One learns to live with a permanent state of disquietude. Each new laceration of the spirit accelerates the process of internal bleeding through which all notions of meaning, desire, ambition, understanding, acceptance, and dignity haemorrhage and empty into implacable oblivion.
One learns to accept this. To embrace it and raise a glass to the floating corpse that bears an eerie resemblance to the man in the mirror.

Banish all yearning!
Banish the thought of another, alternative fate.
It is available to so many others and I can see it, you protest. Ha, but do they have your deficiencies? Are they as insufficiently
human.

And should you ask me about that Optimism
whose details now escape me,
that can be visited only in memory
in passing
as a formal courtesy,
whose passionate clarity could see riotously colourful reprieves
from an eternity of desperation.
Should you ask me such damnfool questions,
I would spit on your face,
laugh at you,
mock you
and ask you to leave me alone.

Algo en ese silencio delineó los contornos de mi esperanza.

El hogar. El más extraño y alienante de los espacios. ¡Mira más allá de la abrumadora familiaridad de las paredes! ¡Trata de no respirar en el polvo, el estancamiento y la culpa! ¡No te ahogues en el sólido vacío!
El hogar. Donde podemos golpear desesperadamente una puerta cerrada con llave, golpear durante horas, pero nadie te abrirá la puerta a un pasado muerto, cuyas imágenes holográficas te atormentan ahora con su familiaridad artificial.
El hogar: donde toda pasión intensa se disipa en una nada domesticada. 
El hogar, donde moriremos de una muerte inquietante pero cómoda.

IMAGINE Yoko Ono.
Invite the unknown, the
-as yet-
undead.

Listen, quietly, to the
sound of your life turning.
Turning in its grave.
Shhh!

Listen to a heartbeat.
Listen to your heartbeat.
Listen,
as a feather
crashes loudly on asbestos.
Listen, with curious, accepting ears.
Como un toro escuchando su muerte.
Vale.
Listen. Escucha.
Shhh.

Somewhere, somehow, with great finality, a pin drops.
Somewhere, somehow, as a result, we all go deaf.

Two wooden chopsticks on my desk, passing me by
Silently
(Like ships?) in the night.
When you, al-Khwarizmi,

Drink to a pun for fun:
a funny pun, some punny fun,
till the wee hours of the morning...
you Maximum Bellend,

Listening to drugs
Hallucinating Indian reminiscences
Can you decode an encoded consonance of the soul?
Will you remember me at all?

Never mind, dear brother.
Never mind at all.

Ohm, sweet Om.

In you may all new beginnings merge.
In you the dream of conquest
of that impregnable
Fortress of Loneliness and Despair
shall meet
its final, sole Conqueror.

Past discussions of mycology and the Atman
Past the morning raga of Linux code
After miles and miles and miles and miles
of running and fundraising,
may you find peace, my friend.
May you find Happiness.

I'll go too. Too soon. Bish, bash, bosh. Schnellschnellschnell.
Adieu.

Perhaps the only way to understand my country is as a monster possessed of a violent schizophrenia. Peace and Love satyagrahis who turn around and slaughter trainloads of their own neighbours. Intellectual, arty spiritualists who turn around ready to auction their souls and convictions for that extra rupee. Perhaps the moods of its people are like the vagaries of its weather; to be taken at face value and endured, rather than sifted and analysed. Torrid sun or violent monsoon, there is always a propensity for the larger-than-life, for gargantuan appetites and in-your-fucking-face emotions. Hospitality and savage brutality, insaniyat and apathy, reason and faith clash and collide and consume each other (and humans unlucky enough to live where such Grand Ideas reside) like balls of hellfire.

If a storm breaks, you just take shelter and wait for the clouds to part, braving the lashing rain and clutching your coat closer to the body (if you're lucky enough to have one). Perhaps there is no such thing as real shelter. Perhaps cruelty is permanent and inevitable, like bad weather, punctuated by brief interludes of warmth and the compassion of strangers.

As I look past pellet guns and human shields; past dying farmers and Gauri Lankesh murdered in cold blood; past Dadri and past border forces firing pepper spray and stun grenades on desperate men, women, and orphaned, dispossessed children fleeing slaughter at home, I look at a now-meaningless Tricolour and hope for such an interlude. Ah, if only Hope weren't as flimsy and ephemeral !

Films do a terrible job of representing the textures of memory or its ambiguities. To make matters worse, the clunky device of a flashback dispenses with Memory itself as just another mode of storytelling, a (merely) parallel arrow of narrative time. No, no, that won't do. Remembering occurs through a succession of still images, through tableaux vivant that blur into the present moment.

Of late I am quite reminded of a particular image: September 29, 2015. I am reclining on the grass of a sunny afternoon in Dublin, surrounded by friendships (two of which melted away, no floating platypus or molten clock to recognise them by), rosy false dawns, and an ephemeral bliss...Le bonheur écrit à l'encre blanche sur des pages blanches. Voilà.

Perhaps the most moving of acquaintances are made under a fleeting sun, not through years of having known the other. We do not ''go way back,'' but the drowsy acceptance of soft grass and the other's comforting presence thaws our souls. Sets us free. Even in the act of remembering how it was. Even through the distortions of formaldehyde. Joy is impossible to describe, but instantly perceived.

Authenticity...funny word.
Who decides what is TRULY
authentic ?

What belongs TRULY to this street corner,
to this little patch of earth, to this imagined community,
bound together
to this illusion of memory ?

Who decides that I don't belong
TRULY
to this street corner,
to this little patch of earth, to this imagined community,
bound together with the others that live here
to this particular illusion of memory ?

Who decides what it entails
to talk funny, to act funny, to
secede
from this particular atavism
from this particular strain of irrationality
from those daft dreams of a far-away Midnight
stamped on my passport, drilled into my head from birth,
and yet whose promises have long been bartered away?

Who decides, once Midnight and its once-hallowed promises,
once Midnight and memory
have been locked away, far from reach...
who decides, once Midnight and memory seem hermetically sealed,
unavailable even to the most desperate nostalgia,
who decides that it is treason
to want to leave it all behind ?

What is so authentic about life anyway ?
Isn't it all Maya? The ultimate, all-pervasive illusion ?

I choose therefore, to strive
outwards.
To seek out an Elsewhere to underwrite my existence.
To seek in my self-evident Otherness,
in the insistence of difference,
TRUE AUTHENTICITY.

Ha !

The silence of a late afternoon sun,
I thought as I passed you by.
If this were the beginning of a poem
I'd have said
It was the last late-afternoon of my life.

A sundown which you delayed
with your auburn hair and
your intense, beautiful face.
A sundown whose silence interrupted all
but the most resilient strains of despair.

The soft, rosy trompe l'oeil of a face
The soft, rosy trompe l'oeil of a stubborn hope
A fanciful version of myself
that I had to pass by.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and then turn back;
but you will have gone
like inevitability, like time...
like so many bombed courtyards and obliterated histories...
like that familiar kick in the teeth...
like all those slammed doors,
like all those erased possibilities...

Well then.
Close eyes, sigh, and walk on.

Looking up from the yellowing pages of Salman Rushdie's boisterous Bombay novel 'Midnight's Children,' I can't help being a little struck by just how otherwordly England is. How aggressively pleasant. A slanting ray of sunshine here, a fastidiously well-maintained lawn there, really nice ice cream, ducks and daffodils...An obstinate, resolute, all-pervasive pleasantness.

It can have been nothing at all. Like being run over by a tram of a featureless Sunday evening: crushed bones, a brief protest of the flesh...sweet oblivion. It can have been nothing. At all.

One must pause.
Pause and allow the greys
of exhaled cigarette smoke
to smudge themselves nicely into the greys
of an unreasonable sky.

All this living you speak of
is grey, the blacks of Thanatos pouring into the whites of Eros,
blurred
and deformed
in an act of reconciliation with the inexorable deadening of affect.
All this living you speak of,
this running fasterfasterfasterfasterfas...goddammit!
Are you sure there is no other way ?

Come now, drop the facade
and come with me.
Are you sure there is no other way?
Of course there is, and it's much closer to ruin.
I'll take you there.
Let me take you there.
Let me take your petite hands in mine,
kiss that forehead just above those infinite blue eyes
and run fast and ready to a place beyond all light.
All the tumult
All the turmoil
will dissolve into your infinite blue Yes.
So come with me!

You know there is no getting away for me
after you have bent the arc of the universe just so
tying up your hair the way you do and
turning on all the lamps of the world
with a million acts of quiet, resolute tenderness.
You know now that I could not but fancy you.
I had no choice.
I have no choice...

Arre come now, come naa?
Drop the facade
and come with me.
It'll be worth it, I promise. So come with me,
and we'll meet death at sunset with a yawn.
What is this world, if not an excuse
for us to walk hand in mehndi-decorated hand,
to the place beyond all light?

That everyone read newspapers was some measure of comfort. We could broadcast the deaths of our unknown, unheard of, common-as-dirt relatives, if only in a small advert in some forgotten inner page. Now with the internet having become the primary medium of news consumption, just how many millions have we condemned to deaths of quite pitiless anonymity ?

THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL

Sahasranshu died yesterday.That much is fact; but the rest is...

Okay,okay,you can’t blame the people,they hardly knew anything about the circumstances that led to his passing.At least not as much as I did.But have you really HEARD what they’ve been saying??? Whoa,talk about weird. Rubbish! He didn’t “succumb” to any metaphysical mumbo-jumbo,nor was he consumed by an obsession that led him to suicide...It’s simple: I KILLED HIM.

I’m Kabita, fifteen going on sixteen,five feet and six inches,dusky, successful student and unsuccessful dancer. I’ve known Sahasranshu for the past five years,since the day he told me I was VERY pretty.I was in turns his friend, confidante,inamorata,MURDERER and now---alas!---his obituarist.I’ve come to tell you his story: the story of an enigma,THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL.Allow me. 

To tell you his story,you might want me to tell you our story;our passionate,but insincere romance that led to his murder and my vindication,details of how we held each other,details of this and details of that.Sorry,I won’t oblige.I do not deal in the lurid,I’m soft-spoken,nuanced,a lady .Suffice it to say that we were close enough for me to know the exact date of his Great Escape,the exact location of the black spot on his lower lip,the exact pattern of his fingerprints on my legs and the exact moment of his death(Of course,he didn’t die as soon as I pressed the trigger,but that is besides the point).

I told him this,time and again,“Baby,why can’t you be normal for a change? Why can’t you be like the others? People think I’m dating a jerk!”.But would he listen?

He always dreamt of the Great Escape,he dreamt colourless,peaceful dreams of beauty,music and yes,of his tall,beautiful,unattainable desiree even as other people saw armies in their dreams(colourful dreams,powerful dreams,dreams full of activity,destruction and death):red armies blowing up jeeps and trains, green armies gunning down people in hotels and railway platforms, saffron armies burning babies,raping nuns...It wasn’t his fault,not at all. The time was at fault,the circumstances were(You see,he could NEVER be like everyone else,couldn’t even fucking DREAM like everyone else),not him,not him...Born into a slaughterhouse of the senses with hope and despair fighting their violent battles before his eyes,day in and day out,he always dreamt of the Great Escape.He finally escaped on the day they bought the seventeenth Drum Of Hopelessness(Without so much as kissing me goodbye).He beat the odds and set sail,hoping to reach the distant Elsewheres of his imagination.BUT DID HE REALLY ARRIVE?

The day he reached the shore,he was too cold from the journey to hear anything.Thank Goodness he didn’t.The sound in the air wasn’t what he would have imagined: one of desolation,of mystery,of the emptiness of arrival.Contrary to his captain’s words(“There.You are there.Your journey’s over”),he was no longer Here,nor There,nor in those distant Elsewheres of his imagination he’d so desperately sought out.He’d become a citizen of a rootless,terrible Nowhere that would draw him in,eat at his soul.My only thought was: God help you now,my atheist Sehraan,God help you now.

Sure enough,he moved from that silence and desolation,that blankness,to a gateway---a gateway that led him to the noisy bazaars of the breezy City of Everlasting Hope(or so it ought to be),its roadside cafes,its art galleries and its state-of-the-art theatre of dreams(Big dreams,bigger dreams,dreams that shrink,dreams that bloat,dreams-that-are-just-dreams-and-nothing-else and of course,other kinds of dreams...)its pubs and discos,its criminals and heroes.He was overwhelmed,sucked in,delighted.He felt at home,even after having escaped from it(Though he did send me a letter now and then,oh-so-long and oh-so-unromantic, telling me how horrible it felt to be away,how desperately he wanted to come back ).He encountered all kinds of people there:fat men,who gave him food,gave him drink,chatted with him; thin men,who stroked their beards,beamed at him,and smiled at his accent; insufferable women who nagged him to misery; and exciting,alluring women who existed without really existing.

Then one fine day,he finally felt like a fraud,crushed under the weight of his lies and lost in a swamp of frustration,alienated,shown a final proof of his terrible uselessness.His feeling of adventure had given way to panic. He became aware of the rule of that cruel,ever-present breeze : he had to pay the price of entering the city.He had to attend The Lottery.He could win,which would send him back home(back to the cesspit of ignominy) or,he could lose,which meant staying on(further uprooting,further harshness,further torture): Quite a double-bind...In any case,he won.They led him to a door leading to the port of his arrival.BUT THE SHIP WAS NO LONGER THERE.He could neither stay,nor go back...He was left with nothing.No longer an energetic,expletive-spewing adolescence; but certainly not the all-knowing maturity of age.Neither rootedness,nor broad-mindedness.Neither comfort,nor adventure.Sehraan the traveller had lived out his life,but the enigma of arrival refused to stop tormenting him.

He couldn’t come to me,so I went to him,observed him as closely as I could.

He’d become a retard,lost to life,lost to human company.A wretch: mad,intolerable.
I asked him to come back,but he didn’t.He spoke about me to those who still wanted to hear,but waited patiently for that tall,beautiful aim.He dreamt the dreams that he was used to dreaming.He did not adapt to allow for me,to allow for a new life.I hated that.I hated him.I shot him down...

Yes,Sahasranshu died last night,and I KILLED HIM.

Oh look.
The cloud there, does it not stand tall?
Pearly white of a spring afternoon, imposing:
neither lonely, certainly, nor wandering.
No fluttering and no dancing in the breeze
Any more than these immobile daffodils
Quietly bearing witness.

Witness
to the stasis and the stalemate
vocation v. avocation
promise v. failure
flickers of hope v. their predictable assassination.
Let's welcome April, the cruellest month of the year...
A poet could hardly have a say
In such sombre company;
I gazed- and gazed- but little thought
What finality the show to me had brought:

For when I'm sat at my desk
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon the inward eye
The full-bodied torment of solitude;
And then my heart with terror fills,
And I proceed to uproot these godforsaken daffodils.

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read, imagine stories, sing, sigh, hope, or look for purpose and for love. However elusive the light may be, our darkness leads us towards it. To live is to nurture this restless, restive, limpid darkness.

One of the things to look forward to in getting on a plane and going back home is to be able to fold the English language in four and tuck it neatly into an envelope, to be opened at discretion. Having lived an entire life where that language has been a confidante, an imaginary friend, and a magic carpet ready to fly me off to distant lands, I am disturbed by this intrusive ubiquity, its sudden, larger-than-life presence. Is Hobbes as playful when he is an actual tiger ? Does Calvin not cower ?

Revisited "Saariputta" by Surendra Mohanty, one of my favourite short stories in Odia. It's about a boy who leaves his widowed mother alone to become a Buddhist monk.One day, he comes back to his mother's house, as a monk trying to convert to her Buddhism, with the stated intention that she can achieve nirvana, that is, freedom from the absurd brutalities of life by attaining 'salvation'.
The lonely mother had imagined that the son would come back to her, rejoin the world of ordinary people, marry and give her grandchildren.

She had stayed up all night preparing his favourite meal in anticipation of that.
But he just tells her, "O Kind Soul (the Buddhist phrase---instead of saying O Mother!), I just seek nirvana
so these earthly pursuits have no meaning for me.
The mother hides her tears, and says "O Saint(instead of O Son !!!), I want jivana(life), not nirvana(freedom from life)"
The mother returns to her lonely hut, and the monk quietly walks away into the still night.

Buddhism, in the context of Indian history, was an intensely political protest movement against the ruling caste elites, not the hippie, happy religion it is portrayed as in the West. Mohanty, with his magisterial command of the most understated, tautly elegant Odia prose, brings into sharp relief, millennia after the fact, the white heat of political disenchantment, and the power of society and ideology to tear families apart, to alienate and gobble up human destinies.

And so it happened. Four students from Ravenshaw were carried away to their deaths by the current of the Mahanadi. In its wake, of course, appropriate outrage,recriminations, and mourning. Yet, truly, how many of us haven't fantasized just such a thing? Our contemptible faces reflected in the calm, inviting water, then splintered into ripples of guilt, of inadequacy, of defeat, of our counterfeit passions and wretched self-inflicted disappointments, wouldn't we all rather we were swept away unawares in a final crescendo of hot sun, lapping water, and the smiles of our friends? How presumptuous to feign pity ! Above all, how dishonest.

Parfois, les amitiés les plus profondes ne nécessitent de nombreuses années de connaissance. Mais parfois , les sourires cachés dans nos cœurs sont décongelées par un soleil chaud et un sens partagé de bonheur. Nos cœurs, caressés par la douceur de l'herbe , sur trouver dans l'autre une présence réconfortante , difficile à décrire , mais instantanément senti.

 Five minutes are enough to dream up an entire life, enough to start off on promising garden paths. One signs up willingly to be slaughtered at the altar of expectation. Tenderness, conversation, garlic baguettes, Euler equations, hope...Above all, hope. The frightening spectre of hope.Is it easier to take because I am privy to the whispers of a cold, silent night ? Do I not tremble in fear simply because I am just too wired to pay heed ?

When you're stuck in a provincial town in the middle of nowhere, all you want to do is escape. And when you're flung thousands of miles away at last, each muscle in your body aches to be back home. Back home, we clogged the narrow streets like rats in a sewer, and yet there was so much individuality, richness, nuance. Here it is all wide open spaces, clean and green, sanitised of confusion, sanitised of life, bloodless, bare. But there are moments, oh yes. A ray of sunlight shining on someone's tender blonde hair, sitting on a bench marvelling at the moss on a tree trunk, being accosted on the street with the plaintive rendering of Faure's Pie Jesu on a violin...Life, in its infinite mercy, affords us respite if not absolution.

Caught between the atonal stasis of lived experience and an insurgent nostalgia for the absurd, one often feels the need to actively court despair. What is more important, to distance oneself from corporeal reality. What should be "me" is referred to in a grandiloquent "he," the breathless third person singular of genre fiction. A spy novel, perhaps ? Why stop there? Why not insinuate oneself into racy plot and anxious melodrama? Oh, very well. Vamoose !

There was once a taking off into the clouds, with a back to bickering guardian angels of despair and ignominy. The past, drowned in glass after glass of fine red wine, summer afternoons, blonde hair, and a famous signature. Drowned under deep waters, never to rise again. Or so he thought. Make no mistake, the waters boiled and simmered, oh they did. They did. They did!

A moving frontier of possibility and dissatisfactions, blurred by the scalding steam that rose up at last, against all predictions. Through sheer force of habit. But of course! Hope, all hope, evaporated on that blurred frontier.

And that, O Dhritarashtra, is the true measure of his shame.

She.

Cemetery of a desperate happiness.
Articulate in her misspelled pasion
Tender, no more cruel to the world
than was seen adequately cruel
to herself.

She was there
as always,
Smiling a knowing smile
at the screen she beheld.

She
was there as always,
earplugs in place
Walking moving going fading away
As always.
She
was right there.

Adele's looks, and the unsentimental beauty
Of those whose beauty is
A bequeathed affluence.

She.
She was there,
In extremis.
Fuller deeper richer more lavish
Than all the violent excess of the world.

She was there.

Ungovernable, a creature of dark imaginings,
The grandeur and generosity of the stars.

She.
She was there.
As always.

There is a caparisoned elephant
at my dinner table, enjoying
goat's cheese and mango chutney after a third round of Scrabble.

It is good to make his acquaintance,
share jokes,
share a solidity of existence that I no longer have access to.
If we value our solid, unquestionable existence,
he and I,
let us abandon it all...

PUT THE PIECES BACK IN THE BOARD !
Fade away.
Make sense.

That's what he is, and that's what I am not.
That's what we must try and live with.

But first, can someone please light his cigar ?

Raindrops patter against the window pane
as I sit and practice
memorised tunes on my piano.
No,
maybe it's you
dancing on the roof of my car.
As you used to dance
All those years ago.

Are you there?
Dancing, swinging, performing pirouettes like you did
All those years ago?

Do you dance now
as an afterthought, perhaps,
having driven away
thoroughly disappointed in me,
having driven away resolutely in that rickety old car
All those years ago?

Thunderclouds clapped and applauded
when you drove away with that handsome
California pothead
Allen Ginsberg on steroids (literally).
Just because I set your house on fire
All those years ago.

An agonizing wait, and a sordid sack of gold at the end of it. An affection has been acquired though, for an obstinate, tiresome, weighty nothingness.

Travel guides make for compelling reading.
A restaurant in Sorrento,
a mall in Burj Khalifa,
a waterfall somewhere or other...

Who chooses the order of presentation?
Who decides
to sift through the bleakness of the real world

to peddle
a consumable, enjoyable list of tourist delights?

TRANSCRIPT? SCREENPLAY?
(ANYHOW, A PRELIMINARY DRAFT):

(Camera zooms in on an unexceptional home in suburban India.)
He:

Now if you’ll stop badgering me about chitau pitha (HONESTLY, enough for now) for one blessed minute, I have something to say. I’m leaving for England, pretty soon. Oh, I know, there’s Skype and there’s reduced-rate phone calls, and this is 2016, and and and…goddammit would you listen for a change, I’ve had it up to here with your interruptions! I mightn’t see you in person for over a year now. I appreciate your company, you know, and I suppose I might miss you a little bit.

She:
(slapping wrist on forehead)

Arre go na, go go, whocarestwopice. Every Ram, Nita, and Geeta goes abroad these days, and what for? Those firangis and their prim ways. I’ve heard tell! Even the curries there, so bland and spiceless, they sing “God Save the Rani”, baaprebaap, and speaking of the Queen, didn’t she invite Narendrabhai for some chai pe charcha a while ago? What became of that? You fools, your intelligence is lower than your IITJEE scores even. Last week, at Sheila Auntie’s daughter’s wedding, we were discussing that only. Look at all the achhe bache, they go to engineering or medical college here, or a decent B-school (By God, Sharma ji’s daughter scored in the 99th percentile on the CAT ! ) and then on an H1B visa to the US or Germany, or simply stay back here and launch a start-up! You don’t know Flipkart or what? What’s all this English-Vinglish, Britain-Shritain? Are you Punjabi? The goddess Ganga alone knows what you are upto abroad. They send you back thin as a reed, even.

He:

(nervously clutching his copy of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury closer to his body, like a rosary or a made-to-order magic carpet, thinking back to the disintegration of identity in that one year he’d spent abroad. Yes, even now, in this hyperconnected age of social media and labour mobility, with desi bande on every street corner in Dublin…mingling with the anonymity of the times, head mind soul buried in a newspaper at the bus stop or by the Luas tracks, coming face-to-face with the absurdity of loss and discovery, with the debris of the soul, stillborn hopes flushed down the toilet, extinguished destinies, deleted Facebook messages, forgotten knife wounds, and embarrassment on cold European evenings that weren’t quite love or adventure but surely, surely, their distant, pale shadows… Yes, even now, he feared for the future and for the lack of a future, and for both these things on certain idle Sundays.)

Very well, I’ll call. Once every week.

She:
Arre go na, go go, whocarestwopice !!!

(She breaks into sobs, badly concealed: India, as ever, she of the oppressive monsoons, rids herself of neatness and nuance with a sadistic, implacable frenzy.)

He:
(chuckles to himself, despite the circumstances)

Proper England bhai, ASLI England, no joking-shoking. Capital of Vilayet. Off I go !

Lost discoverer, in you everything sank... 
everything.
Nostalgia,
innocence, 
Eternities of absurd tendernesses and of idealised lusts.
Everything sank. 

And yet, one hopes.
One searches the water for floating corpses
Embalmed in comforting half-truths.

Oh, for that desperate wish to be granted !
Oh, for the driftwood of some unsighed sigh,
                                      some undreamed dream,
                                      some unsinkable desire.

He had a way with words,
did he not? I agree.

Yet how easy to strike him down,
show him his place
by resolute absences
and that subtle, articulate silence.

Silence, that meets mid-conversation.

Like a gunshot. Like a slap on the face.
Like humiliation.
With the ripe, full-bodied contempt of the conqueror
for the conquered.

There is no irony here, for when I stitch my words together,
I am in fact weaving a mask for my deficiencies.

All of my shrill cries for justice are but a mask for my corrupted nature and base self-love.

All of my passionate protestations of eternal love are but a mask for my basic emotional disingenuity.

All of my counterfeit passions, overeager obscenities, and wordy incoherence are countenanced, shuddered over, and walked away from.

And why not?
Why not.

Autumn leaves.
Les feuilles mortes?
A wistful, musical, sultry jazz smokescreen
of chameleon leaves
bathing the rancid overhang of defeat 
of disgrace
in a soft, unforgiving late afternoon sun.

A blaze of colour against grey certainties of collapse
Falling, dancing, dressed up to go

without warmth
without exception
without goodbyes...
To be crushed underfoot, or carried away
by the good people at Sheffield City Council.

I guess it's high time I bought that overcoat.

Birthdays: officially sanctioned days for reflection, and quiet masochism.

I guess I should take up writing after all. I have the opening lines to my first novel: "November 9, 2016. It was a cold autumn in South Yorkshire. I had just turned 25 that morning, and outside, it was snowing. My first snow. Oh, and the world was falling to pieces. No, smashed to pieces by a tanned orangutan..."

We stand round blankly as walls.
Not as witnesses, no no no. No one
asks for a written record, they are sick of it.
No, we are made to
stand round blankly as walls.

Staring, ashen, into the distance. Waiting
for the chastising bulldozer to come raze us to the ground.
Oh, stop it ! Paranoia! This was only a correction,
a much-awaited (oh yes, for very many, quite clearly much-awaited)
return
to familiar hatreds.
Look, they do not
stand round blankly as walls.
Au contraire.

Indeed, why do we bother
anymore, to
stand round blankly as walls?

The paint is peeling off.
All that hopeful paint.
All that cloying romanticism.
All those colours. Every last one.
To reveal the dirty-white, mossy self
under all that self-righteous hauteur we displayed when
we stood blankly as walls.

Perhaps there is no bulldozer.
But there is no paint either,
and the masons are thoroughly discredited.
Embrace it.
Embrace the aspect of defeat, and persist.

Whatever happens.
Stand round blankly as
walls.

More and more, it would appear, this phantom word "individuality" seems to be little more than a product of the attenuation of self.

One plods away through the bog as cliche upon cliche sticks, and at some point gives up, and lays claim to these ragtag armies. Cliches, fragmented and caked with vomit... now our pride, our source of IDENTITY! , our distinctive, distinguishing feature.

Don't get me wrong. I'd like some of those cliches for myself, they are shiny and smooth to touch. But why would this or that combination be my desert? Why must I be singled out for deliverance, for happiness, for the fulfilment of such and such idle dream ? Why not
cut out the middleman
and
go straight
to the most fundamental cliche of all: the final one? We all die alone.
Some, with their illusions intact.
Most of us,
sans preconditions.

So be it.

A death of course, as featureless and hollow
as society
as lust
as self-esteem
as hope
as life...
The cliche to end all cliches, the fount of all individuality.

2003 is another country. They did things differently there.

Let me show you around that museum: a bleak Stazi-yellow light bulb, the vapourised shadow of an apology from Santa in a sock left by the bedside, and a dusty windowsill on which Garcia Marquez, "74 Ways to Grow Rich!", "What is Dialectal Materialism?" . Wasn't that a lovely classroom, us throwing chalks at each other and pretending we'd amount to something?

Museum's closing in five minutes though, if you want to make an early exit to catch the matinee. No? You cancelled the ticket? Ah, good, I want to hear your take on the new installations. A persistent slide, an escalating loss of affect...Look, I'm sipping nice tea, running my fingers over my big, fat Buddha belly, and floating in a morbid, insidious pleasantness.

Accept it.

Accept it.

There's a parcel at the door.

Tiny, red mittens
have washed up at my door.

Tiny, red mittens have washed up
at my door.
Innocent, insistent, dead, demanding.

A Monday morning Aylan Kurdi
that cannot be ignored.
That asks for greater humanity than I can afford.
Innocent, insistent, dead, demanding...why me ?

It's a fine, grey morning, and I'd like
nothing more than a fine pack of
Lambert and Butler King Size cigarettes, thank you very much.
(I don't roll mine.)
But them bloody mittens.
I hold them (can't wear them obviously, they're
too small, and not mine), I hold them close to my heart,
kiss them,
kiss them tenderly,
and set them on fire.

Sometimes the only North Star assigned to you is a deepening, widening sense of despair.

Thus, once more,
a cancellation
Of that new, wide opening of the spirit.

Once more,
a battening down of the hatches,
As winds howl past from nowhere to nowhere.

Thus, once more,
abject surrender.
Being cut to size. 
A farewell to risible fantasies of escape. How dare I ?

Acceptance.
Acceptance,
and a descent, once more,
into the cold abyss
Of oneself.

And yet,
the ever-present, persistent mirage of tenderness...
Is there even an antidote ?

What one can do is put up a fairly passable imitation of conviviality; of an appreciation for things as they are, feigning hope...feigning resilience.

What one cannot do, unfortunately, is pretend that any of that is true. Your fraud is seen and recognised, held in utter contempt. YOU are held in utter contempt, for the obnoxious annoyance that you are. It is hard to shield against this eventuality, this absolute shame.

Yet one must carry on. Or so they say.

Shall I compare you to the monsoon, then?
You are darker still, and more violent.
Rich with the smell of damp earth
and the clandestine eroticism of adolescence.

For all that those stolen kisses were an intimation of
immortality,
your lease, alas, had all too short a date. No phone number,
no Facebook, no emails, nothing. It's been half a decade.
I have no way to reach you again.

Swayamsrestha. Self-made, huh?
I cannot vouch for that, but you sure were
sui generis: a Botticelli Venus given birth to by turbulent,
impossibly intertwined zephyrs.

O hypnotic, malevolent fantasy that lodged itself in time.
In time; immutable, inelastic time.
Get lost !
Leave me, the fuck, alone.

I kid of course.
So long as I can breathe, or my eyes can see,
So long live these abominable
verses,
So long willst thou live in me. And this gives life to thee.

What a nebulous frontier of dissatisfactions, this. You feel in its smoky, charcoal-drawn presence the fear of death a man feels walking down an alleyway where the past opened itself to him and is available no more: at once circumscribed, and condemned to be free.

Katak, my hometown. My cage, my hideout, my refuge. The dilapidated ruins of the Barabati fort, the dirt and dust of the streets, the chaos, the traffic, and the confusion of Katak cloak my thoughts in the sweet end-of-empire melancholy of my 1000-year old town and the indomitable will to live of the people affirms what I have always believed. My destiny is bound to this place, it is me. As for the animals on the street, they too, are welcome. Their indifference to human histories and fantasy, and their daily, objective presence adds weight to our lives in a way someone from a grander city might never understand. The muddy sidewalks, the sleepy river, the stolen smiles, the raucous laughter, the thwarted desires: how did you, my city, come to colour my dreams?

I wait for such time as the past will reveal itself as a commemoration, not an indictment.

Mysterious woman,
you walked into my life as if from a dream of deliverance.

As though
your nuanced silences,
your beautiful, palimpsestic eyes,
your soft, unsure smiles
were all that I had sought.
All that I could legitimately seek. Yet I realise
what a mirage that is.
As always, you will go your way, I shall go mine.

And none of this will matter,
these feelings,
this hope,
nothing.

And none shall remember,
no trace will remain
of your haunting blue eyes.
Blue eyes that drained into two eternities of oblivion,
hopes past and hopes yet to pass one by.

As always, ultimately, I will repel you.
My cheap sentimentality, my unlovely eagerness, my presumptuous fantasies.

All that remains
is to wait for it all to wash over, and for the anaesthetic of inevitability
to drug me to sleep.

Maybe I'll meet you at last in my dreams.
Maybe not.

Wake up late. Make coffee.
Pore through journal articles, and check your email.
Above all, busywork!

Busywork, to salve one’s conscience.
Busywork, to pretend you’re not in a ruinous infatuation with disgrace,
open to being ambushed on a Tuesday afternoon
by the same silence that offered conclusive proof of your worthlessness
the last time. And the time before. And before that. And befo…

Busywork, to pretend every vicious reversal does not sting,
To pretend that your inner cynic does not recognize the logic.

Busywork, to feign structure,
To conjure signposts out of mist.
Busywork, so you can order self-worth off of Amazon. £7.85 at a time.
Or £9.24 for one-day delivery, cheers !

Busywork. Keep busy, and survive.
Busywork, because giving up is an extravagance.
Shut up.
No one’s bones have a right not to ache.