Category: Poems

“He perished from his monkey’s bite.”
The hall uproars with belched guffaws.
He doesn’t see what’s funny, though.
He hmms and coughs and hmms some more,
Until the host enlists his cause,
“The poet has a word to say.”

He no-nos, smiles, and joins his palms,
But as they try to look away,
“Does everyone not die of pets?”

He likes it when their foreheads net.
They call him woman in their midst.
In this, at least, he lives his name.
Unlike their throbbing phallic jest
That penetrates without consent,
His humour is a welcome womb
That draws their naked interest in.
Or, so he tells his ginger cat.

“Does everyone not die of pets?”
He pours a glass to stretch the pause.
“Are vices not our dearest pets?”
They groan and retch with slow applause.

“We feed them, and heed them,
And constantly need them.”
The host is gracious with his pour.
“We hide them, and bide them,
And lovingly chide them.”
The host escorts him to the door.

“And what do they, but bankrupt us
Of health and wealth and calendars?
And once we cannot clean their shite?
Infect us with infernal bites.”

His “shite” is echoed round the room
And guffaws pat his leaving back.
He kicks his ginger cat at home
And throws at it a tampon pack.

She says, “You are the meanest man.”
l do not know which mean she means.

I’m meanest like the lowliest?
OR, meanest like the average-most?

I’m meanest like deliberate?
OR, meanest like the dullest bore?

I’m meanest like contemptible?
OR, meanest like contemptuous?

I ask her and she screams at me.
“Not OR. You’re AND. You’re ALL of them.”

Divorces don’t determine who
Were right, but only who were left.
And marriages determine this
Today and all todays still left.

For loving is a daily vow
To love the person yet again.
And tolerating is the same:
You choose to tolerate again.

He says we have no future here,
No fortune here, no scope of it.
He doesn’t see the thousand years
Of wisdom in these dusty books
That Father’s left behind for us.

For someone working from his room,
He doesn’t see that all one needs
Is laptop with a data card.
For someone always cooped indoors,
He doesn’t see palatial space
That this here house affords us with.

He doesn’t see the kinder air,
The sweeter water, cheaper food,
And simpler pace of daily life.
He doesn’t see that getaways
Are just as far from here as there.

He points what else he doesn’t see:
No hospitals of any worth.
No schooling for a curious mind.
No privacy from nosy tongues.
No freedom of immodesty.

And yet, for all he doesn’t see,
He sees at least one clearly:
For all romantic words I say,
It isn’t him I try to sway.

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?