thanks to meera, some of the type of writing i did in, maybe 2002?- vaguely a krishnamurti style!-i dislike some of it, some still holds. i remember only a mostly filled handwritten journal, i can't remember the cover, lots of very lightly edited writing, maybe not so different from now :

These words, these thoughts, are a gift from another. From where do words rise, from which indistinct nerve of the mind. These words are placed before the world’s silence, like flowers before a favored idol; there is only the act of placing, and unpetitioning prayer.
I do not know whose words these are, who speaks through me. If it were possible, I would let this voice speak unhindered. I would know then whose words these are- a master’s, one who is sometimes in my mind freshly dead, and sometimes dead for ever, almost unborn. But because these words come trammeled, I cannot separate the voices; as in the acknowledgments of a book of a lifetime’s scholarship, I say that all that is right is another’s, but the infelicities, mine alone.
So take this beginning as invocation; where words are merged and voice is single, however flustered. Who invokes whom? I wish to speak as simply as oceans imply breadth, as beauty solicits the eye; but such clear motive can only be dreamed of. So let me say that I speak here as an actor who has worked on his lines, but now, on stage, is full of doubt.
What is there to fear? Not failure, or even betrayal or dishonour, but only the perturbations of a mortality made present and intimate. To speak is to invite the future, to cast away the years spent refining, polishing, understanding the past. It is to stand free of the past’s slow consolidation of achievement, it cautious calculations of hope. It is to begin again, and to end again.
So the performer on the stage, who renounces his lines; not that he fears shame, for the audience is wiser than he allows credit for- but he is fainthearted that he has not disciplined himself enough. He must now perform, only his gestures must remember the hours of practice, all the words must possess that newness and polish that can only spring from the integrity of the voice’s free contract with gesture. When the body finally renounces itself in, into voice, then will the voice speak free, breaking away from all source, consumed in universality- again, the utopia of language made transparent, as sky implies breadth.
There is no audience. There is only the bare ear that listens, that becomes, in heaven and beyond, the voice that it hears. As in the four walled darkness of a blind god’s brain, as in that stillness, that denuded floor of perception, may the voice’s chant rest awhile, even as does the soul in it’s unbreathing pause between two bodies.

This work is sought to be set in that poise, that pause between voice and action. But words cannot stay long in that airless planet- nor can voice, or mind, or sympathy. So these words live more terrestrially, sometimes inhaling, sometimes dead-
Whose words are these? “Only he has achieved privacy who does not wish to be loved, or remembered, or be, in any way, a part of the world’s life”. I do not know, I will not raise it again.

as fatal thoughts hover

children kiss trees

breath catches in an iron lung.


faces in imagination's marmalade mist

tapeworm their way


(six months later who would believe all this?)


kisses in relief thread the dawn


searching out the needing;


flee. do, not talk.



tender but not without shape

a single vein in marble virile
in its solitude even in its
blockedness, a nerve turfs
the castle

the sea rolls away under

the bay's window


fake softness for love.

small but large of gestures &
above all always
home in a pure raw

vividity


if this tongue's hum were not so

deeply, simple


who would have the means?



let the smile remain so


symbolizing nothing more

not even its

line between the lips.


separately together
tear by tear


feed & flee feed & flee


like the sad thoughtfulness of the quiet

after the excitedmost circus

after the folded tent.



the deeper the quiet the

more tenacious. all sort of things
happen
all over
dreams.


in an iced land of pleasure
they are most separate

and each, by

tolerating


all recrimination

bhopal memorations

this is their body

or
not

is
a
single
charred

dangled
chemical
pulsing

at
the
pit

a
cyanide
butterfly
almond

at
the
coccyx

a
maruti
in
bhopal


this
revelation,

punishment

has
vanished

been,
oblivionated

been,
made
to
rest

in
a
cold

amortized

sinking


arresting



respiration.


2.
build a permanent river & they will come.

they missed being schoolchildren

& felt a longing

waves & rigid waves share

and chat share & chat.

looking out the corner of the eye they

are all puppets transforming more

and more transforming.

felt a longing for those wounded for those
smeared.

the river is everywhere persisting

houses built of drugs perimetered in barbed wire
doctors everywhere asthmatic themselves.

those african women & their fistulas
those dump sites those chemical overspills

those large long highways that take you away from
these mines these sowetos
these girls with strange hairloss

this id of sewage that bewilders this

inertia this soil's tenured evil


a group of teenage boys kick the 3 legged tabby

incineration zinc copper Al


towns that are but moral
legal fictions tax shelters

all entrepreneurs now

the old man does not say a word but he is crying.


this prison was a high school once and
a catholic church before


accelerating cycles of
real estate speculation.

could be st louis could be ahmedabad


the children run laughing with
broken legs bleeding
gums teeth but lumps


the heat the bear made me do it.


mules & hogs rule this town sewage flowers

slo mo riots fumes in the classroom


music nor sport will save

the other day dhoni speaks and the elders cry
at being nationally filmed

children run with stolen microphones.


so easy to lose
a child forever the streetlights are
broken its been dark here
forever in winter
the sun is down by 4

toilets kept dirty
to be used for needles


no exit from prowling teens

only more and more and more
liquor stores fast foods lotteries

if you live till 30 you might be tired enough to wish out.


if killed by the other street's gang there
is the pleasure else why jail for killing
random already superterrified stranger
over shoes that do not fit enough

weeds grow out of his old sepia

watch the children at play & sleep & in their breathing
they are still human

even in the enormous ugly enormously ugly
school more runaways at ratios of 2 to 1
than finish school

india will do an america on america the
horror the terror ism of it


the lone child paints geometry a permanence
of waste of overcrowd of truancy of mists
of tears only 10 and his game is
over never seen a mapled
college not even on tv a deep
inbreeding panic barely describably
despairing they listen to cricket
in the police station detonate me
another building down daddies dead or
collapsed in asthma or just so tired
so bare.

low hanging fruit outlier statistic of development
money is not what works for these
"people"

all irony & madness conspire in
this remedial democracy

the rest of the country only lives in that
b&w tv. think of what you can reasonably
live to see imagine happen even by
the 2200s.

social forms of loudly silent loudly
mute total disrepair.

every building mocks a tree a river

a gray slate of a future unfathomably
...

bad cops happen to good people
in a sad blue tv nightwarmth

the tv media is only aaaaaargh

tears mark their eyes their anger in
their other language

the electronic acronyms of whose future bars
simple ritualizations of ambition

cent per cent equality is cent per cent expensive!
child soldiers are easier to kill give the bellied man
a lathi & red lited jeep these
raids will not be tele vised

there is no language anymore monster & aliens
seem to thinned of savor long ago

separated and un-equalled and moreover
skinned

health care being not a constitutional right...

the water is stagnant the day hot the street crowded
the rains will come fast flow fast it being so

beautiful everywhere around if you look not that far

trimmed lawn look up the lights bouncing off
clean kitchen floors the horizon so wide
so opened stretch your arm

render life

outside and everywhere-

no more human

no more names only digital bacterial colonies of spam, unable to unite all our pseudonyms or remember our passwords or credits, a new cyberfolk accelerating expanding discontinuous nervous system, the i of the creator-publisher not cremated but whose ash is the giving food to that spam that bacteria this is our rigid immortality in the fossil's ice wombcave from & through whose tunnelling we set out to hunt & gather & pin down our/the future

long poem

she claimed no descent from emperors
or their mistresses no family tale
of grandiose death no tale of rippled
sorrows rice is thrown into the fire
to remember her and the largest bull
is wrestled her soul adrift in far wild
riverbanks thinking only
of her joys inspite
of living as the empire still extending
still extending she lived alone
amongst the inland lakes
rearranging the odes of local
toddy stores her bright
iridium bird of spirit
broken her falcon to the world
of dead lay dead himself
and no more when she wrote
of rivers could we hear
their very roar no more
the throat of red jade

legends accrue but leave her corpse
cold she preferred to be of clay not
the soar and swoop of nymph
in lakes of cinammon wine. she
gazes into the water waiting
breaking the river's mirror's
promise. warble water

holding apartments with roofs of
hibiscus leaf. eyes might meet
in temple halls and shoot at stars
reveal angels white teeth.

the rooftop of the ministries
obscure the skies. she
eats flowers and cannot keep pace
with the hours she searches
for the sandal prints of the old
to cool her fever as she
waits for the copper
transparence of angels their
spinal cord splayed open
pierced no chariots for them
they descend prostrate

she wakes in exile marks
her oeuvre on stone cylinder
nude of calligraphy a carp
in the cold sea of time

holding only the studied indifference
an eye on each corner of the spring
a self fulfilling silence etched
in every nerve's signature
happy to not understand
even wine made her peaceful

pastel is the best. so many
children & so little wine but
she drags herself to her sister's
funeral. the empty stories
are the funniest, monastries to
laughter write only the simplest
poems and fewest

a mountain of mulberry

visualizing militia-rizations

1. what would the french revolution have been without the photographeable quality of the guillotine, the dramatic rolling heads (for those with silk who would have cake), arguably the most famous image even if it was primarily a linguistic one, & so contrastive to the non-image of lenin's visage of that other revolutions( even with the later compensatory construction worker's abdomen)-& gandhi's immobile mug shot, how do you photograph a fasting, but monks do erupt in spheres of fire

2. india is going to be like pakistan- a permanent state of civil war, what difference does it make, swat valley or jharkand, taliban or naxals?-so we are the schiz'ed brothers yet. this developing world- guerillas in forests vs paramilitary etc, is different from militia-(r: am bracketing to make visual the sandhi )ized parts of LA, only in that in the latter there are no trees. as a political space they are the same, the same relation of state-power, cops, army, mafias, state & local financings, visual & imaginary spaces they occupy to the aliens (ie us the outsiders, journalists, social workers, adhd romantics..)

3. the leverage of the political is the ability to read, up-equilibrate crime as a political statement

4. india is going to america america this first half of the 21c just as america america'd europe from the post war period-to uncork this fact would be the fundamental challenge of reading this 1/2 of the century. (& then also play it against china, arab-turk worlds, muslim s asia, etc-)

5. politics is the exo skeleton our flesh can't quite grow into

old manuscript found

we dislike that you men & w0myn of meane rancke

wear silver buttons at your knees.


or that those of greater liberal estate & education

must for no cald blewe reason

tolerate your wearing tiffany horlles & scarfes

building narmada

the pale face of the politician is trapped in the jeep's window. a wave of the hand and without tenderness.

(and also the chief of the gendarmarie, and also the chief of the fishermen's collective)

they knows these people are to drown. they have lived by the water long as fish.

we must give back to words their work, no words are alien to me

fish as the words of the water, the river's snakelike wanderjahre

and now it advances up their throat they drown in rising water they cannot gulp down whole rivers

whose death subsidises whose schmancy yachts-


the river's four foot of iambic timeless still a whorl in the eyes of the drake


the voice and feet of the dead are constantly rising millions of tiny machines of feet in the throat

as they wait for the water to rise to be hoarded to be lavished on them so that their skulls bust up like pods


their is no honor in this no name no death by duel this is an evil so immaculate

it could even be an innocence. pain alone refuses to not be of the past. fight with hairpins.

the birds wasted wings flung backwards pinned it cannot swim its face as wax

incarnate. thrust a pistol in their stomach make it clean and dry.


fish kiss the veins on the forehead and murmur cheek to cheek. the statues of the old leaders grow.


they die small in mincing step executioned by an insect people. jails are pyramids too

(sand in the blood, phlegmata and nursed grief) and supervisors impoverished too w/ lice in their beards

but mature slaves. put your hands on life this is your reality your field your border

but not your river. imagine the forehead of the politicos, slaves too to their own strength.


read the script of the buffalo's bones no fate but this endurance of the dead the crushedness of bone in high

centigrade-no wise impatience. see the scavenged old histories the lumber mills the cardboard mills the pulp
& wood by products, the ntfps. the white walled bared provinces embarass their destiny. where have gone the
wandering painters of icons carvers of bamboo their bare feet crushing gooseberry?-


2. the water held in limbo leaves
dragged by time

standing time and water they
have left themselves for an invitation

some span of time lies atrickle
belonging to none

take water, for yourself, unapportioned
who can scale water

make water from water! take water to
leave. where would you leave, or take

expend it spend it waste and reckon
it does not appear in its removing in us

during and enduring evening
in the water's flow away away away

paralyzing river. repeating sequences tick
& give the river up as if it even flows away



3. search for the wholegrain martyr the right
tear's right angle do more than simply look
dirty, learnedly helpless


currents trail from the bloated body making
a liquid map drowned for 31 years still
the water only tell their knees

bloodless death by drowning in some
strange developer's dream palms open to reveal
unblinking pupils scattered teeth still making jokes


obscene means off stage under water pesticidal
corpses ingrow the earth the square of dissent is
girdled clogged by bodies not floods this time


but a surge of dying a digging up of graves
with nails speech after speech of panic
drowned by waves even the hangmen revolt

this thread will not come out of the skin
puppet shows hiccuping elections will bring
flowers arrack instead of the arrow's glint

no throats of dynamite. fruits from the
same tree the same bass voice of
the children's id the women dance

to the lone flautist with lowered eyelash
the television reporter studies her boots
the gap toothed secret agent looks away

the river like tea is brewing there
are no fire alarms the dusk is solid dimness
the temple's gong has a brass tongue

you can only understand a people after
they are all gone. only falsehood is
immortal their hate is not wrong

you cannot step into the same river
flowers for wounds the bustards keep vigil
at the concrete of our wormhood

ministry of water and ore. hydra parties
burst under the flame's thread how long
can death alone sustain a people

commissar of raspberries was choked by
typhus O mosquitoes our only friend
make their blood to rage rage

notate this in the river's current teach
revolutions on blackboards handwriting
and chalk and spelling error & scratched poster

no jails but dance halls. but instead
cart sugar to the mill bushel to the granary
trapped in a coffin with holes

while the agent picks up his phone and reads the paper
speech survives on mists alone. lets choose
the most becoming slogan under the old familiar 'lectric light

stitch pieces of lying houseboat song going
nowhere in the dark water. chisel temples. the river's
whorls are a perfect cancer an adamantine starfish

exploding singly never forget never
remember city of aluminum and zinc
childhoods learn to make enemies fast

in disbelief you touched his cheek thinking it real
a whole city flickers as he drowns always the old
is spectacular heart's widow-maker

everything is impossible to forget. mountains
will crash intemperate nervous angels become
fishermen tramps the moon is nailed

to the car's window. are they dead are they
crushed which heaven is this? sitting on a precipice
of calm they walk like unarmed children

but all eyes and bony bodies. would they rather
have lived maybe not maybe harmoniums and cameras
in a moment of strength suffice if

it doesn't embitter doesn't endure the golden dark
salmons in alaska mis beheaded flowers homemade
envy distractible babies fish like irises

don't mortgage words for ideals

fiction i suppose

He wondered if she thought him only a fake indian aristocrat. but how could she judge? though they were all elusives, she had had many happy hours playing an aging chatelaine. and she wasn't that old either- how could she be.

she liked his light malicious brittle banter, never quite stooping to wit or insight. she had outgrown the hecticness of her twenties. she liked unbraiding his moods, she liked that he did not share anything except the most faux maudlin compliments he gave her when he was preoccupied. she liked less and less the sound of the human voice especially if it was not on radio.

she preferred the neat unhappiness to capaciousness of any sort-she thought she was miniaturizing herself into a kind of crystal simplicity. she made lists of lovers and then kept crossing them out, wondering who would stand at the end.

she petted the maharajah's beard- which year, which decade was it, which war. she was ready to sacrifice herself in a trice, but opposed causes made sense to her. she only occasionally wished for the hardening of those heart's muscles.

it was said the maharajah was actually an indian terrorist, that his broodings were over the fate of his people, his country, his gold skinned land. be that as it may. perhaps among his nationalist friends, they would think that in truth he was just the privileged aristocrat- it is a curse to fit so well in opposing camps, and sometimes to forget who you wish to be. she hoped she didn't understand all this too well.

an encroaching grayed out dusk. where does he vanish. he's once said he had to say special prayers at dusk. she wondered of it- scripture and pistol. dusk was her hour to wonder about pillows & house-stuff, the one hour she turned domestic, and covetous of recipes.

is it because there is a war that all the outside had turned so rural. or is it the villagousness that had set the poor to war. she thought of the metopolii all over- did they still sprinkle gold and mirror on the pavement. it had been a long time, months, since she had motored there. were beloved theaters all gutted. she half hoped so too. perhaps the terrorists had taken over, perhaps her father and everyone had been arrested.

she heard the pistol shots of the maharajah- was it the practice. he always forswore it when she asked him and she asked why. what could the poor man be plotting. an air of semifarcical tragedy hovers over him like an aura. when he felt she felt it, he complimented her routinely on her amber hair before he said something teasing and inept, but it was the pale dye of resentful malice that convinced her that their marriage still had some of itself left and wasn't yet a mere comforting bed of boredom. he kissed her earlobe. she liked his small white teeth's luster amid that waterfall of beard.

this two hundred year old wooded wooded house could do with some opened rage. the earth and its handmaiden of gravity had finally wrestled down the sun, it was dark now. her maid informs her, unconvincingly, that its 1931. she wondered if the march of history had been chilled somewhat. weren't the astronomers saying that the universe is expanding at ever accelerating rates. didn't that mean that time was slowing.

but for now he was young and shapely and wired below that beard, with a hint of shoulders almost feminine in its line. often he muttered his was it prayers? or just anxiety in a serene superior unruffled percussive tongue. was he rehearsing arguments with his mysterious friends- or were those friends simply being hanged in some far land; then she wondered if miraculously he was not just young but absurdly so, 21 or 23. she had heard some of that sonorousness in his secretive conversations over the telephone to his mother- she imagined the mother an old mistress, all righteous fineried modesty in a gouged out rectangle of rock in an indian villagy kingdom sitting around a large fire in some moon carpeted desert with an ungainly phone clamped on her ear m magnifying glass reading his letters the foreign languages washing like a turbid river over her ears. there would be groups of women assembled around to ask of what might have happened to this wandering son. but in all this she remembered that to be happy their life may be exquisite, but it must certainly be sparse of gesture, and of types of conversation. her love and education must remain incomplete. she diverted herself by his glossy eyelashes, the garrulous color of his glance at her; she fretted that this weather aged them uncommonly.

was there no end to all this prelude, however pleasingly romantic it was. his unit of thought was rarely more than a season. he was content to fixedly apportion his affectionate- if his voice sometimes seemed to have wings, at other times it was dull lead. outside were ribbons of ice aglitter . they had their daily grapefruit juice her hand still gloved all part of the self harmonizing mood she felt she had to put out or make up but a fine air of nervousness still roamed the lines around her mouth. she sometimes had dreams that she had been poisoned and her blood dripped in a strange calligraphic script while he sat reclining beside, bent of interpreting it as code.

her love felt benumbed, its starwhite dwarfs of doubt cartwheeling. this was not a happy depression meant to build character or learning. she felt insignificant, a sudden curtness railed her brain. perhaps she should spend her days with fussy aunts and older cats- was this not her fate, she who was after all the king's mistresses' grand niece's only child. so thought she thought. what a vastness- and when this night was sugar for love so lovely the floating web of starlight. what brooded him now, why wouldn't he speak. her forehead bulged over with the files of months of suppressed suffering. she determined that all his ethnic contrivances will no more move her.

as she sat limp, inexpectant he rose saying that he must leave, there are revolutions all around asia. he,an itinerant, could not bear the moral bruise of being sedentarised in an enslaving metropolis. there must be waves of arsenic. he looked to her attempting to foil her sorrow and protest but her resolute inertness made him feel a parody. he need that fourth glass. his mind felt disheveled, sinking. her aversion was now almost florid. it seemed his palace of illusion was not only to be shattered but paraded nude in blackface. he pulled her arm suddenly and kissed her wrist, but it was like fishing for herring, feeling almost a light relieved martyrous joy she did not move it away she soon found herself saying : don't sulk eat your dinner...but his sudden feeling of exposure piqued her again

almost-haiku

sound consumes the year.

i live alone in the forest with 2 tigers.

midst rain song an' rain call



haibun


in a night's moment i turn, and behind my trail, Krishna's footprints,
distinguished by signs, barley, autumn lotus, the goad, a fallen hand
marked by a discus. i wash the dust off the the ikon's hair, stay amazed
of the chariot of blinking star-eyes


repeat the god

a smile traceable as
the bracelets slacken

democracy

at worst is the downward spiral of competitive darwinian minority-isms. there has to be another way of negotiating than finding the aggrieved minority you're from, (or being defensive against such aggrievement if you're locked in the position of "majority")- this can't be satisfying, making enemies where you don't always regard them so-

2. in india, the public, the anywhere is a prospective space for mayhem. for in the military democracy we live in, any "event"- be it even ever so trivial as a professor's lecture,being "public" is full of security, redundant as india is with labor, even of the security kind. but the street outside, or this side of the metal detector, is available for violence, and will be considered as condemnable, but not strictly speaking a security breach.