contemporary poetry

existence as fiction

existence_as_fiction

Our existence is an exercise in fiction.
And it’s through a perversion of this art
that fiction becomes simulation of reality,
thus problematic.

The task is to comprehend
the problem without attempting
to provide a solution for it.

The greatest actors convey
an understanding of the problem
and are applauded as heroic
because they continue thriving
in contradiction with the unsolvable
(fictitiously real) problem.

This is theater of the mind
and valiant acts have been written
with the futility of blood.

The tragic hero’s only
certainty is his ineffective success
and our only consolation is his
acceptance of suffering.

This is our pathos.
The tragic man makes the problem
his only audience.

He must feign suffering until its pain
becomes as real as the simulation of the problem.

He then says that the salvation is unattainable,
that freedom is nothing more than
the purest state of fiction.

And in the irony of his language, he’s dead right.

 

Contemporary Poetry

Pose for me

body_despair_sketch

 

Take off your clothes.
Peel off every last layer.
Squat, further down.
Place your left arm over your left knee. There.
Bend your upper body to the right. Just there.
Right foot a tad over to the right. Lean forward
the other arm straight down touching
the coldness of the earth. Don’t look
at me, look down as if something
great and heavy was pushing you down
restraining your mobility, locking you
with the awkward chain of the body itself.
Untighten your abdomen. Relax the brow,
look defiant as if you’ve been angry
for years, but tired and nearing hopelessness,
like an irrational animal that’s exhausted
from growling in its cage.
There, let your member hang. Let the
pain of the bones and joints led
to convulsions, feel the crush and the pendulum.
Begin to accept this position as your end,
as your skin’s predestination.
There, that’s it. It will be over soon.
I almost got it.

It will be over …. soon.

 

Contemporary Poetry

prelude to a philosophy of meaninglessness

philosophy_of_silence

I want to write
clear and distinct ideas
expressing how life
is a short sojourn
in an unclear and
indistinct domain

that my philosophy
become the instant
when words ricochet off
the build of reality

to expose the futility
of the understanding
and dilate the aperture
through which silence
sinks

I want to make sure
that the veracity
of my principles
is unverifiable

that the meaning
of my verse
emerges as
a blur of music

I want to leave
the cloud of phenomena
to become a single
dab of mist
throbbing in the
chaotic extent.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

nuance of sense

edge_of_creation

It was in 2013
when I started
dancing –
in the moral sense
of the word.

It was this
year when in
my hole, still
timeworn with despair
that I laughed –
in the philosophical
sense of the word.

It was under
a pale circle
in the sky
that I shouted:
‘more, more!’ –
in the maternal
sense of the word.

It was in
momentary empty
flight when I shot
over the aching nothing
to touch the inchoate
rim of creation –
in the real
sense of the word.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

bellsound

bellsound

 

If the end
at a glance
a whole gamut streaked
about to be found
last feeble fleeting
piece of a second.

Someday come.
When all the pages
are stained with words,
but for a white slice of purity
gliding over the dark fallacies
of thoughts.

The mesh, and the ink
has followed the trail
of remembrance.
but this life
being an anthology of instants
has a silent museum
of shadows and vivid
lights.

When all meaning
at last
is a shapeless mass
if in the end
at a glance
something is found;
a piece of motionless
bellsound nestled
by chance
in the straw
of the verb.

 

Contemporary Poetry

Travel: Here, is the clamor.

sound_of_india

Here, is the clamor.
Totality crackling.
I gather every seed of noise
as grains of rice
inside my cupped hands.
A nomad hymn has travelled
as a fantastic bird
through an atmosphere of time.
Its reflection is a worn
anatomy of ripples:
moving slowly like a full
moon pulsating on a lake’s surface.
The song and the silence
have become animals
savagely wrestling for
a piece of creation. I’m
watching their pristine
movements from a land
where gods sit next to
man, woman and child;
where we all sit
rapt and perplexed
by the howl of the light
and the course of silence.
This is a land where even the gods
confess not knowing their origin;
much less the nest
from which the primal rhythm took flight.

Contemporary Poetry

Travel: this is INDIA

this_is_india

The covers of privacy are ripped off; the pages of the book of life shiver in the warm wind. One does not find chapters or divisions in this book. All is intermingled in one long narrative. The truth is exposed in the streets. It wears no make-up, it does not disguise its raw semblance. People wear their hearts as an unpolished jewel over their chests. There in the streets you read the secret print of every soul. There – out there: misery, happiness, poverty, tradition, greed, compassion, goats, cows, ox, worship, tears, dirt, smoke, smiles, sun, phalli, disease, deformity, piercings, struggle, suffering, patience, motherhood; and above all, silence untouched by the honks, guffaws, the shitting, screaming, the suffering. A mysterious kind of suffering everyone seems to bear peacefully. This is INDIA. Where life is not speculation, postponement, or expectation. It is an open book, where every act or event happens simultaneously, where the cruelty of fate and arbitrariness of poverty is somehow justified in their placid and stoic faces. In this story one must undress from the cryptic paraphernalia of self-hood; one must descend as an open wound into the balsam of reality. – this is INDIA.

Contemporary Poetry

schematization

You now
must know
what it is to crave a glass of water
or to sip a kiss;
to be so reckless as to flood
the heart because it is a crater of chalk
and you’re tired of its empty dusty frame.

I don’t remember what
kind of day it was.
Full of sun with
musky winds, dark with
impalpable clouds, perhaps
flat and drunk in sapphire.

I don’t care what kind of day
it was; a day to forget like all
the rest had I not begun to count
the breaths I’ve taken in despair.

I began stooping like an imbecile twig
that bends with every paddle of the wind
as if an essence had broken into milliard
tiny mirrors on the sidewalk, and I had
to count and sew them back into a remembrance.

I plead for the pallid crust of light that envelopes me
like a bulky perfume to melt into a song of shadow
or even for a single mindless mote of dust
to land catastrophically on me and pierce
this ferrous mold, I want to watch my holy skin
fall away and leave a naked and unwashed soul
standing erect like a pagan odalisque.

But don’t show her mercy, kick her out
of this world drama, let her run barefoot
back to her incomprehensible origin.

It could have been a year ago, while getting on
a bus that I conceived of grabbing silence
by its throat and squeezing out a peep;
I had been so innocently prone to believing
that the world was a gigantic bird suffocating
me with its kaleidoscopic feathers but
now I feel at home because suffering
sets as a sun behind the panorama of knowledge
and even if it is reborn every day I dream
at night of being a thin echo of fiction.

Amen.

Contemporary Poetry

tiny light

buddhism in poetry

find
the springing
color

the neutral
infant that
rests weightless
as light on the
palm

emerge
and glimpse
the impact
between
breakthroughs

ascend
like sexual smoke
into the notion
of emptiness

leap into
an aura of feathers
when the thought
departs

sit between
two naked fires

neither assume
the primitive illusion
of a total universe
nor entertain
the harmony
of its idea

listen for the echo
of the beginning

and the drunken
river of time
that travels
the ancient wrinkle
of being

may shrivel
into a single
drop of stillness.

 

 

Nihilistic Poetry

before wisdom

An animal without thinking of hands opens a cave of innocence. It sleeps without the weight of tomorrow, like a burning match. The other animals are heavy with knowledge, spinning like kaleidoscopes of fat. My ideal self is a plant, surrounded on every side by invisible expanses of solitude. Sometimes it could think, but always to negate. It will say: these petals have not changed the world. And it will sway and tremble in a monotonous wind. If the world is a vessel sinking irrevocably into forgetfulness, there is no real distinction of types. These beings we see, or imagine and sometimes become have no name. Like thistles with nameless thorns. Like music with blind hours. Like blood without the river of taste. I see the fur and claws submerging; the animal does not struggle. It drowns like a bean in water. But I still don’t know if in a glass, an ocean or in eternity.

PoEtry