Month: August 2023

You want a way to know for sure
If I am who I say I am?
The answer is a simple No:
Noone, nowhere, nowhen has been
The person that they say they are.
Pretenders all, pre-tending to
Pretensions of their betters far.
I am the one I wish I were.
I wish I were the one I am.
This circularity of mine –
Now magnetised by glorious goals
And now demagnetised by fate –
Is how I waste my energy.
No tense Potentiality,
In ambush, waits to spring at me.

In looking at the books I’ve read,
I only see the books I’ve not.

Too busy, lazy, crazy, sick
To pick the ones that challenge most:
The classics, histories, long and thick
To whom my shelf plays patient host.
A new year comes; it’s time to pick
A conversation with the ghost
Demanding silence – what a trick –
And then demanding my riposte.

But whether I am wrong or right,
The big books always blow my mind.

Is keeping things to yourself hard?
Does Silence cut you like a shard
Of Truth you find embarrassing?
It’s not that you are gossiping –
The Gospels too are gossip, right?
The gossip on one Jesus Christ?
It’s what you gossip and with whom,
To what details your gossips zoom,
That gives me reason for concern.
By learning more than they should learn
They gain a hold on you and me
And I prefer remaining free.
And ’cause we are no Jesuses,
Nor endowed with geniuses,
We’re quite unfit for gospel talk.
No people throng us, when we walk,
To hang on to our every line.
Resist the bragging. We are fine
Despite what anybody says.
To socialise, we’ve other ways.

Mama! Is that a shooting star?
It’s just an aeroplane, sweetheart.

I still can make a wish on it?
Of course, you can. You always can.

But will my wish be granted then?
Just share the wish. I’ll follow up.

But that is cheating, isn’t it?
That rule is just for shooting stars.

And also birthday candles, right?
Yeah, also fallen eyelashes.

But promise you won’t grant the wish!
No fooling you! My Biggie Boy.

I wish to be a shooting star.
Haha! So I can’t grant this wish?

So I can grant your every wish.
You got that from your Pixar film?

Mama! No fooling you, haha!
I’ll get that comic book you want.

She picks the boxes from the doors –
The Christmas boxes of the rich.
And sometimes some leftover cake.
And sometimes some leftover trees.

Her kids might love to have all this.
The boxes they can burn for heat.
The cake can thicken up the milk.
The trees can make a winter roof.

Her kids might also hate it all.
They hate to wake to fan the fire.
They hate to drink their milk entire.
They hate to even pick a plier.

She rather trade it all for cash
And buy herself some opium.

Praise be the morning when
We wake up, eat up, sleep again.

Praise be the afternoon
We wake up, eat up, watch a ‘toon.

Praise be the evening
We sit and talk of everything.

Praise be the magic night
We bake a cake in fairy light.

The swelling love within your heart
Erupted in your cake’s relief.
I gulped it down your Adam’s Apple,
Oh my perfect Christmas Eve.

I graduated Nobody,
Escaping in bellwether fur
Mistaken by its cosiness.

My one-eyed Education writhed
In agony of blinding pain
My passioned pen inflicted deep.

I should have listened to my peers
Who spoke of patient temperance
In stormy waters of the world.

But I, emancipated wrath,
Ebullient bravado-wreathed,
Proclaimed my name aloud to all.

My Education’s cursed response –
A prayer to Reality,
Its Father by divinity:

To keep me far from native skills
Whose love forever beckons me.
My dear, dear Poetry.

And so marooned from page to page
In fated twists, or false allures,
I write and yet I do not write.

See how the nymph of Comfort Zone
Confines me on her daily page.
My verse is worsening with age.

How much of this will I retain?
And if I don’t, have I progressed?
They say to squeeze the real juice
I have to read it all again
To find the things I’ve missed between
The lines, the words, the spaces too.
And then I’ll doubt my doubt again:
Is there a point to what I do?
To read and read and read again
To read and read and read again?
To learn that I have learned too less
To learn that I have learned too less?
To waste my time to learn I’ve learned
To waste my time to learn I’ve learned?

In school plays, he always was
Solomon the Wise.
Two mothers, one son.
Two claims, one lie.
My brother draws
His cardboard sword
To split the baby equally.
One mother cries and walks away.
She cannot see her son divided.

Now, every time I fight with him,
And mother has to mediate,
He simply walks away from us.
He cannot see her so divided.