Poems | Abhishek Jha

Photo : Tilak

A Letter From Nowhatta

In the courtyard where I am grubbing for a ruin,
your silence and the static of the radio
are cadences that entwine each minaret
hushing all vowels and leaves.
The one that stands and gives a view,
look, the one we scaled
to take a panorama shot
of its revolution, I think, it got
plucked from the packet of cigarettes you left.
In the courtyard, I am spattering
some smokealone ink for the consumption
of birds, and in case you thumb
through you might choke on it and die.
That's useful, I thought, for raising
a ruin or coughing a glottal stop.
The ash is not anyone's,
so don't go around and stain the paper
ballot. There will be a man
soon coming with a mallet to nail
a woman on the walls of the minaret.
Now that I am here and scrubbing my feet
my arms and the back of my ears
lend a hand- will you?- to me
and clean my tongue of acids.
That's how it's done, you know, here
at the washing tank in the yard,
that's how we speak to the silence that entwines
and slowly smokes the cigarettes.
Later some people are able to learn
about the muezzin who was late
and had left the radio with a wire through its heart
to inform of his "death by stabbing".
When this work I do is done for the day
I'll leave with the children of the tehreek.
The movement, they say, is also a prayer.
Our prayers, I know, are circular.


Mucous 

My nose is convinced that a wire extraordinarily straight is an instrument of precision for measuring sleep. A gram is after all only a teenage experiment condemning your brain to sibylline wispiness. We need concrete measures. A metre. Can the discovery of gravitational waves ever flatten our nose-time?

To find: The other end of the wire as a result beyond black holes.

Therefore, we move.

Assume that the morning headlines are running on parallel tracks to the finish line of a railway junction, of nonsense and N2O. Yet there is enough cigarette smoke above an empty stall to kill all war-men who forgot that standard operating procedure does not allow pissing. We are ready despite moving. We want to bleat our semibreve whole.

Now Uncle Sam is an A-hole. Sam has an O-pinion. Sam has always been of the opinion that he is what God made him. Sam has been yelling that he'll beshit himself with Valium to liftshoot all trees that grow limbs at night- a fact hereunto hidden under a well-known gas. Sam will not stop until we bleat our semibreve whole. Sam wants a forest fire. Sam gets a renal failure.

In the event of renal failure, appoint a surgeon trained especially for such occasions to culture a very persistent species of bacteria. Step 2 is always a merry-go-round or an ice-candy or a confetti-shower. Repeat until the next dot of time. The method is distraction- pure in procedure, clinical in cleanliness, absurd with ablution norms.

Vulture V and Scarecrow S, at time Now and date Today, are banging a cathode ray tube after a long period of convalescence that was supposed to contain their celebration of diarrhoea as a noble pursuit. My nose is not convinced.

CLICK a truly business-minded lover CLICK a truly business-minded lover wants a wire drawn through every blandishment CLICK what is it like to be mind-fucked by a city, bro CLICK boy it is like a tape recorder turned on CLICK a lover is condemned to be an itinerant in truth CLICK and do you pause at every stop CLICK  a true business is the same feat in each line CLICK and do I pause at every stop CLICK a rulebook is a faint breath of suicide CLICK don't be ridiculous CLICK a truly business-minded lover is a tape recorder CLICK see you soon CLICK

subject already dead before the end of experiment CLICK