Virtual Machine

I speak like a compiler to her.
In precise words we exchange ideas; her
Frigid foreignness doesn’t allow
For redundancy in communicated thoughts
And speech.

Our relationship is
An algorithm to her, and
My poetry burns a tattoo on
The inner surface of my public methods,
Which she calls when it makes sense to,
No more, no less.

She wears her austere religion on
Her olive-green sleeves; I lost mine to a song
And a book.

She’s beautiful like a mathematical proof; I am swirling
Twirling, fighting
The hydras of half-thoughts that are born
Out of wedlock between the Past and the Future, who
Copulate with silent screams on my fecund pillow.
I am trying to fill empty spaces in my jigsaw, and she
Fits precisely.

…

Too precisely. Alas, that
Fate is an artist, not a logician.

You Crazy Breed

Skip

Tiptoe

Around

These criss-crossing ropes

That form a maze:

A delicately mutating labyrinth

A hydra that refuses to die.

Second-guessing

Second-thinking

Always second

To the pressing need

To be acceptable

To be normal

To belong.

...

Adultery is a lesser crime

Than slurping. 

Vegas

Miles and miles

Of the United States of

Nothingness; a solitary

Cigarette of happiness dangles

From the side of a racing

scarlet convertible,

impervious to the desert

Wind, which is itself

Retaliation against speed.

Speeding towards

A purveyor of

Hope.

Miles and miles

I have travelled in solitude

Just me and my ironic cigarette, and

The theater of my mind is running

Advertisements -

Billboards that approach billious

And brilliant and increasingly

Behemothic until they vanish -

The Great American Highway is

A Capitalist-Zen dream.

Miles and miles,

And then:

A neon oasis.

She Sleeps

She walks with a

Permanent half-smile

On her face,

She tastes like an avocado

On my tongue.
Her smile 
Crinkles up my world.

She forgives me my cruelties

After midnight

So that's when I call her.

Sleep smoothes away the bumps

I cause in her synapses.

Every years she's getting older

And every year she remains the same.

She spends her allowance on expensive

Stickers that she sticks on cards to me:

Tweety the Bird proclaims her affection

For me, and put

My self-conscious attempts at amatory poetry

To shame. 

Pirate King

Bertrand Russel says that his advice for any reasonably talented young man afflicted with the disease of sinusoidal ennui is to go out into the world, become a king and/or a pirate, explore and live such that survival is never at any point assured. We shall find happiness in struggle - through action, we shall enjoy the present. In motion there is contentment, and in comfortable solidity, decay and boredom and ultimately unhappiness. Like Will Smith says in my favorite movie of his, happiness is a pursuit. Where his character goes wrong is, however (although he may be forgiven for this given his circumstances), is his supposition that this pursuit is an unfortunate fact. Happiness is not a state; at least, not one achievable by ordinary folk who do not have much of a chance at achieving moksha and nirvana and the like. Happiness is necessarily active - it exists in the space between seconds spent moving.

I worry, sometimes, that what I really want from life is what Russell suggests: to become a pirate. Well, not that particular profession necessarily, but rather an absence of profession. Freedom. Freedom from the concept of a career, from the bred need to 'do well', to be successful, to earn lotsa money. From the need, from the disgusting, wretched nauseating need to have a resumé - an A4 size sheet of paper describing the sum total of me, my infinitely complex self with its myriad roots and branches and nodes and shy tendrils, to someone else who decides whether I'm 'good enough' to 'be successful' (quotation-mark everything) based on aforementioned sheet of paper. However, I would hope that I am not naïve: I understand that this organically-grown (and growing) system works best, and is probably the most optimal. It is all just rather unfortunate. I am also not anti-money: money is important, insomuch as it buys things that give us happiness: flight tickets to visit friends and family, books, art: all these things are (often) expensive. This of course begs one way of living a happy life: do a conventional job, amass capital, then do things that give you happiness. This is probably the model followed by a number of people; indeed, it seems like almost every one of my friends plans to do this. Yet here we sacrifice a number of the best years of our relative youth. Is there a point to being able to travel to the Amazon rainforest, when all of ones friends can't because they have families and they must be responsible adults? Or being able to afford the expenses of mountain-climbing, yet not having the knees for it? Can we, in another words, do better in our search for a model to life?

The best-case scenario, and the rarest, is when the performance and exercise of one's skills (the things that come to one naturally; we shall assume that this set is a subset of things we enjoy doing) results in wealth-creation. So the blessed are the computer science nerds, or the techies, or the people-who-love-finance-and-its-siblings: they love their jobs, and at the same time they earn money. To these people I say: I envy you.

Another case is that of the starving-yet-happy poet - intellectual satisfaction compenses for the lack of monetary satisfaction. The love for your craft outweighs the disadvantages to not having money. To these people I say: I respect you, but do not want to be you.

Why do I say that? Because I am increasingly suspicious that I don't have passions. At least none which are financially rewarding. I like computer science and math and engineering for the intellectual challenge of it. I would call what I'm studying 'interesting' and 'satisfying' and sometimes even downright fascinating, but is it my passion? I believe a definition of terms is in order. I define being passionate about something as an activity that you would do in your leisure time. It gives you so much happiness that you would exercise it on a holiday, even if there were no monetary benefit to being good at it. You would do it because the very act of it fills up your soul. You think about it all the time. It is a part of you. In that sense of the word, I doubt I'm passionate about anything.

Except maybe literature. Maybe. In any case, I shall never find out. 

My Little Cousin

My little cousin

Has an uncertain smile

A smile of innocent vulnerability

And it makes me love him.

It's probably a survival technique

Honed by years of evolution

And my love is a calculated response

But the smile slits through my armor of rationality

And I love him.

Montréal

Montreal. The city is an impostor. It would become my home. It beckons me sweetly yet insidiously to dissolve in the echoing jazz borne on the cerulean wings of its wind and in the singing drawl of a melanin-bankrupt denizen.

Montreal. Beautiful stranger. You shall soon give up the secrets of your tresses and the enveloping wrinkles of your brownish-white streets to me, once I get used to your ways and your speech and your idiosyncrasies.

Montréal. These initial salty pillowcases are the ransom I've paid for you.

Montréal. Meet me half-way. Teach me happiness in the insular bubble of individuality. Teach me to be content unto myself, and shower upon me the seasonal comfortable blossom of friendship. Give me you, and let me keep myself. Teach me to accept the accent marks in your name, and your nasal speech. Teach me to accept you, and accept me in turn. Supplant (but gently) the centre of my universe. Make me love you, but let me keep what I had loved safe in the granary of my unconscious mind, hidden under a dusty sack of songs, or maybe filed away beneath an innocuous emotion that darts in unnoticed some rain-and-whiskey soaked late-evenings. Make me come back to life. Adsorb my green-leaved fears and doubts onto your powdery-white skin, and when next spring you shed your skin, let me look back and be happy that I came to your doorstep one late August afternoon, with an inertial heart and a half-formed tear welling in a lonely corner of my eye.

Love

Love

Wakes us up

To life.

It rings a bell

Near our fuzzy ears

Ears that are plugged in

Against the static of life

Unplugs us, and dribbles

In a few choice drops of golden honey

So that we see and hear and touch

Life, as it really is.

Unfiltered.

Hear the beauty of musky speech

In words dropping like soft boulders

From a slope of a liquid tongue

See reflected sunlight on a a windowpane

And love Tyndall's dust mites

Hear the footsteps approaching

Like twin birds flapping,

Slapping against the heel of a beloved feet,

Clapping unconsciously for Today

Trapping.

Smell old cigarette smoke in wood-lined sofa rooms

And love every ash flake that flickers down

Like tired miners.

Love unblocks the mind, widens the

Narrowing filter

And lets it all in.

All in.

Till you swell up with an autumn glow

And burst into unbeckoned humour.

That singes everyday living

Paints a few brushstrokes

Hums a few bars.

Instant Coffee

There's a copy of you

That lives inside my head.

Ersatz-You murmurs like a breeze

Or a ghost

Softly right under the throb of my

Consciousness

During the day, but

At night, Ersatz-You comes out

Of your hiding,

Ferociously stalks like a tigress

The savannah of my mind, hunt

The fauna that creep like slugs and slip

In to the cinema of my pre-slumber

Imagination. My pirated copy of you

Protects me from myself, and

I snuggle into your feline eyes-neck-arms

Every night.

But now,

You're fading. Every night

You're a little paler in my arms,

Your eyebrows are dissolving and

Your cat-smiles come from a great distance.

The flow of Time is eroding a hole in my brain, and

You're slipping through,

Draining from me, and I'm trying to gather

Straws and strawmen into my arms, but

Every night my bed is colder, and soon

The shivering will start.

Fisherman

I'm a fisher-man

I'm a student

I'm employed

I'm a husband

I'm a father

I'm rich

I'm old

I'm a grandfather

I'm a fisherman.

Feminist

The thin, barely-there line of hair that made its way from one depression of the corner of your lip to the other, framing your closed smile; clung to your ivory-chocolate skin like fine moss to a marble wall.

The smattering of down on your exposed arms that you bare audaciously to a magazine world. This poster of rebellion against a parlour-beauty that you wore like an organic medal made me fall in love with your mind.

Dust

Exhausted listlessness

Stalks me through

The bush of the everyday.

Passionless 'how are you's

Old backpains

Listlessness of the day that stretches on for forever

Tired dust that swirls and dances in a ballet Under the spotlight of a beam of stray sunlight

Visible, then invisible. Visible. Invisible.

Incorrigible apathy of the hard bed

That seeps into the patterns in our skin, clenches tight

And holds on,

Till every morning we wake up exhausted.

Cut fingernails

Bits of paper that float in anarchy

Existing without a cause.

Stray droplets of sweat bead and coagulate

And fall, wordlessly.

Small apartments

The walls perpetually shrink

Contract

Squeeze

The life out of me.

Tired smiles

Of tired parents

Old undershirts

And sweaty meals

Served with a smile and the fervent hope

That happiness is well-cooked mutton.

Moisture hangs heavy

Over the dusking evening as

People hang onto their phones in loud

Desperation

And the ones who don't wait silently

Decayingly, for the ones who do.

Four tiny islands

Live under this yellow roof.

Insulated against each other's fire by

Old newspapers and TV and books

Cellphones and summerheat and money

And the internet and tired smiles

And old jokes and tired

Tired tired tired

Tired pursuit of money and/or happiness

Dusty filthy choking

Back empty words and empty jars

Of affection filled to the brim with

The dust of the Indian everyday

Days slip into weeks slip into months

And soon it is time for me to go back

And I have gained nothing, hung onto nothing

Nothing has penetrated my flesh and made home

Among the stars of my heart

Everything is blunted

By the dust of the Indian everyday.

Tired tired tired tired.

The exhaustion makes me want to burst out in tears

The anticipation was impotent

My love for these islands

Is anchoring me into quicksand

And I'm sinking, sinking

Into the exhausted everyday.

There is lead collecting in the pit

Of my stomach.

The abstracted notions of emotions

Connected to time and objects

Are draining like small rivulets into

This lake of churning metal.

The air is so heavy with moisture

That I'm trapped in it, wading through it

And I breathe the scent of old saliva

Every night as I lie on my bed

On my vagrant pillow

And toss frothily

Into the 'morrow. 

Didi

What shall I tell you of this loneliness? It forces its way into me when the sun goes down and the darkness strays impetuously into my silent room through the frosted windows. A half-cry rises in my breast, and I want to scream, but that would be unseemly and unmanly. After all, I chose this. It was my own choice. And the cross of making the right choice I bear with me every night into my bed, and sometimes my pillow is damp when I wake up

Debating

He and I have started agreeing too often and too much. The earlier mental friction that gave our dialogue its life-force is missing; it's been replaced by a presupposition of intellect, a deference and an a priori respect of the other's thought process. We've been correct together too often to realize that we were rarely correct discretely, individually. The whole coherence of thought has bowed down to the part-truths. The two streams of argument that flowed against each other recklessly and fought wildly, cutting each other's crests and filling each other troughs, until they finally flowed in an uneasy equilibrium together have been replaced by separate, distinct streams that do not clash.

Our problem is that we have become friends. It's no longer fun.

Absurdity

Life is Absurd, as defined by Camus and Sartre and Hesse and others before and after them. So then, how do we escape this absurdity? We have been given minds despite ourselves, without us wanting them - to what end? The only truth is Death. We all die, and nothing we do matters. Life goes on.

And perhaps that is how we escape absurdism. Through cheating Death. Through achieving immortality. Through Creation. Art, literature, music... And that most lasting and death-defying act of all: children. A child is the ultimate act of Artistic Creation. A creation wrought from the very cells of my body; what is more beautiful, more immortal, more expressive, more complete? Life perpetuates itself through Love, and Love is both the foundation and the fuel.

4

We used to have

A common well,

From which we used to draw

Several fertile liters every day, and the

Nights would be spent in sleepy

Shovelling, and even the extra inches

Would be wet the next day.

And so our well grew deeper.

Soon though

The summers started piling up, and

We started scraping the bottom.

No more midnight digging -

When the darkness played peekaboo and the night kissed the window panes and everything was doused with a sense of romantic magic for me, it was the caffeinated morning for you.

Soon,

We were reduced to

Trying ravenously

To scrape out a few drops, wring

Out the last vestiges of moisture, and

Then

In desperate thirst, we started supplanting fingertip whispers

For words and directionless passion for

Discourse, and soon every explosion

Started seeming increasingly

More flash than effect.

But

The well is so deep

That to dig another one

Would take another Four Years.

So we hang onto our well

And quench our thirsts at nomadic,

Beautiful, tactile oases.

I have my tiny kittens, for whom

I harden my shield and put on masks,

And say half-felt words, so as to tunnel to

Half-felt sighs, and you

Have your pretty, pretty boys

Whom you call friends.

And we grope in the darkness, through unchartered corridors and tumble through passageways and sleep in musty beds that squeak too much, and maybe we shall fall, finally, into our own parched Well, and smile sadly as they pour sand down onto our backs,

And because we're not donkeys,

Because we are after all honourable

Men and women, with

Pride and ego,

We shall accept our fate.