Sometimes serious

There is a place not so haunted, that has remained, bearing the sound of a muted rain lashing on car windows, on a long street without sharp angles, and several red stop lights the low monotony of wipers going left - up - left - up I have been walking around waiting, for the bells I hear to mean revolution, and the prisons of strong cars To not be in my mind, but with everyone inside not too close to not breathe. I see the blobs streetlights, in watercolor yellow, and midnight white No matter which street this is, or which day, or what festival we are decorating for, or what turn of the seasons, has brought us here To buy a ride is anonymous disappearance in an unnamed city. No matter how I hold your hand, or whose hand it is i hold, and what questions you ask, about the dredges and trails of the days memory, What kind of times are these, where to be in these fifteen minutes of false safety must be, as, to be in motion?

one day you might realize that you are an extra a cog, a burnt out piece of equipment in the rube goldberg world that is planned by no one an entirely replaceable piece of window dressing as an ode to strangers, withholding immense suffering in their beings fighting immense indifference on the outside we're all trying to be more than window dressing even on that day a stray runner looks into your house after nightfall at your mundane activities watching tv, and arranging flowers for a sense that there's at least someone that's at home a colleague might walk by your desk seeing you gaze at amazement, at your instantaneous boredom a sign of life, and engagement of energy flowing around them your laughing at a dog video in a bus your irritating sneezing in a concert your presence in a party as nobody your terrible stroke in the pool your dumb tweets your things are truly better expressed than not and when we all speak together, aloud fortiss...

if you ask me today: HOW ARE YOU? and ask me again in 3.5 hours and then again in two weeks and a month again, over text messaging. How are you? :) I might have to keep telling you: like shit. just as many times. But that a question was raised. A QUESTION WAS RAISED about how i was. is enough to trigger uncertainty that i feel like shit. Heisenbergs microscope trying to measure something despite knowing that the answer is: SAD. BUT AS LONG AS WE CAN ASK, WE WILL NEVER BE SURE THAT IT ALWAYS IS.

I tried to hurt myself using you  weaponizing you  turning your care ballistic  and my softness into weak armor  i tried to use the hollows of your lower back as landmines  your words as small sharp blades that fit into old razors and broke in twos  your lips as quagmire meant for drowning  i used your attraction as fission a devastating proxy for the  surplus destructive energy in  my own mind when your love was not enough  i used your presence as war horns  alerting formations of my hearts cavalry  into attacking your defenseless desire  your scattered battalions that were only looking for me  when I waged this war, i even used your indifference to hurt me  a blunt injury sustained under my very living skin  a slow passage of bloodclots into a series of hurtful colors  why?  why do we cut ourselves?

i trusted you with my name when i taught it to you you, the you in the second person that has become my dialogical self irritatingly speech that is either self directed or directed at the Other our stories could be anyone's with enough empathy but our name and our skin are only ours, and our skin dies with us but our name it can be flung around as nebulous identity and it can be hidden and thereby forgotten as would be in death. i should not have trusted you with my name when i taught it to you.

in marathi, we say that a depression has come, it has arrived, been welcomed. taken its slippers off, having tea watching television in your living room. in english we say that we are depressed, that use of copula, equation symbolic castration of its tyranny as identity a mental state may or may not be an externalising force 'my depression' we call it our ownership of our darkness our right to assert the sweet sweet depths of black darkness our power to let it bend at our will, knowing that it doesn't. every time we forge a relationship with a mental state like unicellular organisms achieving mitosis not as clones, but as a twisted splitting of a dicotyledon i don't speak all the languages but in some there must be a gentler way a kinder alternative for our own minds.

for all of that which is sub-liminal under the margins waiting to snap but hasn't already the pressure under the bubble the steam under the whistle the clot under the rupture we must suffer under the margins, the allocated scale for reparation starts when you gain 50 points, and not 49, and so for 49 - you must suffer you are sub-liminal to be helped and must help yourself, the world is divided most often into two (2). and not more.

i see a woman sitting next to me go over and over again reading the chat messages between her and her hot and cold lover 'do you even read me?' she asks 'i do miss you' and every so often, like breadcrumbs to a sparrow he throws a little heart sign back she's at a safe distance to always be had, i'm snooping over my shoulder, at a sad romance a theater of dishonesty built from small cowardices and then larger ones. 'it's 2019', we're all yelling at each other; tokenizing small and large pieces of respect that we forget to give to our selves, suffering indignities at the hands of love, or desire, or to repeat the indignities that we thought we deserved. i snoop shamelessly into this chat. gazing in second-hand horror a third person perspective of my own self.

abandonment is the natural order of things shipwreck aesthetic new fish swimming with the rust old corpses deep in the sand dunes by the bed of the sea where organic matter doesn't even compost to leave, look back, your history streaming from your own materiality abandonment, to leave and be left, forever forgetting, and the heady current of melancholia to revisit, renegotiate question: if all of those things were love or none of them were

i found a burnt letter by the river today about the time they met and the bridges they saw in the city that will drown that had linen hung by every window to dry just like the little flowerpots of springtime façades the corner that they hid in, seeing the boats by the canals, carrying amazon.com delivery preserving the wild city formed completely of stairwells the secret pathways to golden, romantic era architectures, tiny streets towards unseasonable beaches, the relaxing strangeness, the handwritten menus, the soft towels, the warm showers, the tiny kitchens - the very details of intimate acquaintance - burned strewn by the side of the river delicate monochromatic singed paper with tiny handwriting in black ink burnt. fuck this nonsense, they must have said fuck the details. there is no contradiction between being poetic. and ugly.

night comes gilded foil on the atmosphere, purple rust in blue air, the smell of settling exhaust, city structures sway, as they did all day, we now take notice. the gentle, and the absurd the slight. the slight, and the tender the moderate. the night is tender and not horrendous because it's not just me in it. the horrors of my loneliness haunt me less even if despair does, my occupation as a poet is to translate hormonal neurochemical chains into substantives. i try to make feelings argumentative we must decide, we must know we must discuss what to do, reconcile how far we have come, and how it is our own fault, touch - gently as it were, from skin. pretend as though this night and its smells are sign and signification. 

will i ever stop wishing i was elsewhere or believe i should be elsewhere or try to actively be elsewhere fighting twilight with torches, marching alone, and so without coordinating steps, not attempting to escape the glass jar, but suffering regardless from the tyranny of what should be. what should be is not even utopia it's not the crushing weight of dreams but that of mistakes, or the compelling drive to make them or the fear of it having been too late now. this is not sylvia plath or a fig tree it's just me trying forever to be absent.

Years go by fast but seasons don't end I've been running for years it feels like to find places of beauty, hoping to show you for you to find it in the places where i find it That you would legitimise your sense your worthiness in appreciating letting it come to you Your language is like soft silted mud I will breathe through these minerals And when the time becomes right it comes it will come as warm rain you would let it wash you I would stop running Maybe one day you won't talk the language of discursive poetry but of action still and maybe one day action will no longer require ground truth.

suddenly one day there'll be an unnanounced energy. your tongue will taste like gold, your heart will be lifted by a swarm of hurtling butterflies there will be dream clouds in colours yet undiscovered to you swimming in your brain the smells of fluorescent pollen will cloud your rivers and everyday will suddenly reach a thick and unknown density. the brightness of the world will not be possible to actually harness. the knowledge of this fading and the impending silence, and the exit of this silence too, will not help. until that day there is just waiting.

light reaches out through the margins bends around the leaves, travels through thin petals pierces the tiny holes in dry leaves light reaches out grabbing the quiet contours of your face lightening your irises making your fine hair almost translucent the drink in your hand almost fluorescent light reaches out through the colours the powder blur on the skin the diamonds on the water without reaching out there isn't any light, all light really does is reach out. bounce back and reach out and bend around every edge light isn't anything that it doesn't do and essentializing as it might be and in this naïve moment we mustn't be what we don't do either.

to get over somebody they must die inside you your mourning of them must be completely selfish a building burns, and we immediately begin to talk about ourselves what we were near it who we were because of it what it did to us. our world is a million non-intersecting egocentric frames our house burnt down too, we say it was yy years ago, oh the smell of ash! connecting word to word memory to memory, mapping one by one, the bricks of the same unreal landscape someone's death, or their absence is really all about you and your longing.

my heart is raw, and needs to be processed before being consumed again. it needs: scaling (as for fish), to removing its crusts slow cooking, until it is tender finely chopping, shucking, revealing maybe a rainbow de seeding, plant new saplings? filleting, de boning, so the flesh can remain flesh puré, make the pulp that it is pickling, some of it may well be preserved and beating.

they will get you, the skincare people convince you that this face is worth preserving that it is anything, and that wrinkles and lines are not worth the passage of time they will catch you failing at faking your age catch you napping in indifference as if scars are not evidence they will get you to submit to erasure and have a clean canvas put colours back where they are meant to be draw bigger eyes as if scars weren't evidence of events as if history didn't need material memories they will get you to plump up your wrinkly skin and hate yourself gradually

a long time has passed but not enough time has passed still for our trial in the court of beauty to get our case annulled and the judge postponed our appointments and the case has been dragged we remember different things now our testimonies have changed too as have our memories and my petition to see everything in the cold hard light of the day with no tinted goggles and brutality is a pill i wouldn't sit without making you swallow.

महाराजबागेतल्या गुंजेच्या झाडाखाली आईबरोबर बसून घालवलेल्या संध्याकाळी गुंजेचा पाला खाताना गुंजा वेचून, गोळा करून, घरी आणून सजवताना तशाच लाल गुंजांसारखे मखमली किडे पाळताना, त्यांना पावसाळ्यात पकडताना त्यांचा पाला गोळा करताना त्यांना लाजून गुर्फटताना बघताना, आईला दाखवताना मला थोडेच माहिति होते की हे अनुभव, आणि ह्या आठवणी कधी अशृ होतील आणि लाल शर्ट घालून त्या पावसाळ्याची आज तहान भागवावी लागेल

a norwegian class just ended and out came forty different languages small clusters of people partaking in the riches and the revelry of an oil empire that appears to be based on welfare. forty different histories came out of this room, forty geographies a caricature in real life of zabaan sambhalke forty rivers on faraway continents hundreds of different trees various relationships of months and seasons many maps of rolling the tongue around the mouth - emerged to partake in an oil empire. in my university i repeat: knowledge production should be local geographical determinism is inaccurate communicating personal truths in L3 is hard and when i sit trying to reassemble identity and comfort based on language and geolocation i am lost. unable to reconcile what is upbringing and what brought me up? writing and rewriting a useless autobiography recompiling languages i might one day forget.

love is not enough at least the knowledge of love is not enough the knowledge of a future love isn't and the memory of a past love isn't enough any deviance from exactly how you want love is barely enough for the soul to be ensconced in light all tenses cases moods affects are immediately not enough if the heart isn't trapped in the warm quicksand of love right now and at every conceivable time.

i have milked your death for poetry. i've milked your loss. i've milled your absence into identity a fine beautiful powder. a sooty kajal. collected from a lamp burning night and day in the mind. hasn't everything that was to be written been written? is their anything at all that's unique about today's pain than yesterday's than the fact that i still feel it perhaps and therefore must express. perhaps this loss will become collective perhaps that will be why we will come to each other to lean.

stupid, stupid poems of the sentimental the foolishness of the sentimental people affected by alignment of words. poems they look just like incomplete lines 'left aligned', and sometimes 'right' and sometimes 'left, right, and center'. rogue stupid rows of words. feelings long rows broken rows of feelings for the nostalgia of the foolish. left-aligned feelings, and then one paragraph of right-aligned. question papers full of word alignment, and nuance of meaning in word alignment trying to escape pages in trivial meaningless ways.

does the sun know how responsible it is for the seasons? or perhaps it isn't, and it's the earth's problem her axes tilting her poles changing sway her people smoking away the life on her surface does the sun know how responsible it is for trees? or perhaps it isn't, and it's their problem their leaves changing shape their barks, their green their death in its absence. does the sun know how responsible it is for how we feel? or perhaps it isn't, and it is our problem for our skin, our mind, for our loving, and our brightness is shaped by us, perhaps. i wish anything i did felt like the only right answer. and the causality and influence were indisputable perhaps then pain and longing would vanish, perhaps the order of things would appear natural.

are dumb tweets poetry? those about comical self deprecation? those about absurdity of lunchtimes the absurdity of predetermined systems the shit that is the economy the shit that is self preservation of social groups and the shit that is my period. aren't these the footsteps of revolutions built upon the personal that is the political a naked lump of clay - the self that has no rights without its body and identifiers. weren't the beats just writing tweets words, that fill up the spaces in empty cultural discourse a space for, a valence towards charged and electric words ionic words words that seem appropriate words in a new absurdist language a torrent, a warm current of intercontinental symbolically void and poisonous words. that live for a small slice like us and cicadas, chirp and die.

i am obliged to trade in the currency of happiness that i don't have any money in but the world does. oh yes they have banks of it. notebooks filled with sweet, sweet memories desires propped up on plinths and pillars of stable, unabandoned memories, expectation, and retrieval of happiness. on most days i can't so much as buy tea with happiness; i don't keep a wallet. if i earn, i spend all of it in few short, unnecessary days. and become poor again until someone shakes me and puts a crisp 500 happiness note sneakily in my shirt pocket. i cry when i see it why did they give /me/ this? and then spend it all at once on being verbose and dramatic and let thoughts fly no care for the guilt of tomorrow belongs not to today but it comes. and when it comes, i have nothing again i'm under a steam roller. i wish the world traded with me in real money. and not this talk about loving oneself, not this confusing delirious banter do not ...

it annoys me that we have to continue to eat through profound suicidal thought that we have to fend for ourselves assemble an omlette while ideating our death chop onion and grate ginger. and fries - the devil. them - you can find cheaply as samosa was around your house, as you ideate your vanishing act your invisibility, as it were, if you ceased existing like a rip in a magic cloak or a liquid. my entanglements are not liquid though, and i wish they were knotted, or knitted, or woven. but they are like curly strewn instant noodles, destined to interfere and break. let me fantasize destruction through the bitter toxicity of a morning coffee.

it will soon be ten years of absence ten vacuous years ten years of monstrous progressions and no cadence ten empty years of slowly forgetting and recreating, and getting wrong - your vocal gestures ten sordid years of having a hole in my heart shaped as you ten lonely years of not talking to you, ten years of having not seen your knobbly fingers your hesitation your cotton sarees your writing on the board your raspy voice ten years of not having played with your skin that stayed when pinched your word-games nobody could win your not visiting me your not calling your not writing letters your not listening ten ghostly years of meandering, ten years of loss of home it will soon be ten years of being misguided and walking in the dark and getting astonished at surviving with your loss. april is your month your day of birth your day of death your day of introducing to me, summer.

in an old kafka parable there's a tale about the rooms inside the mind the things in the rooms, lie unordered unchecked, unregistered while the rooms outside the mind visible in the light of clear day books, clothes, souvenirs from forgotten events and name tags announcing a person before their speech their work before their face their name before their grief i used to be a person too and had objects in my mind: Thoughts took their trains on regular paths, stopped at stations known Devices of parables and metaphors, were plugged in, blinking Books full of people and their stories filled up the shelves Many languages, like robes hung by the door, and lay folded, dialects, neatly into closets And in the safe some fears, under lock and key And some keys, neatly hung to take away to work. at this time, someone else pilots this room. i can hear them fumble around the objects that i made feigning to be me disusing, and casting about, the things i ha...

when i was young, my mother showed me a scalpel that she used to cut wounds out of people’s bodies. we warmed it up and used it for thermocol cutting to create delicate objects, carving slowly, birds, insects that exit for the unwanted, the carved out the excess could have been this surgical i had not known. i try to practice this precision while letting you go. an atomic differentiation between our spirits.