Prussian Nights

Prussian nights, as these are.

Tonight we’re close, and yet we’re far,

                                           -Away to see each other’s sardonic face.

Departing aircrafts flitting through the sky,

-Confide their bereavement in me, and with a sigh,

-They tell tales of us being alone in both time and space.

Tonight the battle’s lost and yet the war is won.

Cast away from the din and tumult of the road,

-Stands a solitary bill-board.

At it I stand looking, and fish into my pockets for academic comprehension.

The carnival is closed, to the people; its rides are not open.

Now all that’s awake at this hour is the tip of my pen.

The philosopher’s statue stands alone; forgotten in the mist.

-And philosophises to an audience which does not exist.

A surreal stillness has fallen over our dearly beloved earth.

-Dampening all our inordinate lust driven actions.

-Crying hysterically in favor of the fall of Sodom.

Tonight we’re devoid of all signs of hypocrisy and all means of mirth.

A freight truck passed me by,

-And before dissolving into the line of the last few halogen lamp-posts,

-It advised me to hide from the societal eyes.

So I make my walk tonight, without a beginning and without an end,

Political posters on the walls do portend,

-Of avertable coups and unneeded revolutions.

A surreal night has fallen over our toxic city.

Stifling all our crowning consummations of living someone else’s life,

-Of earning our own enmity.

-Of enticing our sober neighbor’s wife.

The smell of kerosene and leather float merrily through the air.

Weary bus drivers ply their fares,

-Between the ascent and the descent.

As if after making something so sure,

-Someone tonight has been rendered insecure.

Yet on your window pane you stand.

-Images and words from last night’s intercourse in hand.

-Eternally waiting for him, in death and in life.

-Yet knowing all the while, that he can’t possibly arrive.

A shriveled old man of minimal appearance was here,

-Before he added to the desertedness of the road.

-Before he was ripped by the economical sword.

He had cast a fleeting glance at me, and then had walked on eternally

There was no speculation in those eyes, no beating in that heart.

He did not choose, but was chosen to transmit this nocturnal hydrant smell.

Yet he mocked at me for having planned my life all too well.

The cynosure of all things urbanized, now sleeps like dead.

-To it can be attributed all our nocturnal societal intercourses.

                               Empty people now lie lapped in their empty dreams.

Unuttered words and unstated feelings,

-Now chiefly gloat over the fact that we never did let them escape.

Hinterland’s grotesque night descends down upon us resplendently.

We are not happy, yet we all must pretend to be,

-At this hour, aren’t we all led in to nocturnal depression?

-By any and every bloke?

Haven’t we all been led in to believing,

-That our own life is but an ugly farcical joke.

Pure Grunge! Pure Noise!

Sunburn Epiphones are there in your bones.

Everyday you dissolve your soul in Rock n’ Roll.

Now it is your age to take the stage.

And you are alive to do a stage dive.

A far fetched dream it may seem,

-To play to a crowd which is cheering aloud.

The time is never right for any stage fright.

It won’t do you any wrong to just sing your song.

 

Parent’s die. Siblings lie. Partners leave. Friends deceive.  

Rock n’ Roll stays, and it does not discriminate. 

Trofnil – Anti-depressant Pill

On a sultry summer evening,

-The myna does not sing.

Curiosity might have cut off her wings.

It is a planned disaster on her part.

But graveling in the lowly dust thou art.

 

I uncork wine bottles and leave them at the kitchen.

Oh! What a pity.

Idealism mocked at me in a time when,

Curiosity killed my virginity.

 

Television is a unnecessary evil.

Shall you pay my utility bills?

I have over fifty channels to choose, over fifty ways to lose.

-While the dead band still plays dead man’s blues.

 

That was a beautiful place – her face.

There I was asked to consent – to represent.

Whatever lies before me – is discourtesy.

But of-course, I can’t possibly deign you manners by means of a sledgehammer.

 

‘No attachments and no miseries.’

That’s exactly how we’re supposed to be.

We sleep fresh and wake up tired.

But I’m not so sure if our lives are wired.

 

Cut the wire. Fly still higher. Light the fire. You’re a liar!

 

Evening is a smudge of yellow and crimson.

I almost mistook you for the prodigal son.

You’re the steadfast outcast, into the mire you’ll have to descend.

And that’s something you possibly can’t amend.

Helga

That girl, looked at me, through her side parted hair.

This world, booked me free, on spot then and there.

I cried, like a child, at a time.

When she lied, frenzied wild, sloth is a crime.

I shout point blank, and live life like a harlot.

That black biker gang, silencers sound like a maggot.

 

Grunge is dead.

So they said.

I killed them.

Like R.E.M.

 

Grass is green.

Dawn is seen.

Evening is black.

Vanguards, Attack!

 

This black feeling,

Pours down from the ceiling.

I drown myself in red rum.

Rattle & Hum.

 

I was standing, in her lane.

I expected her, on her window pane.

I must account, for being insane.

I mocked at my nocturnal pain.

 

Every morning, and every day.

You give me the reason to stay.

For all the urban tears of sorrow-

You give me the hope of a bright tomorrow.

 

Anyone who disobeys-

Would be left to his own ways.

No eternal reward-

Can now save us from the Tudors sword.

No amount of worrying-

Will change the past recurring.

No amount of repentance-

Can change the past countenance.

Black Coffee

I know a boy, a little boy.

Who stays up till late.                                                                                                                                 

Its two A.M. now.

And he’s still awake.                                                                                                                             

 

I know a girl, a little girl.

Who stays up till late.

Its two A.M. now.

And she’s still texting her mate.

 

A silent night, a holy night, temple of the dog.

A halogen light, a petty fight, chariot of the gods.

A round cup, a white cup, with love from the defector.

A powdery mass, some green grass, and god’s own black nectar.

 

We are the children of the nocturnal generation.

The psychotic products of total frustration.

We fuck sleep and stay up till late.

It is two A.M. now, and we’re wide awake.

 

All the black powder in that cup-

Is enough to keep you up-

Through the night and till dawn.

My generation is always on.

 

Rhombohedral depression of the Nocturnal Generation.

At this hour.

A cup from the defector containing that black nectar,

Which tastes sour.

 

All the insomnia that we gain-

Is essential to drown our pain.

Always we have the freedom to choose.

But my generation is always confused.

  

Traffic

I boarded a bus last evening.

At a time when the myriad criss-cross of the street lamps was as inviting as a sedative.

The bus would take me to the edge of town-

-My unknown destination.

Through a panorama of madness called life.

-Through a tale of failure-success-failure.

-Through the doors of perception & the hall of shadows.

All around me, mundaneness grows.

-Dirty air, diluted souls.

While crowds at streets scrabble for homes, and scrounge for merciless fares.

I breathe in the dirty air.

Quotidian cares, everyday affairs.

I’m just a traveler in time,

Through a labyrinth of routine souls-

-From the medieval arc lamps of sanity.

-To the home of the cleansed sunshine.

Don’t feel ashamed to join me.

There is no more pretension.

Our inner doors of perception are now cleansed clean.

Everything now appears to me it is, INFINITE.

Take my hand, step inside my Elfin Grot.

Our intellects are limited to the chamber of Maiden Thought.

 Aneurysm, come take me. Wake me from my sacred sleep.

Take me to the forest of Azure.

Where the birds still sing and the children still play.

Inside the Elfin Grot, I stepped in,

Found myself a seat and let the journey begin.

There was twilight.

And there were birds, flying to the southern sky.

Penicillin had stopped giving me happiness.

I had written the final letter in dire stress-

-With reference to Helga’s sun colored uterus, my damsel in distress.

So from where the halogen pours down from the sky,

From there did my journey start.

Having seen lust from close quarters, I could have chosen sleep over sex,

If only she had given me the freedom of choice.

The hungry protesting voice-

-Is now silenced with field gray Panzer.

Whatever lies before me is faked, is delusional, and is illusory.

I am forever in debt to that swine Lowborn-

Who made reservation a religion.

I was sitting inside the moving bus.

There was artillery shelling all around me.

While one part of the world was busy making little boy,

The other part still cared for manners and courtesy.

The Duce was killed by a human bomb; I heard it on the radio.

I feared it would burn my trust.

I thought it was the end.

I thought it was the fifteenth of August.

In a country like ours, honesty evaporates fast.

I curse the slimy public servant who puts public last.

Nothing, absolutely nothing pleases me these days

Though I wanted her to live inside my polyvinyl box, she didn’t comply.

It started raining outside-

And my mind kept straying back to that dark knight of the last millennium-

-The night she had taken my virginity as captive.

-The night she had allowed me to see the world through her cellophane hymen.

I’d like to see the world once more-

-Once more through her cellophane hymen.

I can’t help thinking the consequences of the battle-

-Between my conscience and her inclinations.

What if my conscience had won?

What if it had not been broken by the ravages of female concupiscence?

I would have been a loyal citizen of my country, sane, satisfied and serene.

I would have danced with wild Brunfelsia on my ears, in the warm summer rain.

But everything ended with that cursed ejaculation.

 Where Indians and Chinese citizens plunge into black holes of ecstasy

Enemies of the state indulge in million dollar mirth.

The neighborhood friendly rickshaw puller finds solace in his earthen pot liquor.

Angst is the only thing that the youth can possess, and angst can be silenced by rifles.

My bus took a turn and entered red road.

It’s been all over the newspaper, the blood of politics has crept into the milk of social service.

A fire is slowly spreading, but no one cares.

Time has come for the fall of Sodom, but no one wants to talk about it, not even the Fuhrer.

I spot couples dressed in white, walking hand in hand on the sidewalk.

The vanguards of law are going to spill our guts out-

-On the sidewalk.

I hear cries of ‘Attica!’ every time I think of protest.

Poetry of Chaos and Death can only gift you suicide.

But the driver of my bus doesn’t care, and neither do I.

Halfway through the journey, I’ve lost most of my illusions.

Not a day goes by without me asking myself, why I was born to be a crusader.

Why wasn’t I engulfed by the white blood cells patrolling my mother’s hemoglobin?

Why wasn’t I ejected out of my mother’s body as sweat or pus?

I can see haloes of dust building on top of my bus.

Diesel tanks and memories associated with Pavlov’s experimental hogs.

’Achtung!’ babies are born every day, out of the Gas Chamber Black Ash.

I’m like them, if not one of them.

Harlots and Executioners and Troopers and Priests co-exist in a country like ours.

Plus, minus, surds and integers are all forming a veritable bedlam of confusion in my mind.

Regiments of damp sensations are racing through my skin.

I think I won’t make it alive.

If I die before I wake, I pray you comrade, my soul to take.

A storm will arise, and the establishment can do nothing about it.

They can censor my pen, but they can’t suppress me.

The movement can be censored, but suppressed it can’t be.

House of Detention

Good afternoon!

There are no true tones left in your bones.

Fake plastic trees everywhere-

-Infest my forest-

 -My Forest of Azure.

After three centuries in Limbo,

Time has come for the awakening of the subconscious from the damp cellars of cognac.

A Divine Comedy is about to being.

I would have gone Unicorn-hunting today,

But for the rain, heaven’s Cardinal Sin.

 

I’m in search of my Maid of Orleans.

Have you seen her?

Has anyone seen this girl?

I’ll tell you how elegant she is, deep down in the black abyss.

She washes her ornate hair every winter morning.

She often takes a walk through the Palace of Mordor.

She sunbathes on the epitome rocks of Lost City Atlantis.

I call her my Maid of Orleans.

 

It’s wonderful to know that I can’t sell Idealism to buy bread.

Everytime I hear them sirens on a winter night.

  I live some more. I die some more.

And there’s no one home, in my House of Pain.

But if you promise to break this promise,

I shall make you my confidante again.

There is never anyone home, in my House of Detention.

 

Repetition is Intelligence.

-That is what they told me at Hills Sanatorium.

Heretics die every afternoon, in areas Urban & Rural.

What good is someone singular, in a sea of plural?

 

Full Prudent Enlightenment

A baby stump went to school for the first time on the first day-

-With his seasoned timber father.

The teacher looked like an axe.

The school looked like a mill.

His father told him there was nothing to be afraid of.

The process was all conventional.

 

Baby stump first learned how to repeat.

He repeated the names of his subjects-

-Which were very elaborate for our friend.

He was lucky to receive an education of the highest order.

The teacher made him sit beside another bright stump-

-Who had been half chiseled already.

 

Baby stump shaped on quickly in his lessons.

He was good at budding, leaf-caring and grafting.

He was taught all the traditional wisdom’-

-The oriental conventions-

-And the orthodox procedures of becoming an educated stump.

 

With every touchstone, Baby Stump was chiseled-

-Little by little.

When he went to school that morning-

-He was a bright young thing like we used to be.

When he came out of school that afternoon-

-He was a chiseled piece of timber, who knew it too well to repeat.

 

He was perfectly perfect in repeating all the same conventions of centuries.

Yet he thought himself to be different.

Baby Stump then gave Entrance Tests-

-and went to a reputed Lumberjack school.

He shined in everything he did.

He still shines as a furniture in my living room.

 

My Olfactory Rememberings’

Every memory has an attached smell.

From my pile of retention, I can state,

Every smell sleeps inside our subconscious, like an ornate.

And every street, lamppost and causeway has a story to tell.

-The enamoring smell of her perfume.

-The sedating smell of early morning diesel.

-The cold smell inside a dissecting room.

-The prohibitionist smell of an anti-Christ novel.

-The stench of a thousand Chinese boxers.

-The dry smell of chalk dust and Theory of Relativity.

-The uplifting smell of Kill Devil with the Wright Brothers ‘Flyer’.

-The smell of romanticists’ lipstick in a French train.

-A thousand ‘forget-me-nots’ and the sinking Titanic.

-The October Revolution and Stalin’s brain tonic.

-The medieval smell inside Tutankhamen’s tomb.

-The odorless disorder of the first atom bomb.

-The jaded smell of Kennedy’s cold blood.

-The murky smell of Wehrmacht bogged down in mud.

-The electronic smell of Hendrix’s red wine.

-The azure smell of Morrison’s pen, which would have been mine.

I remember very well, the smell of every autumn evening gone by.

The extra-terrestrial smell of UFO’s in the ozone sky.

Death comes to the body, not to the soul.

 Every smell plays its role

-In the quotidian play of morbid and farcical elements.

I was there, I was there.

I was there, everywhere.

-From Noah’s Ark to the Wolf’s Lair.

-Striding about from smell to smell.

And every smell has a story to tell.

The Banshee & I

The Banshee was a mystic woman.

I had never known her very well.

She stood under the flickering lamp-post at dusk, with her body to sell.

She lived in a place, to some which was heaven,

-While some called it hell.

 There I saw her standing, one spring afternoon.

-Dressed in the carmine shade of red and white.

-With her consistence before my sight.

Her flowery hair was flung open-

-and scintillated in the sunlight.

I broke my journey when her eyes met mine.

Her face illuminated and began inviting me.

Her eyes were as lilting as pure red wine.

And in them I could read all the agony that she’d left behind.

When after a century of silence, she said, “Well…”

The sun was down, she smiled and said,

“If you’ve come here to buy then I’m willing to sell.”

But the price of her services she won’t tell.

She caressed my hair and pointed towards the bed.

And that’s all that I remember of that affair.

The next morning after I awoke, after my ecstasy broke,

I sat up bewildered, my disarray resting at large.

She had left a bed note, which bore the words, ‘No Charge’.

And she was gone, to be found nowhere.

 I waited for her at dusk under the flickering lamp post.

-In the days that followed.

I waited all through thunder, lightning and rain.

Then when on one autumn evening, I met her again,

-My excitement overflowed.

She was the same mystic woman.

Her mystifying beauty could not have been hollow.

She raised her hand and made a summon,

-Which I most hypnotically followed.

She walked through the moony woodland.

I followed her.

She walked with a candela in her hand.

-And turned back near the river.

 Then she called me to her side.

To this directive readily complied.

She confided in me of a man, who was strong.

And by whom she’d been deeply wronged.

She asked my help to buffet this man.

I assured to do everything I can.

I followed her into the slum where he lived.

I battered his head, after he begged to be forgived.

I smeared his walls with his black blood after he died.

The Banshee stood there satisfied.

That was just the beginning of a macabre and beautiful play of war and plague,

Her bereaved spirits found expression in me; her alter ego.

I became her slave, that’s something you should know.

Of me she would certainly not let go.

Her reasons were dim and motives were vague.

The second man, was actually her third-

-Customer who had by purpose occurred-

-To not only scavenge her body and her mind-

-But also sprinkled on her acid and gouged her blind.

I followed the Banshee to the marooned railway yards.

Breaking into his room was not so very hard.

The Banshee began humming a tune-

-After I had gouged the man’s eyes and offered them to the moon.

Sometime later I relived him of his suffering.

I dissected his heart and gave it to The Banshee as an offering.

The Banshee stood behind me,

-Smiling intently at this monstrosity.

 

We both sat there by the rail-road.

We both sat drinking the blood of the deceased.

The gustatory modality of dead blood was to us, quite a feast

She then told me of the terminal enduring beast.

And after finishing him I would enter the Hall of Shadows, she could forebode.

So I finished my last sip of gall-

-picked up a sledgehammer and got back to work.

Upon reaching his fazed window, I shattered it with the maul.

When at last I had crushed his skull into pieces infinite-

The Banshee sought my leave for the night.

She intended to cross the grotesque river on a barge.

Before leaving, she thanked me for aiding her vengeance.

I just smiled and said, ‘No Charge!’

 Then again it was the bleak December when she reappeared.

The Banshee said that she had a malady which was weird.

 There was an insect her brain which became alive in the light of the sun.

She said that it had been clicking the wires inside just for fun.

It would transform her into a butterfly, she feared.

She had found her soul mate, her alter ego inside me.

She begged me to set her struggling passion free.

In the dark side of the chamber, her voice still resides-

-And compels me to set all other paraphernalia aside.

My decisiveness found expression in relieving her of her agony.

I choked her to death, and played with her silver skin till sunrise.

But her return as the Woman in White took me by surprise.

She said, ‘your attention is all I implore,-

– I would like you to follow me, and nothing more.’

Thereupon I dived into the oceanic abyss of her eyes.

I and The Banshee used to talk a lot, and yet we used to say none.

Her eyes were glinting before this morbid play was done

Now at dusk I wait upon at Chesterfield, beside-

-that flickering lamp-post, where her lilting voice still resides.