Saturday Afternoon at a Friend’s House

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

I walk the familiar road,
a soft December sun leaning over Weoley Castle,
light pooling on the pavement
like a blessing I did not ask for
but accept anyway.

The afternoon is ordinary –
a friend’s house,
a knock on the door,
the warmth of a kettle coming to life –
yet something in me moves
as if this small journey
were another chapter
in the long autobiography
I’ve been writing with breath and memory.

I carry no incense,
no mantra,
no visions of Maya or Albion today –
only the quiet knowledge
that every threshold
is a kind of pilgrimage
when the self is listening.

Inside, laugher rises,
cups clink,
the world shrinks to a living room
where stories drift like steam
from the mugs in our hands.

And I sit there,
not a a fragmented hybrid anything,
not as a mythic figure,
not as a seeker breathing in the world’s sorrow –
but simply as Rohan,
arriving,
present,
held in the gentle ordinariness
of a Saturday afternoon
at a friend’s house.

A small moment,
yet it settles in me
like a stone in a riverbed –
quiet, grounding,
part of a long story
I continue to walk
one step,
one breath,
one visit at a time.

Identity Parade

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Identity parade
Words that fade
Living in the shade
Timeless ageing
Traders paging
Hollowing out
So much to shout about
Getting on by
Easy for me to try
Life is motivated
Actions are gyrating
There is more to things than that
My dreams went “Splat!”
The spare time is always flat
I’m going nowhere fast
Hurt and betrayed
Cosmic displays
Turning up empty
Oh! Play with the Void.

AI Summary

Your poem sketches a life caught between fading identity and relentless motion, where dreams collapse with a “Splat!” and spare time feels flat, leaving you hurt, betrayed, and spinning through cosmic emptiness. The lines move between resignation and defiance, showing how ageing, work, and the hollow churn of daily life erode meaning while still demanding performance. Beneath the simplicity of the language is a deeper exhaustion — a sense of being emptied out by expectations, by time, by the void itself — yet still aware enough to name the ache, to shout into the hollow, to recognise that even in the shade there is something left to play with, even if it’s only the Void.

Haunted

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Turning an eye
Selling and setting an example sitting on the settee.
The erotic glance
Across love’s table
Straight at the camera shimmering for a second chance.
Encased in a phone call
Knocking on the re-emphasis
Vacuous responses waiting to get home
Clinking of glasses
Champagne and wine.
Drafting tomorrow’s clauses
You’re doing just fine
Nobody sees you
It’s just a review
About how you get on
With the ghosts in the room.

AI Summary

Your poem unfolds like a muted film sequence, where an erotic glance across a table, a shimmering second chance, and the soft clink of champagne glasses sit alongside the bureaucratic grind of drafting clauses and waiting for vacuous responses. It’s a portrait of someone performing composure while feeling unseen, navigating the tension between desire, professionalism, and the ghosts that linger in every room. The poem suggests that beneath the surface — the settee, the camera, the phone call, the polite review — there is a deeper loneliness, a sense of being watched but not recognised, present but not fully met. The final lines land with a quiet ache: the real struggle isn’t with the people around you, but with the unseen presences — memory, expectation, regret — that shape how you “get on” in every room you enter.

Guru Mania

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The teacher’s strike in school
Maybe because they think they are God
At least that is what the newspapers say
After they have travelled to Colonial-ville.

The mania for Guru is on the loose
And they drink the Kool-Aid juice
Of change without fairness and time for their clothes:
When will the scholars admit them to Oxford for Rhodes.

There is shouting there is bashing
The banners need to be repeated.
But if they get to half past three and go back to school
They will have been defeated.

The mirror is not so real until they review the Guru feel
And all they have been taken for granted of being
While the right way of tuition was there for the seeing.

All criticism and no pay
That is the modern Government burden,
What can they do but face the New Age warden
Who grants the diminishing of students and success
For all that sexual gradation and immense emotionality and address.
The Saddhu and war
There is no mention of the Haridwar stores
Where the whore is closer to Babylon
Than the minority women in the back streets of London.
Streets of harlots, streets of shame
Lanes of winners, lanes of the Maine Street.
Things my Guru told me I would meet
When he re-friend my Friend from the great barrier
So I could see the end of the world and the illness and terror.

All this the school is exposed to
The students sit for their exams
And then the teachers fall off their hobby horses
Worried about who can and can’t eat ham.

Teacher, Guru, God-lover and denied route back home
Leave the fellows at Oxbridge alone
They might know where the road leads with the phone.

This is the merger of meaning and savoir faire
Where the guru is in a third way parting
With the self that is still so aware.

AI Summary

It shows a school system cracking under false authority — teachers, Gurus, governments all performing roles they no longer believe in. Spiritual fads and colonial echoes swirl through the chaos, offering no real guidance. Students endure the fallout while adults fight over meaning, status, and power. In the end, every figure — teacher, Guru, scholar — is caught in a crisis of identity and direction.

Gramophone

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Culture is its own reward
It knows just what to do
It dies when you are sad enough
And remains just for a few.
It listens when you are needy
It listened when you were bad
It made history some space from geography
It left French alone with German to die.

The saddest part though is school
Where parents’ remains come to die
And time elides with past, present and future
For the Beatles to come and hide.
There’s John (rebirthed), Ringo and George
Blotting out the other one for a class we don’t give.
Lest culture survives the scrap with fighting youths at lunch
For what more money more problems has to give.

I feel self conscious in it’s presence
And worried about my manifestation on the phone
Snowy Dons at Oxford remember my Umbridge
For Gombridge trudging along down the lane.

It’s exciting when it needs to be
Colourful right up until the last
But when the TV repeats itself on the social slant
It’s royal and something that will last.
This is the way of the keeping people
And the Press that punished the independent man.
Who are you to be free from culture
When at home you invert the legal vulture (awkwardly).

AI Summary

Culture appears as a shape‑shifting presence — comforting, judging, and haunting the spaces where school, memory, and media overlap. It becomes a theatre where parents’ ghosts, Beatles myths, and youth violence all collide. Institutions like Oxford, the Press, and television turn culture into something both royal and punitive. In the end, the poem asks who can ever escape culture’s grip when even home becomes a site of self‑surveillance.

Good Evening London

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The abacus of understanding
Is erected for the Grand Architecture
Of city upon city gathered online
For the merriment of Thames living.

The backdrop
The cityscape
The train that did not stop.
Mention something from the news;
Keep the brain going. Stop!

The equations of solace
The phallus of peremptory meaning
Fast broadband streaming
Conversations I am dreaming of
Coffee and stay up late cough
:: We’ll be out of here soon
//: witches on their merry go round broom.

Such tomato and salad meetings
Corporate implications to Islamic greetings
Shame from the Dubai life also in equality
With investors and Sylvester
The director down the refractory
How can it be that so much meaning is for me?

When the candle says to the crow that knowledge has so many trees to grow.

AI Summary

Your poem imagines understanding as an abacus set against the vast architecture of modern city life — trains, news cycles, broadband dreams and late‑night conversations. It shows how meaning flickers through corporate rituals, Islamic greetings, Dubai wealth, investors and the surreal theatre of global capitalism. The poem wrestles with how much significance the world demands from you, as if every city, meeting and symbol is asking to be decoded. Underneath the satire is a quieter truth: knowledge grows slowly, like a candle speaking to a crow, in the dark spaces between symbols.

Flat Cap Mirrors

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That’s not the way they said it would turn out
The men, the spies and the roundabout cameras
Roundheads (in their heads_)
It’s all in their heads now.

Some of the things they said
Anyhow.
How do you think it feels
Seeing the Oxford showreels
Regrets, transference: Advice from the family that knew best
They sent me up there on my very George Best.

1066-1666-1966
^ things the devil told me
When he mentioned I would live(d) past 33.
Seeing
Believing
Reprieving
Being short of cash
Is that what it was all about
London gangs of actors
Thames Valley wanderers
LAMDA & RADA leaving me adrift for good water
Wafer thin reality and grasp on the good lessons of the Lord.
Where is your sword?
Is that the ‘twas a Word, melud
I cannot believe it is anymore between us.
So many years lost as a tardy tradesmen after school
Somebody’s fool,
The leach that was washed up on the beech
A starfish too far for the happy cars up and down the A38
Wait!
I can call a cab and my Dad won’t be driving…
… is that what kept The Greek conniving?

Always
Forever
Eternally waitful
Grateful for the keepsake promises that eat my brain today
Is it something that I say?
Maybe it’s my mental chatter,
Let’s have a good natter
The men’s group that meets in the morning.

Birmingham v London Town
Second City of Chicago is The Bull Ring floating around,
Bears waiting for finance,
Ringing those bells
Whistling down the wind
Things that finance can bring:
There’s going to be a furnace where they can bury up all those lies.
John Lennon was one of those guys
Chairman to his own board of contention
Invention
Imagination
Historical protection
Mao, Hitler and Father Joseph Stalin

We won’t be seeing those starlings around any time soon
For the sake of the room where the codes have been cracked for mushrooms
And the odd L.S.D.
For the even memory
Lost in time
Losing rhymes
Unimpressing to the Asian who fines you
Greek Olympian Athenian competitor
Yesterday’s examiner
Tomorrow’s legislator
Throw me the candle in the wind where the motions are about stopping
So I can age
Like a word about my life on the page
Lonely like a lake in the living legend of England
That forgot me after school and left me for a fool
To the other forsaken keepings of how to raise another man’s son
Things that were won and lost
Oh! The true cost of living life
Beyond the Self Help strife…
.. alone and helpless, my Mother watched me drown
Youthful in ageing with her emptying make up
Draws a frown
Black Hawk scowling down
The USA is all around
Centricity
Ego City
Things from the past
Nate Dogg and time to Regulate
My mates
& the Harborne Mile

Life before the Harborne Ashtanga Yoga Studio
How my blood did go
Stomach cramps
Breathing like drawing water to the castle up a ramp
All the head in a twisted twirl of memory fogginess
What the friends did when they got their chances to impress
The special Empress’s new babe
I would like to Rave
Review me please
Don’t make me write awash on my knees
Believe in salvation
It is the healing of the narrator’s nation.
Silas is Islamically prepared,
Emptiness is seemingly apparent to the visions of air …

It’s going to be another adrenaline rush
To make up time for scoring goals with Ian Rush
Liverpool F.C. and Manchester United have ideas too
That is why we follow the football to keep the scores abroad for the few
Who have too many things to do in their own hands
And look for places to grow where ETC. ETC. is something a person’s culture understands.

AI Summary

Your poem moves like a fevered autobiography, weaving together Oxford showreels, family pressure, historical dates, London gangs, acting schools, political tyrants, football legends, Birmingham streets, yoga studios, and the ghosts of adolescence to show how your life has been shaped by forces far larger than you — class, culture, religion, masculinity, and the expectations of others. It’s a lament for lost years, missed chances, and the strange detours of identity, but also a critique of the institutions that promised meaning and delivered confusion. Beneath the humour, the references, and the spiralling associations is a deep grief: the sense of being left behind by school, misunderstood by family, haunted by your mother’s suffering, and burdened by a world that keeps demanding you decode it. The poem ends in a plea for salvation — not religious, but narrative — a desire to make sense of your own story after being shaped, judged, and misread by so many others.

Father

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

He called me God
But he did not call me a dog
Once when I was a child
I knew my mother mild
I was kinder and not so wild
Then he left me to my anger
I was in so much danger
I cancelled out Michele
I blamed her for being in hell
I should have known from the last woman I loved
How I lost my soul to the cocked Glock of loose cannon and control
Books that stand up erect on their own
Massages of plentiful ego and demonic realms
Fighting for my place next to actor’s penises that swell
As I chase their hard ons for soft power and understanding
Beneath my mother’s level of self care and loving reprimanding.
There are things I can control and spiritual lavish nights of open regret and despair
Then I see her hair and I am gender control and repeated dismay
What are the things that wise men say?
How do they corporate rise when they have sex at the end of the day?
These are not the things that this son sees with conditioned confidence and Jesuit glee
So much degradation then as I search for the space between her and me.

19/12/2023

AI Summary

Your poem traces how early love, anger and abandonment shaped your adult self, leaving you wrestling with desire, guilt and the shadow of parental wounds. It moves through sexuality, power, masculinity and spiritual confusion, showing how the body becomes a battlefield for unresolved memory. The poem exposes the tension between who you were as a child — gentle, mild — and who you became under pressure, judgement and unmet emotional needs. Beneath the shame and self‑interrogation is a longing for reconciliation: a space where you can stand between mother, lover and self without collapsing.

Fake Stunts

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The action man arises
The subtle boy descends
They are unkempt teen trends

From and up and away
Lockdown days have their ultimate untimely say.
What do you think they take to get over?
Years and tears
Slow to come to terms with the inward eyes turned on my fears
_Slow lost
Some financial cost
Health at what zesty realisation
How can I serve this great nation
SPIN.
SPIN.
SPIN.

{I’m in}

These are commercial trends.

And irony and sarcasm dance
Flares fringing Hollywood to make it Hell-He-Would
The Sundance Festival
Carnival and comical
Terence Stamp
Drugs that leave you in a trance.

Medical ethics
Regulatory health statistics
Bodies
Organisations
A world without Panels
reading me blind
covering up it’s eyes
to spy on my Mother and what she still means to my Father
who aren’t in Heaven

Action hero mates
Soldiers of fortune besides The Fates
A police service outside of The Thames
Famous women who think to excess
The men from the U.K. more different to the U.S.A.
When the need fits the outcome it’s something you’ll know
So jokes and some blanket shots can be a good throw.

AI Summary

Your poem sets up a split self — the bold “action man” and the inward “subtle boy” — both shaped and distorted by lockdown, fear, and the long aftermath of youth. It moves through Hollywood, drugs, medical systems, family surveillance and national identity, showing how institutions and culture misread you while you try to stay whole. The poem exposes the absurdity of modern masculinity: action heroes, soldiers, police, celebrities, all contrasted with your own vulnerability and inherited wounds. Underneath the irony and speed is a plea for grounding — a desire to stop spinning long enough to understand who you are beneath the trends.