Month: March 2023

I’m often in a reverie
Of things I’ll do hereafter –
As if the deed’s already done
And I am merely calling back
A favoured, coloured memory –
Embezzling the impetus
That would have birthed the actual act.

It saves me quite some effort, this.
Were I to marshal energies
For every ping that shakes my heart
And makes me tap and pull and swipe
My faculties of fertile flair,
Would I not find myself in want
When on my desk I pull my hair
And nothing else will come with it?

If I can wrest contentment from
A mere hour of fancied flight,
And thereby save a year’s regret
Of why at all I started, right,
Am I not in the profit still?

Our culture urges urgent action,
Damning those who sit and dream,
And through the plastic dreaming, choose
The act that so consuming is,
It effortlessly overspills
Into the realm of actioned beings.

Who knows, perhaps, our culture’s right?
And you are right to call me names –
A lazy loser languishing,
A wise-ass wasting willingly –
And I am wrong to spend my days
In energetic ennui,
Denying all the professed fruits
Of my invested venturing.

But grant me this: do I not gain
A workshop from my idleness?
So what if it’s the Devil’s own?
Do I not get a place to craft
My fancies into daily art?

In trying to reset my clock,
Reset diurnal calendar,
Reset from owl to morning lark,
I have amassed a debt of sleep
The equal of a couple weeks.

The fog of mind precipitates
Into a marble coronet
Around my forehead, temples, ears,
Which begs to slip along my tears
That fall for strain, not sentiment.

And yet I keep it propped in place
With rubble of some coffee beans,
To keep schedule by any means,
As if an owl would give two hoots
For early worms or sun salutes.

You end up getting used to it.
Upsetting? Yes, yes. Every time.
But then, you’re getting used to it.

My first was when I first arrived –
The very day I got this room.
Some woman down in 13C.
They wheeled her out along this hall.
I could have gotten 13C
Had I arrived a few days late.
It has the garden view, that room.

And then it took some months again
Before they wheeled another out.
I knew that one. He picked his teeth.
The kind of teeth you wished he lost.
He never did. Not even one.

Oh no, no. I don’t make new friends.
They want to ask you everything.
And worse, they tell you everything.
And then they try to sell their Gods.
I’m used to books and sitting still.
It’s lonelier to talk and know
That no one gets you in this place.

I sleep and exercise alright.
Unless the virus gets me now,
I think I have a decade still.
I have enough to pay for it.
My sons will whine and drone about
When I become a bill to them.

I’m living more lives daily here.
The library is full of porn.
They call it Literotica.
Donation boxes full of it.
God bless the sinners of the world.
Whatever God they suck up to.

I wouldn’t mind a new romance.
Though I would skip the talking part.
The guy in 7A is mute.
I’ve seen him see me fingering.
It isn’t what it used to be.
But, maybe, if a man…who knows?

You see? It’s not that I can’t talk.
It’s just that no one gets me here.
You got me started with that smile.
You sure you will not like it here?
Here. Video call me anytime.
I got a tripod yesterday.
It hurts to hold the phone for long.

The Buddhists have a word for it –
For when the mind precipitates
The crystal acquisition of
A skill it toils to activate.

For when what felt so “Hunh? Saywaa?”
But days and weeks and months ago,
Feels “Obvious!” and “Yes, of course!”
“Predictably!” and “So, then so”.

“Ahaa!”, “Eureka!” do not reach
Enough to hold the process whole.
And often they mistake it for
A latent genius’s role.

From “tongo” meaning “instantly”,
And “zengo” meaning “gradual”,
The Buddhist “Tonzen” gets it all –
Integral and residual.

Connecting dots is “instantly”
When all of them are in your face.
Collecting dots is “gradual”
For often they are tough to trace.

You need the vision to detect
The constellations in the stars.
You also need the doggedness
To keep on sifting heavens far.

“You have to read him out aloud.
And if you can, do learn the lines.”
That’s all she ever asked of me
When I implored her to divine
The genius of Shakespeare.

I tossed it as clichéd advice.
I could not make the meanest sense
Of how his words enmeshed with life.
So, why attempt, in staged pretense,
The genius of Shakespeare?

It’s only after sixteen years,
As I recover sanity,
That as a liberated fool,
I strut to voice, with vanity,
The genius of Shakespeare.

His origami language,
His curdling cud of metaphors,
Incarnate on my conscious tongue,
Through music of his metered verse,
The genius of Shakespeare.

No limitation unstruggled,
No beauty undemonstrated,
No role in life has yet escaped –
Not even pauses, unstated –
The genius of Shakespeare.

So, when my mind is fuddled now,
When music suffocates my ears,
When shayari of Sufis fails,
I summon for my torment fierce
The genius of Shakespeare.

To say, “I’m great”, is ego, yes.
To say, “I suck” is ego too.
It’s best to stay away from both.

But best for whom? Is it for me?
For “ego” is the Latin “I”
And “me” is just another “I”.
But, can I stay away from I?

Of course, you’re a handyman,
A practical and working man,
A man who doesn’t truss himself
In “Who I am” and “Who I’m not”.
So, tell me, truly, handy Van,
Exactly where you etch the line.
For even if I take your words,
Your “I am a spirited man”,
Is that not also “ego too”?
So, can you stay away from that?
That line that drives your present art?

But, should you even? Should we too?

In carrying down the fumbling flame,
My slippers slip on lichen steps
That lead into the blackened pond.
My knees are knees reflected in
The rippling water pulling me.
My arms are arms of nearby trees
The monkey troupes are highwaying.

He must be blinking heavy sighs –
The one who always stood so firm,
Unshaken but for grumbling lips –
Receiving bumbling offerings.

I’ve trussed myself in narratives,
Inextricably intertwined,
Of who I am and who I’m not,
For none are a convincing rope
To hang my dreams with hustle clips,
Or hang myself with dignity.

The fires underneath me grow.
I fan it with my every throe.

The “easy” tetrameter rhyme
Makes reading so enjoyable –
Despite the claims of “cringe”, remains
Effectively employable.

The “busy” pentameter verse,
Though blessed by Milton and the Bard,
Makes reading it so “dronorous”,
The reader feels like full retard.

I took our words from WhatsApp chats
And sieved out all connector words,
And passed the rest through AI code
To get a glimpse of what we talk
And what we seem to leave alone.

It did not help we speak three tongues
And often mix them all at once.
It did not help we make up words
And often misspell ones we don’t.
It did, however, help to know
We speak sarcasm fluently,
But only when we start a fight.

Results are underwhelming, though.
The AI says we are in love
And not just kids who talk of love.
The AI says we are at risk
Of getting bored and ending things.
The AI says we are confused
Of who we are and what to do.
The AI says we are okay,
No matter what the AI says.

The point, I think, is merely this:
We’ll love until we’re tired of it.
And pray we’re never tired of it.