an apt regurgitation.

I need to reassure my cynicism. It wavers, sometimes.

I need to read poems about deciding to be mad[ly] in love.
About using those clichees consciously, defying
Both those who use them ignorantly, as commonplaces,
And those who studiously avoid such pollution.
And so Proclaim to the World that our love Subverts Conventional Meaning-
Ours is Language and the World that's in it!
—While believing, beneath, that it's all just hormones anyway.

I need to attend plays of socio-political Worth.
Nod vigorously in self-righteous assent, like everybody there,
Be suitably dressed, nothing too bourgeois, like everybody there,
Critique State oppression, middle class Conservatism and Indolence-
But I can never prevent those popup points:
My family's Middle Class. I don't know who the State is. I don't see
What use it is to the downtrodden that I use my leisure time
To nod vigorously at their hurt.
I need to believe that they'd stutter, ashamed, helpless, without answers.

I need to imagine those scenarios, you know the ones,
Where my friends turn out to not give a damn,
The men I love forget me, my family dies on me
[The self-absorption reaches its peak here but,
Threaded through the shit, can you see the naive trust?]
I die, and nobody cries
[Wryly smiling, viciously reminded
That I am not free of the proverbs, Chinese, Yiddish, mother's]
I need to remember, grateful for the harshness,
How little I have grown, contrary to unreasonable certainty or hope.

I need to hear of people who have done badly
Despite being born with effortless perfection;
To despair, fear though never pity,
To throw up my hands, exasperated at the futility;
I need to Believe—desperately, and grasp at the familiarity of it, 

As though I never stopped doing it, and hope
My subconscious covered those bases, to mitigate the petty calculatedness.

I need to be reduced, to be crushed and trained to cringe,
Because-—one final confession—
I cannot live in the moment, extempore,
Steadily leaving the minutes behind, like emission trails;
I am tied to each one that passes as if I gave birth to it.
I cannot easily turn my back on
Lost friend, disappointed hope, on emptiness,
Without practice.

My friend says wearing shoes without socks is disgusting.
I'm beginning to see what he means.

Socks keep your feet clean and from breaking a sweat
and help in homeostasis. Kept in socks, feet don't get
dry and hard, or develop painful cracks, or stink. The socks absorb it all.
How this happens is both perfectly explicable by materials and conditions and processes,
and yet the happiness of feet is not. Perhaps we all need
something between ourselves and the surfaces we present to the dust:
Soulmates.

with guilt as my bedfellow.

'The Dummies' Guide to Being Strong-

  Step1: Realise that damn bed's been made.

  Step 2: Lie on it.'

It's bitter how the fact that

You'll have to let yourself sleep sometime,

And forget, just sometimes,

Turns that opiate from relaxant to sedative,
And bravery to charlatanry.

"Let the lying dog sleep", they'll say.

epic fail

People use the word epic a lot, to refer to something very good. 

It is the successor of awesome.

And I suppose it isn't going to matter that they're diluting its meaning because those sorts of adjectives aren't being used seriously much anyway.

Grand theory has been discredited. Grand narratives are a pejorative.

Grand pianos take up too much space. Grandparents aren't grander parents.

There aren't undiscovered territories to discover. I could do a trek or something,

but that's because I don't know, not because humankind doesn't.

And anyway, if I'm out of mobile range for a few days, people start panicking about me, or I about them.

If I commit a grand crime passionel I can't flee the country with the name of my love on my lips because I won't get a passport.

And there's enough troubles at the border already without unbalanced lovers queuing up to question their Line of Control. 

Oh, and there's no solving murders of international import on the Trans-Siberian railway either, because the train takes forty days from start to finish and I'll never get that many days off work.

I don't want to be nostalgic about the days before I was born, that's my parents' job.

Nor to long for TB to consume me while I breathe sea air and try to get used to my impending death. And let's not go into the plumbing and things.

And as consolation there's still racism, to deport immigrants with, and imperialism, to keep your car going,

And sinocentrism, because the -centrisms were getting too North-heavy. And Americanism, which should've been an ideology but instead stands for something so uninformed that only someone utterly internationally privileged could've thought so, and yet people can organise their words around it. 

There are still epic battles on ESPN every third Saturday in season, and some civilisation-sized observation waiting

in every expert's larynx for the right note to be hit in international affairs.  

Everybody's little drama is a big deal as we're all equal, and those who capitalise on it are an offence to humanism, which in turn only an ecological ignoramus could've come up with.

Not that I have an alternate future in mind, but discoveries are all to the scientific,

As battle used to be to the swift—or perhaps the strong—and the rest of us

are busy looking backwards and forwards in time trying to avoid human failings 

before we cross the road.

right to privacy

Earth as well as moon tonight are blinded by the city's smog. 

On a balcony suspended mid-cloud in the grey half-light,
you should have been with me. 

It is so rare, this wall for the eyes; for lovers,

this angel with the flaming sword at Eden's gate.

The life lived a bit more than it used to be

My life was a useful thing altogether, amounting to
A couple of very nice birthday cards, three or four
Clearly-written exam papers and an interesting idea or two
A year. The poetry was marginalia.
What's to be worried over, if you insist,
Is the narrowing field of vision, the cramped, busy writing,
Too many words, too little feeling,
And too much space beside for poetry to fill up.
In that chasm between words and verge it simply drowns.

Spanish poor.

Late last night we saw an old lady in an angloindian dress, carrying a plastic bag
like a handbag, poke fastidiously at some garbage bags beside a footpath.
Today, walking up to the church I was attacked by some herbs and a lady
handed me one, reminded me of aunty Molly and proceeded to bless me thoroughly.
I don't know what she said because it was Spanish.
Then she leaned back on her left hip and asked me to bring out the cash.
I said I had none and smiled at her helpfully. She grimaced, took back her investment
and left me with the smell of myrtle on my hands.
On the cobbled street corners old men with dirty beards are slouching
with dogs in dirty jackets and a can out ahead of them.
A man came to our lunch table, left a lighter and a note saying
his wife had an awful disease and he no job and they two kids.
He put one set at each table, came back after a bit and told us
we could keep the lighter, but we politely refused so, practically, he took it.
We felt like benevolent ex-colonials. My father took a poverty picture,
We said don't be gruesome, he said they do it all the time. My mother melted neither for
worst nor most skilful, transnationally consistent and no post-colonial ego at all.
Down another street is a woman all in black, broken voice and heart together, wailing.
Fifty metres on, a chirpy fellow with an accordion, on a steel chair, making us feel better.
My sister gave him some money to patronise the arts.
There are impersonators in the squares and busy night streets—the Angel of mercy,
and Grim reaper are favorites—and my father stood a long time figuring out a levitator,
refusing to see what makes him trick. We never saw any children beg.
Walking back at night, we passed a man looking through dustbins like a buffet.
The next morning a Bangladeshi immigrant will tell us that with so many
thousand euros paid to be here, he has no intention of going back.