness to try and hide ageing. The visitor could not answer such a question. The resistance, in itself, was a quagmire but somewhat larger, and perhaps a more realistic demon than this little Waterhole of intoxication. How would this visitor negotiate with the Waterhole, on the questions of selfishness and greater good if there was discussion on the resistance. The only way out of this mess, was to run. Run far from this city. Run and leave behind everything. The escapist’s route seemed the best here. The demons of resistance or otherwise were too big. Resting on imagination of a few. It was the blight, the disease of social evolution. The visitor could not confront this to be a reality. It was too time consuming. There was just one instance of life, he knew well. It was his. It was his only. The others were ghosts.
ENDS
Recently, two poets met after 40 years at Nizamuddin Station. I cannot say that they ran into each other because both of them were expecting this encounter. They were probably closest rivals of each other and they both wrote in English. One was brutally honest and the other was an empiricist. Beyond these ‘isms’ or moral constructs, they had an amazing ability to attack each other with poems. About 40 years ago, when the railway platforms were still under construction, the authorities blamed them for causing a riot inside the railway station. Their fans had clashed and they basked in their enmity. The authorities always blamed the poets for what happened at Nizamuddin station. But now, nobody knows them. They both found jobs with various communication wings of government and private enterprise and won awards for writing brutally honest and empirical poems. The empiricist is called Kabhina Kavi and the honest fellow is called Such in.
S: Pomposity never arrived in this station, like how it has now after 40 years.
KK: Hope you are being treated like a tramp. I have not read a single poem by you. I don’t even subscribe the magazines that carry your filth. You are pathetic.
S: This time you should at least be honest about your misdeeds. I know how you looked at that young student. Disgusting! You are filth. That doesn’t even need any personification.
KK: You are still bitter about so many things. Must be leading a horrible life.
S: We are wasting time because we do not have an audience now. Anyway this poem is what your epitaph would read like. I never imagined in my life because imagination, i thought, is unnecessary. I mean anything that needs imagination would engage the idea of absurdity and in that process, people like you miss the point of doing the things that you are supposed to do, mislead young one into believing that there is relevance in imagining things. With honesty, there is certainity. Certainty requires no imagination because certainity is build over the repetition of actions. Actions, even if they are planned, needs some work. Anyway, we have too many things here. But I could not conjure up anything more than this but what you will read to your children, if you decide to be honest like me:
I lied about the metaphors,
They were not mine,
I lied about imagining myself inside
a mirror,
It was my reflection.
I lied to you about light,
the faster this light travelled,
the darker it all seemed.
I lied to you about brilliance,
for such brightness could only kill
and you are not a bug.
I lied about the stars too,
I lied about the dark spots on the moon,
I lied that Earth as round,
look at everyone talking about this one plane of equity.
I lied to you about roses,
They were red because I chose
not many but just one.
I lied to you about beauty,
Covered up my greed and lust.
I lied to you about mountains,
and the bubbly streams,
They were only pools for people to drown,
I lied to you about you about my language,
I could have been twisting my tongue,
in the benign absence of mockery.
KK:
“My name is not on the crime records,
not even on the births register,
I must have avoided the census,
and probably never turned up for the class,
nor was I admitted to a hospital,
never owned a vehicle,
and never made it to the lists
of hopefuls or has-beens,
nor the most-wanteds and never-beens.
I was never insured,
nor my name,
and together we missed publishing game,
therefore not on the merit lists
nor on the reserved quotas,
I never made to the waiting lists,
and obviously missed the voting lists,
and my faith never listed me as a believer.
I am not a prisoner, even if it seems,
not an undertrial or a convict.
Unlike everyone else,
I was never on the guest list,
nor was I featured among the top-million rich.
And from the bottom,
my name was missing from the POW list,
or any other beings of war,
even those secretly fought,
nor I was in exile or that missing spy.
No! I was not on the list of state secrets,
nor on the list of mysterious creatures,
and never shared my berth with an yeti
or a certain grey alien, who’s now revered.
I might be endangered though,
but I was never protected to start with.
And I have no reason to feel insecure.”
S:
KK
Kabhina Kavi fell inside the gap between the railway platform and the train. Suchin, leaving all his imagination behind tries to pull him out. But Suchin looses his grip and both get mashed by the train. No one knew.
ENDS
We were negated,
opposed, deafeated,
failed, misrepresented,
hated, arrested,
jailed, failed,
for our collective
misgivings
by our collective
structures, owned
by the conscious
protectors,
of our faithful foremosts,
and since they could
not restore their belief
in our deeds.
So we drifted,
and we drafted
a charter,
named all of us guilty,
and committed sin together,
fled to open spaces,
ran liberated, orphaned
disowned and free.
I wanted to build you a home,
because loans are sponsored tombs,
And I will be dead
hanging from an insurance tree,
my corpse would hang free
of the caged spirit.
This is my body,
the altar of your investment,
my shadow needs the grooming,
and prepare for this impending doom
called senility,
this depreciating humility
of my wasted consciousness.
Then, they called it recession
for I was assured we need to rest,
To slow this malignant growth,
and we wanted that moon too,
"But there is a pattern,", he said
for this market Saturn
who feasts on hollow aspirations.
What if the tiller had taken your cheese,
and convinced you that you were rich,
and he was poor.
So a nervous Apocalypse didn’t know,
where to start or what to shoot,
For there was semblance of order
in every art and you looked so amused.
Men and women buying more papers,
sealing more gift wrappers
sans giving.
Men and women struggled too,
Begged on the streets,
across the narrow lanes,
of a loud desert of unknown hands,
waving left and right.
These hands were dreaming hard,
fingers pointing towards the sky.
God is a cannibal,
universe is his creature,
we are his feed,
He is the master,
He is omniscient,
and that we must know,
God feeds on us,
so that he can invite us for dinner,
in his living room called heaven.
क्या देख रहे हो?
अच्छा! फोटो खीचने आये हो?
फोटो सिर्फ मोडल और मुरदो के खिचो, पैसे मिलेंगे तुमको|
ये कुदरत तुम्हारी नहीं सुनेगी, और न तूम उसकी सुनोगे!
क्या तुम्हे लगता है की कुदरत तुम्हारी राह देखती हुई, बन-थन कर बैठी रहती है?
"कब मेरा फोतुग्रफार आएगा, और मेरे हरे भरे वादियों की फोटो खीच कर छापेगा"?
क्या देख रहे हो?
मोडल को दिल दे बैठे हो क्या? या सपनो में मुरदो के चेहरे नज़र आते है
या फिर कुदरत ने धोखा दिया?
अच्छा चलो मेरा फोटो खिचो ज़रा|
अरे क्या देख रहे हो?
