An item for the lit-groupie newsletter, I met Jabberwock for the first time at the Zubaan reading and he is as nice as his blog. He said that when he read Broadband and the Bookslut he was reminded of a Woody Allen story called The Whore of Mensa. Later he kindly sent me a link. Thankee, Jabberwock. It's so wicked, it makes me sigh.
Mmmm...alright I am taking the plunge and posting some of my poems online. I used to have minor paranoia about plagiarism which was justified (If you are paranoid long enough, you will be given reasons to be paranoid.) by an ertswhile friend posting one of my poems on his blog after having added two terrible lines to it! I stumbled on it months later and went through 'the nerve, the gall, the cheek' routine. When confronted he gave me the windiest, drew-himself-to-his-full-height-explanation for it. The defence also involved him saying he did not know me too well. In the words of Christine Keeler, "He would say that, wouldn't he?'. Recently, I revisited the scene of the crime and found that he has deleted my infuriated challenge from the comments and retained his own windy explanation and the soft-shoe routine involving his having got it from an unnamed someone who mailed to him. This after having coyly accepted dozens of compliments for the poem from the readers of his very popular blog. The compliments remain online as well, though the post can only be seen by friends. Anne Fadiman was right. Plagiarism most closely resembles kleptomania.
The poems below appeared in New Quest, a Pune-based lit journal last year, but were written a long, long while before that. I am on the verge of disowning them and this seems as good a way as any. (Woah, watch out! Galloping angsty poet!)
Radha Kalyanam
Her mother bought her
sarees made of gold.
Her mother
never knew
that what she loved best
about women
were the undersides of their breasts.
That though she loved the rest
she loved that best.
Resignation
I am sorry, ladies.
Can’t serve two goddesses
in one shift.
(And hold the puns
on shiftless lives.)
You! You stop frowning.
It hurts to think.
I’ve decided to live.
And you, you can stop too.
Don’t roll your fine black eyes.
I’ve given up on you as well.
It hurts to feel.
I’ve decided to float.
Next janam perhaps
You will oblige.
A fish, that’s it,
pretty and bright,
one eye to each side
and a life straight ahead.
Mediocrity and what we said
This time it is gone we fear
This time the shudder is real
Only clichés are here
It is indeed the block
And they will chop our heads on it.
Mediocrity and what they said
And their absurd pretensions.
Who dares stand up spaghetti strung ganja sprung
And announce, “I am a writer.”
Off with their heads.
To the dogs they be fed.
Regurgitate them when they have smart back cover photographs
But until then
let them stay dead.
ANGST IS OVER SISTER…OVAR SISTAR
but there ain’t enough slips between the keys and the lips.
May have been born brown in Malabar
May speak four languages
and swear in three
but can write only in one
And that one still bears punctuation, grammar
standard phonetics
(the nuns in shorthand…
though nuns there were none.)
The convent departs unmourned
from my tongue
in times of stress, irony
raconteur’s joy, political empathy
caffeine overdose
and returns quietly, shamelessly
when money is at stake.
But the keyboard
(the parrot where the rakshas keeps the soul)
will type
no raucous Kannada, no sarcastic Malayalam
no filmi Hindi, no lyrical Tamil
Its cloister keeps me chaste
like no other,
bores me
like no other.
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