<hello, friend>
1.21 root@fsociety:~# How do you hack someone whose life has been broadcasted and documented carefully through all of their snooty trickery?
1.21 root@fsociety:~# Where were you dear Eliot when they hacked me to write about my life, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second. And I ended up with a lifelong disease.
1.21 root@fsociety:~# Sometimes I am making love with my dream tattooed girl to make myself believe I am in love. Sometimes I am doped on cheap hash or pills of Bhang or Librium, sharing my deepest fears and regrets with people who I thought were my well-wishers. Other times, strange women appear into my life, into my room, into my body, into my brain to ruin everything that was left of me.
1.21 root@fsociety:~# I know you were there with us through the tired, tired 18-hour cheap bus rides to distant hills with my love; Jonsi breezing through the sky, as if fields after fields of marijuana were burning. Love must have been something like this.
You were there with me through the many solo trips to the poorest villages across this malnourished country. Through loveless nights when sleep was a luxury and cigarettes never enough.
Through childhood memories of desolation and rejection. Through distant faraway laughter and eternal bullying and sabotage that sometimes reappear as flashbacks around useless colleagues that do not have anything else to talk about but fat money, investments, cars and apartments.
Or through a lonely ride back home from the office in a busy subway with no one to talk to or smile at. Through drunk, doped days and nights of mid-aged reckless anger. Through my irrelevance and deactivated existence, breath.
1.22 root@fsociety:~# Through miles long walks along the endless empty streets, screaming: “Exiting times in the world right now, exciting times.”
You have seen it all. How ethno fascists morphed into rats at the sound of a telephone call. How trees became concrete. How felons became pundits.
1.22 root@fsociety:~# How Allen Ginsberg was hacked. Kerouac was deleted. And how a sunflower became a locomotive and how a locomotive, a sunflower.
How friends misunderstood. How acquisitions were manufactured and reality constructed and superimposed. How lovers left one by one only to reappear.
How erstwhile friends became spokespersons for the right wing frenzy, propagating only for the famous ones, the cults and the spooky fads.
1.22 root@fsociety:~# How hashtags became poems and how poems became hashtags.
1.22 root@fsociety:~# ….
1.22 root@fsociety:~# …..
1.22 root@fsociety:~# ………
1.22 root@fsociety:~#…….
1.23 root@fsociety:~# But well, it’s all a distant memory now. Like time. Like time lost-deleted- Schizophrenic Gong. Gone!
The question remains:
Are we “1 or 0”
And how do we stop
the “top 1% of the 1% … who act god without permission.”
I am sharing this not to avenge or to ask for your help to change the world.
But we must remember:
How the 5/9 hack was hacked.
<Fabric walks>
All evening I walked through the fabric stores at Nehru place
In search of the absence of you. The stores lined up one by one,
Reminded me of your disappearance. Textiles of all colours, varied shades of you.
So much forgotten, so much to forget. Pixelated memories. Blunt realities.
So many burns, colours. So many months- between rehabs and hospitals.
Yet this mad desire to trace your disappearance, months later, confounds me.
I remember you had said that you saw me properly when I was reading my poems. While I
Must have unseen, you little by little, every night as we made love through the winter’s mist. It is winter again and the mist has grown murkier. Meandering across fabric stores
Is all I do now to return.
<The kohl eyed lady from the Midlands>
Lying naked for hours together, we escaped to Wales for weeks.
You sang to me of Codeine, the vivid extraction process,
Sketched, step by step, in your journal.
The skeleton faces, your naked breasts, distilled encryptions-
Your self-portraits of your black hole flashes, your head rested on corners of the walls, trauma.
Existential fears, childhood, youth, substance, punk, abuse. My silent heaves.
Your sublime eyeliner presence, your aesthetic body, voice like that of the winds of the woods.
Watching the Bloodstock photos together, you sketched abstract images on my bare back.
How you coloured my nails with different shades. I miss cooking
For you when you were unwell. How you panicked when I became unconscious,
Testing my pluses every 5 minutes. Death then would have been a perfect ending. The drunk Impromptu singing sessions; the crazy Valentine’s feedback, ruminations about benzodiazepines
And opioids. The silent metro rides, drunk screams at pubs. The kitchen smoke. And, how I Would always end up running down to your house through the grey late night,
Lost, every time, when all the gates are closed.
Only to taste your folklore dreamscape, and the pasta that you would cook.
Colours of all colours, oh, the queen of anarchist performance masks!
All I am left with now are your whispers,
Some torn pages from your journals and a frozen
Rose that you had put between my teeth.
<Recovery>
The night is the only weapon
To confront these viral times
When distance becomes the only elixir
And all touch forbidden.
Counting seconds
Memories
Forgotten tastes,
Fragrances.
Sidewalks,
Yellow broken brights,
All emotions erased
Or, are they?
The same old place
Same old faces
The same old anxiety pills
Only the expression has
Changed.
Last taxi to Sohryngkham
(An Elegy for Angeline Kharmalki)
Memory is triangular
Like frames that melt in flames
We burn to fight a cold, cold winter.
Night brings strange insects
Feeds her anxiety
Moths plan a mass suicide
Inside her mind. The windows are blur.
The humming pine winds set the score
The rain was always a part of the plan.
Until a coal truck slides and falls over
As she finally flies.
(And all our love-
Hate games
Unread letters,
And scores
Settled
In a flash)
<Divorce>
Like hollowed earth, being;
Like a broken instrument;
The visits and the revisits
To the same places
Same spaces
To fight memory.
Like a mountain storm,
Like the night winds shivering
Like December forever and ever.
Like rocks under a waterfall
Blue birds and more
Always there, disappear
Stings
Like a pancreatitis attack
Like a life gone wrong
Like a song about a gong
So long, so long.
<A desolation streak>
The last subway back to the depot.
The last drunk person in an empty bar kindly asked to leave as they are about to close.
The only yellow shade that shines low in a multi-storied apartment as the first rays of the sun begins to appear.
A prostitute who got robbed
by her only customer on a failed night.
Trans women raped by old men in the middle of the night.
A petty thief killed by billionaires
An unknown singer-songwriter playing in a crowded pub
who no one cares to listen to.
Like talking to imaginary friends
for hours.
Inventing games till minutes turn to hours and hours into days.
Old birthday cards from lost friends
that you throw off to clean your bookshelf.
A ticket to a place you never visited
but you find it tucked inside an old diary years later.
Like the women who loved you but you never spoke to.
Like the women you had loved but who never spoke back to you.
— Songs forgotten, poems deleted,
people lost, undocumented disappearance.
Ragpickers’ only meal shared
with the homeless.
Beggars sniffing dendrite to forget this birth.
The unattended souvenir in a rusty museum.
A decayed corpse in the gutter.
An old monument where no lovers remain.
Like a lonesome woman at the solo table in a quiet lounge celebrating, raising a toast to her gained age.
Dried rivers, roads washed away,
lost old railway unused tracks.
Broken cars, bikes and rusted boxcars.
Erasing hills, the lapse of seasons
Gossamer, end of memory.
Post-loneliness. Happy faces.
Just a lull without a storm that will never come.
A perineal emptiness. A visceral sound.
A beep that never ends, a earburn
A dystopian silence.
No song. No sound. No mourning. No whimper.
Just a white bright light.
