I hate Shakespeare, Milton,
and Petrarch. I despise
iambs, anapaests and trochees.
I’m giving up on meter.
All day long I stand
in this cage watching shoals of
mackerels like grey lesions
on blue skin. I don’t know
rhythm or time anymore,
and the only time I see something
other than aquamarine
is when a shark bites a diver’s leg
off. I look forward to it now —
red —
beautiful, but violent red,
gushing, spreading faster than
the clock ticks. Day melts into day
or is it night?
The world’s in revolt, and rivers slowly bleed
You and I have rejected love’s embrace
Consumed by anger, apathy and greed
The world’s in revolt, and rivers slowly bleed
Snap the bruised reed, burn the books they read
Incur the wrath of gods, spurn wings of grace
The world’s in revolt, and rivers slowly bleed
You and I have rejected love’s embrace
They call your writing
two-dimensional,
disconnected from your roots,
lacking that cultural voice
that places Ashok or Leela’s
story on a pedestal,
replete with the dirty streets
of Chennai, the beggars,
and the ruffians moral
policing after whistling and
eve-teasing. They need your
voice to take back a country
lost to majoritarianism,
fundamentalism and violence
by presenting it as it is,
full of sordid details and
bhabi porn and randis,
but why should you comply?
It isn’t like the culture has
given you anything,
it isn’t like your tastes are desi,
it isn’t like you even crave Indian
food all the time
when there’s a bar serving a
good burger and fries.
What is three-dimensional
about some drug addict in
Mumbai, mocking some driver’s
accent while gangsters and
politicians fight in the background?
He ties it all up in the end and
some even say it’s four-dimensional
like a tesseract. It’s a damn formula.
You know you’ll never get published
unless you give in, so until then,
write something outside
cultural, religious, and political
spheres, not caring about
roots or branches,
uncles or aunties,
rasam or biryani.
When you were young,
the streets called your name,
beckoning you to go places,
explore, search, and discover.
And though your father’s
madness and obsessions
pushed you into corners
while mother wept, telling
herself she loved the brute
despite the rancour that bit her
with each fist raised or choke,
you listened and meandered along
alleyways filled with scrap
and yesterday’s bones, oblivious
that one day you’d see the potholes,
the used needles, the trash,
and the dog shit for what it is,
stripped off innocence or
more importantly, naïveté
because you lost your innocence
when the madman howled like
a rabid dog, screaming,
“This hurts me too!”
as if the slaps and curses and
the gnashing of teeth,
was simply discipline,
a mild spanking while you
watched mother fend him off,
a beast from a realm far from
Bethlehem, a demon of death,
a psychopath of the ‘old school’
his father and his father’s father
were part of. Today you no longer
step on those roads
regardless of if the sun gleams
off the asphalt or if puddles
of water prevent movement.
You’re not listening, you stopped
a long time ago, the silence of
enclosed spaces your reality,
meaning and wanderlust
motes in the attic, or worse,
fabrications of distorted minds.
I’m here texting you
at 1 am, wondering if
the time and space
that separates us
means anything.
I have Gin Blossoms playing
on my old Macintosh
and you’re probably
listening to Hunter Hayes
or some other
modern sensation. We’re different,
but placed at this point
in time, in these circumstances for
an unseen reason, and I can’t
help but wonder if in
another world where time flows
backward, and eventide
brings its hushed whispers
and sober greys at some odd hour
we’d have a Benjamin Button
romance: geriatric, calloused
hand holding preceding
a horrible, middle-aged hebetude
when each day ends with a smoke
and a shot of whiskey leading to
an effervescent twenties,
the wisdom of age losing its vigour,
recklessness and nonconformity
making us think of spliffs,
tattoos and muscle,
sex appeal and metal
while silver becomes off-white
and then a blazing red
as we dance to the rhythm
of music that plays backwards,
speaking English that sounds like
Pig Latin, but is really a language
slicing air with its strange
consonants and harsh syllables
while it drifts backwards
with time, the weird aubade
occurring when it shouldn’t.
As my thoughts weave a web,
catching these concepts barely,
I wonder if this is all there is,
and what could
simply could, but won’t,
and whether what would matters
on what I say to you,
or what you say when you
don’t speak, or is simply
another way of saying what will.
Sometimes I love you
and sometimes I despise you, but
I question my affection because
it often stems from emptiness
though I say the sweetest
things, retreating into the world
we made for ourselves with its
characters, inside jokes, and
anthropomorphic bears,
the little space where we can
be ourselves despite the shit
we’ve seen. Is it true love?
I ask myself. Isn’t there more to
love? More substance? More
depth? Isn’t it more than things
said or even felt? Doesn’t it reflect
in the way we treat each other
and the sacrifices we make?
So I doubt everything,
and wonder whether I’m capable
of love at all or if all I do is
joke and tease. Even when
my actions align with what love is —
putting you in front of me,
making those much needed changes —
I wonder if what I’m doing is simply
duty, a following of a routine
that masquerades as the
real thing.
I watched everything I held dear
splinter, break into a million
pieces, my life turned upside
down and nothing anybody said
or did helped me.
I ate, drank, slept and smoked,
becoming the king of all zombies,
a being who loved closed spaces
and hated the sunlight,
a brooding vampire scared of
venturing outside because
he knows he’ll catch fire.
Could I have done anything
differently? I ask myself,
but I know now
that irrespective of if I made my
choices or if someone else
made them for me,
I would have seen the same misery
because we’re placed in particular
points in the grand scheme of things
to serve some greater plan
and what we do or don’t
always aligns with it,
and I guess this was my purpose,
to endure by existing,
to move on without strength,
to fade to black.
I remember walking on the
beach in Mahabalipuram,
the waves raging,
the winds howling,
the pages on which I penned
a poem for you swept away
and I thought
that the rage that made that
moment, the celestial anger
that burned through both
the earth and the ocean
described us perfectly —
two ill-fated lovers
like magnets repelling each other.
I gave into my cruder, baser
instincts that one night
which titillated you,
making you surrender to lust,
and in that moment we
made promises in breathy whispers
and held each other, saying
we’d let the other know everything,
but thinking back, our passion meant
nothing, and our ecstasy
was without substance.
Perhaps we were never lovers
to begin with, and I doubt
we’ll be friends unless we let
the other in. So let the ocean
sweep the debris and ashes
away because the smiles
and tears only amounted to a
weak simulacrum of love
and everything that comes with it.
I’m smoking my cigarettes,
lonely, watching some dude
walk his dog around my
apartment complex,
and I want to laugh at the
mundanity of it all,
or cry because life’s a
senseless burden we’re
forced to carry, but I’m too mute
now, too insensitive, too callous
and too numb to feel or even
lose myself to thought.
Days blend into days
and every dawn brings with it
a conglomeration of madness —
disjointed shapes,
incoherent sequences
and odd, disproportionate
patterns. I want to care
about you, but I’ve seen too
much to reach out.
I want you to reach out,
but I know you’ve seen too much
to actually give a damn.
So spare me your opinions,
your bold-faced lying and
let me continue watching
as the dog rushes towards
another passerby who’s perhaps
not as lost as me.
Just a Writer 
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