Here for the archive. Please note that Ode to Prose and
Death Wish are due for publication later this year and so
are not for general circulation outside this list, for the
moment. Gujarat: Five Songs and Scenes from a Space Odyssey
appeared last year, in Fulcrum 3 and Harvard Review
respectively. Thus they can now be in the public domain
under a copyleft principle-- ie. free to distribute and copy
at your pleasure, but please contact me first if you wish to
use them for commercial purposes or if you want to modify, borrow
or lift a portion of the text.
Vivek
ODE TO PROSE
(for Ratika)
For we long for the vertical reach of verse,
its first-dipping rise into the blue,
its way of fixing the stars in their firmamentâ
for we are at home in the world sometimesâ
...but on other days the dark pebbly-smooth noun-stones in a well of
prose will do;
prose straining towards the spirit of prose,
prose that rarely walks unplanted, scythe among the stalks,
prose that in the rainbow-arching reach of the line rolls into plain
view, like a hippo, like a tank, like a combine-harvester drawing
steadily across;
that prose is the mat we slept on,
the only heart we can trust if only because it beat so firmly,
that prose is black bread, the grain we power our machines with,
that prose is not averse to philosophy,
that it pulls back from sophistry
...that one day among those Socratic contractors and their forklifts,
the elephants devoted to their granite blocks and their mahout,
the tracts of arable land as seen from the sentinelâs smug cabin,
near the marketplace, bursting with spoiled tomatoes, tasty slabs of meatâ
among all this, or in the stable near the pigs,
in the hour of the blood sacrifice,
at the moment of that offering,
humble, hewn from a human handâ
that quadrangular prose, at that very moment, be born.
DEATH WISH
I want to be sweet and clear and free, as half a line
of Auden, or an episode of the Powerpuff Girls;
I want to be dew, and honest with mine,
like Bob Marley, or Boesman the Boer.
I want to swing and get it right
at the speed of Pollockâs light,
I want to be deep like Zulu,
tight like Tamil,
and trust my sense of Sanskrit true
with little shame for its will.
I want to dabble in the fields
ignorant of what I was doing,
rub myself on the ruins
with a self-induced disease
and gleefully lapse
the hope to be heard. I want to fax
my favourite English words
into the forty-fifth centuryï
haw, for instance, or luminaryï
hiding them in a snatch of prose...
passed over in silence
like Wittgenstein, no evidence
for Laura Riding or myself,
like Bharathiyar going mad composing,
I want to dissolve into our language
printing too little for my age;
I want to be obscure but not leaden,
flippant if I feel like it, then
I donât mind being called poetically shitty
in a note from Manohar Shetty,
writing into the time weâve borrowed,
singing from our utter boredom;
I want to hold in me the heat of my combustion
and leave this sweat-smear as a resurrection:
I want to be sweet and clear and free,
inconsequential, insufferable, just like me.
GUJARAT: FIVE SONGS
1. Boy Whipping Self
He snaps a rope-whip on his brown torso
and flays the skin, or so
we are led to belief. Tea, snacks, trinkets
and all of us unticketed
appended watchers in a circles-and-
-tangent dance, flame-ish around
him: we blue his bruises by our looking.
Whoâs the boy whoâs making
him do it, what was his name, who took
it away? What spirit yokes
them so? Is it his own body he beats
or that of a discreter
another? Will it hurt us as it hurts him
when prophecy and whim
and sign conjoin conformably near,
here in the theatre of the undeniably here?
2. Silence
The flown-in politicos, they clap clap clap
and the flown-in journos, they click click click
and more has been said than ever before
because more can be said than ever before.
3. Hindus on the Moon: The Tale of Pandit the Pundit
(for Ranbir Sidhu)
Pandit the pundit, hyper-managerial software king,
opened an office on the Moon, another on a Saturnine ring.
Far from home he was, among the recognisable debris,
far from home he was, from his own encrypted history;
it was natural that he find something lacking
in his new digs: smooth, unplashing, desultory.
Plagued by half-memories revivableïïone hopeïïthrough charity,
he plunged his funds into development machines
blind to the warlords there mongering.
So, he blew up his home planet, unaccountably.
4. History
History in its grand design
alloys matter and spirit in time:
Karlie Marx in the library,
Toni Gramsciâs prison infirmary.
History in its petulant detail
prefers to sabotage retail:
now the goondas use their computers
to distinguish their own from others.
When Big History and Little History meet at the colonnade
a terrible, questioning quiet falls on all that we have made.
5. Laughter
After a massacre
one hears a call to laughter:-
Manto did, Vonnegut too:-
a tinking thin-brass bell
buckled under heat, a spell
disjoining. Lapsible, crude
and bitter hope of return,
song of the tattered urn.
Nothing will be the same:
this house is not your house,
my wanderer. Please, nurse
your wounds. Recopy your name
in this ledger here, begin.
Oh, and find something to believe in.
SCENES FROM A SPACE ODYSSEY
1.
A shrivelled stony man on the rocketship home
said, âDammit, back then people who came to this place
behaved themselves. They didnât have pressurised phones
or pinhole Teflon cameras. To visit space
you had to be an educated athlete or
very, very rich.â Tittering children rephrased
his voice on voice recorders. The fat parents snored.
2.
Two days, it now took: Moon City Central Egress
to Junction Terra Point. Through the portholes one peeked
that odourless, unmoveable inclusiveness; and encolourised
self-service screens in rooms digitised these bleak
wave forms, offering data-swilling picturesque
alternatives. Many, many worlds and so much
variation for our thought to enliven. No touch.
3.
Oil, blue bananas, uranium, titanium ores;
residuum, plutonium, spirochete spores:
these imports in our hull underwrote our cost-claim.
We drank from face-refracting decanters in bars
and tried to fall in love by default. Who then pined
for mini-eons passing on Earth? Wars, wars, wars;
the chewing gum of the economy much the same.
4.
Hissing, the white bathroom auto-cleaned. He took a dump
in sempiternal time, deciding Earthâs fate, though
he knew his insignificance. Outside, among
the small debris on the exoskeleton, a slow
undoing took place. No little safety sensor rang.
Not over yet. Nor slackening movement. Bored, lonesome
muttering, sleepless. Minute meant for death? A hum.
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