I can't quite explain why I have no stories.
No funny intro to my life, all the time I have spent
in all the years you never knew me,
Or in yesterday, or the day before.

I didn't do nothing, you know.
Though my funny bone is brittle
and my life tellable only in episodes, hurtling towards—
—more episodes to come.

Perhaps I'm too predictable once you get used to me; Yet

when you rewind to episode two or three for that joke—whatsit—
you'll have forgotten I used to be like that.

I'm tired of myself.

Actually no, I'm just saying that.

I do tire of myself, I need to experience the outside,

But my concern is with and for myself.

It's a kind of colonizing; reducing to an experience

All of that outside, and appropriating it

To write myself into the books.

I won't defend it as creative collateral damage.

I will defend it, though. Hold the fort

For my brain's right to devour, exploit,

To do damage to itself, to have its quality recognized,

To melt, impermanently, and be resurrected or reborn.

I Other you right back, you Other, you.

Take THAT.

Then it strikes me.

No use, and that's why I'm inviting the fight, again.

To be split-second sure, as I hear jaw decisively Crack

Again.

The talking in our house

Is like a trickle from the tap

Even after a long time

Your hands haven't gotten wet

And when you need to soap, it won't lather.

The listening in our house

Is like a tape-recorder

What you say to it makes no difference;

Yet it has recorded the sounds perfectly,

Can repeat them verbatim,

Without understanding.

The laughing in our house

Is like the fancy crockery.

We can display it, visitors and guests can attest;

We use it on ourselves once in a while

And enjoy it; but normally, amongst ourselves,

You wouldn't have guessed it was there.

The love in our house

Is like my mother's wedding ring.

It legitimizes, excuses, entitles;

Assumed to be there, hidden away somewhere

Until one day, searching for something else,

We realize its gone, with no more than the basic minimum pang.

We wanted to ride rough-shod

(Why not better shod, again?)

Over all their nonsense. All their

trivial pursuits, their petty rivalry,

Back to the basics—or rather forwards.

Pure thought, and pure sensation,

The totalitarianism of Youth.

No more living for the future.

Now is enough for itself, and for us!

But you have to plan beforehand for a revolution.

And a first-div is required to rule the world.

empowerment.

i give him the once-over.

long legs, broad shoulders,

casually loose shirt, lean,

not-too-full lips, high cheekbones, sharp nose.

look again, appreciatively.

see it register, the split-second almost-smile, the triumph.

when he passes, turn. nice ass too.

say it loud, as invitation.

why not? i have a (bed)room of my own. seeti baja, seeti baja ke bol.

Bring a light when you come, for it's dark on the highway
And trucks roaring along grimly, in the dark, with lit-up jaunty cabins
Will jauntily run us over and be gone.
Mid-morning will find us vanished into tubes and chalk outlines
With the tar just beginning to bubble and absorb the last of us,
Moustaches shaking knowingly at those
Crazy youngsters on bikes, trying to get free,
Or whatever,
Causing heartache to parents and wasting their money,
Though we're not them.

In full rooms, with full lives, we're happy just trying,
But they'd mark us out as anti-socials,
Delinquents, Sallu-aspirants or shameless (-ful?) women
With troubled childhoods, oppressed by the drought of civilization,
The pressures of the information age, the ruthless competition.
Like elephants dead in the electric fences of sanctuary
We were caught getting in or out—
A State infrastructural lapse.
We might've even got bullet-holes, and become
Would-be terrorists, or Maoists; "How a child from such a good family—?"
And so on. I suppose we should've expected it.
Here we were, trying not to take
The path less travelled by; what would make a difference?

It's funny how you know people.
Collect bits of them—
an Oh, He's So Hot accidentally dropped within earshot,
a Did You Hear whisper, heard from inside a cubicle,

sequences shot from the corner of your eye,

inconsistencies you only noticed when someone else was saying something else,

a wretched fight, not worth the trouble,

the thing you gulped down, rising like bile into your mind,

the things they laughed at, and why.

It's gotten easier nowadays, with

Facebook and all that.

But the old ways had much more style, and took more skill.

And you didn't have to stop and realize how jobless you were.