art

Zaqat Went Splat

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Did you believe the world was this way?
The way the wildness inside of you did not say
That you need a woman like a woman needs a man
To satisfy the hotel room with coffee after an okay plan.

See, the outside world is such an egregious affair
I have my legs wilder than that in the outrageous air
Modelling Hollywood and L A Style as if I have savoir fare.

Three line whips, lots of chains of bondage
Alfonso Bhandari is there with your immature soul cage
Selling the shambles of brambled apples and some granny’s rage.

Voter! You are no daughter – with the hotel quartered
Entrance from a Hollywood master and his debutant blaster
For money and vermillion so that Iraqi can know first ladies
And squillions and zillions and bazillions after Tony Blair’s trillions.
Master Blaster – unable to hold the camera’s gaze
After raunchy Knights have held up erectile Counts
Far from the Paige’s and their confusion about the purple Ronnie
And how about some Blue Peter for yours truly and that fucking Konnie?!

Ropes and whistles and then there is some shouting matches
For the prettiest Oriental to sing me some blues
About Krishna’s curtains after he has been through the hue
Of cry and Laurel and Hardeep for that original truth:
To thine own self be avant-garde so that Spirit is doubled
#WhentheDevilknowsyourlonely and youthful mother is in trouble.

AI Summary

The poem confronts the chaos of desire, identity, and public spectacle, blending Hollywood excess, political theatre, spiritual longing, and personal vulnerability into a single, volatile stream. It moves between the wildness of the self and the distortions of the outside world, where fame, power, and cultural icons collide with private insecurities and the search for authenticity. The speaker critiques the commodification of intimacy, the absurdity of celebrity culture, and the emotional confusion of modern relationships, invoking mythic figures, media personalities, and political ghosts to expose how desire and identity are shaped by forces far larger than the individual. Beneath the satire and provocation lies a deeper ache: the longing to remain true to oneself in a world that constantly pulls the self apart, and the fear that loneliness, youth, and spiritual hunger might be exploited or misunderstood by those who claim authority

Why Do You Like Me?

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Why do you like me?
Unless you want something
Is it that I am handsome
Like your fairy King?

Is it the monstrous invention
In your little head?
That mentions my mother as invention
Before you go to bed.

It can’t be that we’re Partners
Those things are down at the Law Firm
And when things are soft I am lonely
Because all of your dates are so hard.
Could it be we are meant to be?
And you will come back soon to see me?
Is it that you long for the same things?
And not just politically writing out A to Zee.

Come down here literally my man
And spend some time with an English affair
It’s not so bad, you can even fake Red.
But if you’re up there in Americana
Then we have so many Codes for your Karma.
Cosmos boyo and landed Tolkien
How do you know where you bowl?
Where is the China you have been sold?

So trade in your Jackie for some Jackie Chan
Another time if you think this is Bruce Lee.
This days went out when the lights were Covent Garden
So I was hard on myself to get past the snooze at quarter past three.

AI Summary

The poem wrestles with uncertainty about why someone shows interest — whether it’s genuine affection, desire, cultural fascination, or simply convenience. The speaker questions beauty, partnership, politics, and the strange fantasies the other person seems to project onto him, while also acknowledging his own longing for closeness and recognition. The poem moves between humour and vulnerability, invoking Englishness, Americana, Bollywood, Tolkien, and martial‑arts icons to highlight the cultural dissonance between them. Beneath the teasing tone lies a deeper ache: the fear of being wanted only for surface reasons, the hope that the connection might be real, and the frustration of feeling exoticised, misunderstood, or kept at a distance by someone who drifts between worlds.

#WhatNewsHoThereSailor

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

(or Reviews, Bailiff, if you please for representing to Tax_)

A fool on your Home Planet
A journalist on the monied one
Don’t you know your next wielding verse
Is your unwritten son?
He hasn’t been so paid
To wander streets to evade
The decorative Devi with sincerity to get laid
While the monstrous beasts lay to your back what is now aid.

Convince your emotions
Complacency is strong
But where is the deviancy that once stood strong
To listen to others of their points of view
And dine with the extras of what was for you?
Have they stolen all they can –
The friends who could feed;
While teaching you tired manners
By the fountain of youth in your hour of need?

The literary Reed is not dining forever
There are other things to progress:
And if we say so dear Fellow,
Your English is leering to impress.
Just click right and turn left at the exit
You’ll find others’ with keyboards
Ready to entertain the Boards
With stories from their lives
And who was white when alive was a live wire.

It’s always the same : –
They came in with a board game
And left with Monopoly on fame.
So what – theirs are not The Vedas
And yours is not the shame,
Of needing to get laid on time
When the complacency tells enough rhyme.

13 o clock
What a cock!
Then it is Bucks Fizz
For watching him drink his son’s Jizz…
Round and round the story will make you proud
Of what he was watching while you were brown
And his father sold him the Church of England as a Pub
#AndIndiaasDharamsala while a Llama ate meat as his grub.

AI Summary

The poem stages a blistering critique of literary vanity, cultural theft, sexual hypocrisy, and the lingering hierarchies of class, race, and colonial memory. The speaker addresses a figure who postures as journalist, poet, critic, and moral authority, exposing how he feeds off others’ stories, bodies, and labour while pretending to be enlightened or progressive. The poem moves through scenes of artistic ambition, sexual frustration, spiritual pretence, and social decay, weaving in satire about Englishness, Indianness, academia, fame, and the absurdity of cultural gatekeeping. Beneath the biting humour and explicit provocation lies a deeper ache: the sense of being exploited, exoticised, or dismissed by people who claim sophistication but hide behind privilege, hypocrisy, and inherited power. The final lines collapse the whole spectacle into a dark, looping joke about identity, shame, and the strange afterlives of empire — leaving the speaker both disgusted and defiant, refusing to be reduced to anyone’s stereotype or story.

Unfinished Business

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Things are so conceptual in that little head of yours
I have not got any edges to play with my little paws.
You say this and you say that and by the time you are done –
I find I have been over run!

You take me to here and I go over there
There is no length of your lines that I am so aware of.
What kind of verse is this that you sell the greenery by?
Why should I try to be one with nature after this sort of guy?

You’re an outright strange sort of fellow.
He needs to shown how to plan a poem with Yellow –
That way the correct sort of Sun will be number one
And you can existentially angst on your own, one day.

Leave me alone, you funny little moan
So I can settle down with the Classics and find myself there!
I shall be self aware enough when I am plenty
And you supply and demand your economic zero with the many.

You funny Marxist and tremendously definable tool
How is it there ever let you leave your school!
Where the ladies know their place on the page with some faces
And your goatee is shaven for the craven image of a Sannyasi.

Out on your arse! You’re a thing of the past!
There’s no border here to solve between Tagore and Betjeman.
The real men know what it is to kowtow
To our Bollywood triumphant hold on your soul and blast.

“All” is a word best served Theological
However much you write and survive medicals and biologicals
But when the hour approaches and your time is near
What about the grim nights in between and whom you did afear?

So leave it with us and we shall see about The Christ
And you can tell us all about your tiny amount of mass,
From the books that sell when you are welcome and so unwell
From a diagnostic from computers that leave us first placed last!

Caste boy from Troy and your Trojan wooden man
Facing the Devi from estrangement with your crafty malign plan
To take from my cake your own slice of hefty taste
And leave me some ruined carriage where my liveliness is a waste.

Sell it to me, Old Boy! What have you got over there?
That leaves me a little humble pie and some friends with which to share
A verse, a saying, some discussion, nay I say a broader afternoon –
That is not beholden to me and my tea in a saucer with a blessed little spoon.

Aye, it is so! He is one with us and we are barren
Of the past where there was no camaraderie
And no-one shall know our paths were not the same:
But shall I see this again, you’ll be the first amongst many
To find me drowning in my favourite Sherry
That I was right to have enough when the commotion was such a fame.

AI Summary

The poem stages a tense, mocking dialogue with a figure who criticises, misunderstands, and tries to categorise the speaker, prompting a cascade of retorts about poetry, culture, caste, education, masculinity, theology, and literary lineage. The speaker pushes back against being reduced to stereotypes or intellectual boxes, rejecting the other’s pretensions while asserting his own complexity, heritage, and creative identity. Humour, sarcasm, and cultural references — from Tagore to Betjeman, Marx to Bollywood, Troy to Christ — become weapons in a verbal sparring match that exposes insecurity on both sides. Beneath the bravado lies a deeper ache: the desire to be taken seriously, to belong, to be recognised without being diminished, and to escape the old hierarchies that still haunt relationships, art, and self‑worth. The poem ends with a mixture of resignation and pride, as if the speaker knows the argument will never truly end but still claims the last word with a flourish.

Trypolar

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Erroneously the mountain rumbled
And down it came a worthy disaster.
Seated like a crumpled heap on the floor
Mourning the loss of decency and good daughters.

There where the weather was fine and the market moved
In the open bazaars for the people to shine the shoes,
He moved too, like a gazelle and shopped for twos
On a cigarette that needed a companion every now and then.

Like a Zen man and one with a planned route
To fall on Good Friday after doing a reboot –
Back in a time when nothing was real
And men wanted things more than cells that could heal.

Such was the Djjin in the evenings’ on the earth
Where the muscle man knew carpet capers
And the noise of the dowsing was such as no Sky Scrapers.
City Scape? City Scape, they said to me
As thy will be done through the darkest times,

The holiest hours and somewhat confused in rhyme
About the images protruded from my eyes
And how the movies made miracles from history.
Something for then and something for now
Where the commuter is allowed the raciest thing:
Like a honour story where the audience sing
About the people who win and lose each other
Lining up for some new likeness as if you’re a brother.

  

How much more than Akcatraz you need your State to shimmer
The little trash heap that never could glimmer
Off the lights when America supplied studios ; 
All new reads all about it gone in
This is my Swan son.
You wait to see what happens to you
What have you done to me?
There used to be several bus routes
The Beyondness of Things and the number 63.
Countess and Duchess with the rigmarole of the sensuality
How many erectile dysfunctions can you go to without her beside me?
Sundays and the Church of Christ, settling what is Cult?
Theories on the Daily Show, selling what is to become online assault.

Therefore it is all the same to being and me
A little bit more than a terabyte or three:
When Tera Patrick is Tagatha and his clique
And you are doomed on the TV.

Krishna Colouring Books

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

I used to work at the British Heart Foundation and around Christmas time I was in the stock cupboard sorting out the books when I noticed how many Christmas books there were. There were so many books aimed at children that it makes me think how far behind we lag in literary stakes in the Indian community. We have now had a British Asian Prime Minister, so if there are any serious questions about our national identity and heritage we can ask him, or at least point as if we are capable of his merits. But what would it take to have some Krishna colouring books. Native images of Rama and Shiva; to see the delight of children colouring Ganesh? Why stop there? There is Little Krishna at ISKCON and he is playing with white kids; so why can’t they have children books that have imaginative art work and are large scale with the permission given to pass them on. We Hindus suffer from as many health problems as Christians do and may have problem getting access to decent holistic treatments with the onset of western medication lacking roots with which to talk to us about our post-colonial status and really find out how we are doing on a day to day basis. What if we don’t like football or support the Beckhams, does that mean we have to Bend It Like Christmas Karma, the movie? We have problems letting the past go that can not be seen and gaining access to literature aimed at children would be one way of helping this cause. What do you think? Can you think of reasons not to publish cartoon books of Sita and Lakshmi? Does Indian archaeology have a say in the depiction of our glorious Gods and Goddesses? Is it a matter for erotica and are we doomed to hold on to past energies and find ourselves on the receiving end of medical inspections and questions without answers and answers without questions? The publishing industry was fought for in the United Kingdom and we as Indians are still dealing with Shree Book. There used to be a book shop on the Soho Road in Handsworth where Sikh books were priced at up to £100 and over – so what is the catch and where are these discussions being had? Who is deciding what is important about the postcolonial sketch and what are the long term artistic features of integration and holistic meditation on these factors governing the British Asian diaspora, their families and all their friends who work so hard to put their culture on show at weddings, where family is the centre piece of the religion of Hinduism but the children start out life so one sided and emphasising one side of the brain? Social media now hosts Instagram and all those flashing lights and images so there is hope that these stagnant waters can be moved on.

Tomorrow

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Tomorrow is a Sports Day
It is the 5th of July
It is also a Pizza from the delivery guy
Something instead of a Pig Sty.

My son will have cleaned his room
And my father will Aha every moment;
So that Norway lets on about Brexit
While Sundays are still days of rest.

Tomorrow is like a yesterday’s feast
A tobogganing affair all about sorrow!
Something for me and something for her
While the windows are cleaned without borrowing
From parents who do all the housework…

…

…

It’s when the work will take place:
When will you do yours?
Do you still work after COVID?
Can you ride horses on all the courses?

Tomorrow is where all messages and meanings take place
Like a Self Help drop-down list of perfection.
The worker better than Bill Gates
And an open door policy to statements of retraction.

It is the place beyond time if the Yoga is still fine
Where people get left behind if they do not keep the time.
It is where poems come to die if you do not detach the outcome –
How come they do now dream of my outcomes
When the Dear Kali part of the process is dry and sad?

Tomorrow is when the crying will heal me
It is the deliverance that will save the pain from the Healer of today.
Tomorrow is Bhagwan’s advice on the Id for reformation
After the dealer is psychoanalytical about due processes with Louise L Hay.

This is the formation of some power
This is the talent of some nights
When Bipolar left be darker than other hours
And tomorrow was not even in my sight.

AI Summary

The poem reflects on “tomorrow” as a space where duty, family life, spiritual striving, and emotional recovery all converge, blending the ordinary rhythms of sports days, pizza deliveries, housework, and parenting with deeper anxieties about work, self‑help culture, yoga, and the lingering effects of bipolar episodes. It treats tomorrow as both promise and burden — a place where healing might happen, where meaning might return, but also where expectations, comparisons, and spiritual demands accumulate. The speaker moves between humour, fatigue, and vulnerability, invoking gods, gurus, and psychological frameworks to make sense of a life shaped by illness, responsibility, and the desire for transformation. Beneath the references and reflections lies a steady ache: the hope that tomorrow might finally bring clarity, relief, or redemption, even when today feels heavy and the past still echoes.

Tick Tock

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Tick Tock and the me time from you
There is a shallow pool
For me to dip into.
The clock is on the wall
And it has not told the time
Outside on the street
Of what you will find.

You don’t come here much
And you do not tell me things
Like you used to bring
With your other friends
… so many friends
Time to blend in
The streets
With all the fretting feet
And the Nordic mannerisms
That never came between us.

Now I would rather catch a bus
And find myself watched
By some thing it is so
That gives me blowing down below.
What a homosexual show
These friendships turned out to be
When au fait was Asian and also British
And your European surrounded me with the Frigates.

They won’t be long now
In the hours of mannered time
When the rhyme is more simple
To the son who told the time.
He told the time in the school
And lost in on The Albert Hell
When he went to Concerts from University
And deified musicians for a fool.

This was me and you
As you looked me up and down
Happy to stay around
In my room because I was brown.
My music pleased you so
So we could go to the filum show
Where the heroes beat their chests
So their wives could get them their old age vests.
Mr Popularity. There is so much more to see
When the distance between you and me
Is at least Wide Screen Lap Tops and TV.

AI Summary

The poem reflects on a friendship or relationship that has grown distant, where time, silence, and shifting social circles have eroded the closeness once shared. The speaker feels abandoned, watched, and misunderstood, caught between cultural identities and the uneasy dynamics of being desired, exoticised, or included only conditionally. Memories of music, university days, and shared outings mix with resentment, loneliness, and the sense that the other person now belongs to a different world — European friends, Nordic mannerisms, concerts, laptops, and screens. Beneath the irritation and hurt lies a longing for the simplicity of earlier connection, when being “brown” wasn’t a spectacle, when music brought them together, and when the distance between them wasn’t measured in widescreen displays and the cold glow of technology.

There Will Be Wounds

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There is no doubt that the future is the shape of the past
When the worry of the money is the jape of those who finish last
In the hands of the empty who do not write the cheques everyday
As journalists and typists who get paid when they say…

Something is here for me in the Rishi Files of yesteryear
Which told Om and Shanti as if the ThIrD WoRlD WaR was very near
To be scared off from print media who cleared the cellar to wine like Arjuna
And go home each night a winner with wounds shared from some poor fella.

Stretch and yoga this way and bend and yoga that way
These were the tests in the past in Maida Vale:
That is the modernism of finding influences in the 2020s
Something light for everyone as the body goes through New Age hell.

There will be wounds when the record is the recovery as well as the victory
Of pain in the particulars when silence was séance and some old man’s Vasectomy
To neuter the gender general for the Nazi, Gypsy, Oik and even the Navaho
So that Ukraine stepped back an equal for a Eurovision and some Ivanho.

Step back and let Dr Zhivago handle something on a Saturday afternoon
Before Hollywood gets banned for handling what a Cancer would not see off too soon
From the ambulance chasers and the cinema queens who vicinity fair the merry go round
And show up in the newsdeals like a telephone money fundraiser and mad go around.

Madness
Madness, I tell you, MAD!
These are the Stardates of the Bon Voyages fair thee well and Ennui.
Inuit and Intuitive will you sell me back my soul
If I have lost my only hope to Obama for Joe the Worker’s droll

AI Summary

The poem reflects on how the future keeps repeating the patterns of the past, especially in politics, war, media spectacle, and the spiritual anxieties of modern life. It moves through references to journalism, yoga culture, global conflicts, and pop‑historical figures to show how public crises seep into private consciousness, turning everyday life into a theatre of dread, satire, and déjà vu. The speaker feels trapped between cultural expectations, geopolitical noise, and the absurdity of contemporary “wellness” narratives, all while wrestling with the sense that society keeps recycling its wounds — from ancient epics to modern wars, from Hollywood myths to political fundraising. Beneath the humour and exasperation lies a deeper fear: that meaning, hope, and even the soul itself are being bartered away in a world where history loops, leaders disappoint, and the ordinary person is left searching for a goal that still feels human.


Goal.

The Port of Sports

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Candles on the wind

Lighten the Godly passage to Sindh

Where the pains of Spanish ladies

Contour the refrain of deranged grading.

The garden of the grades

Where the blossom is fair in the shade

Of a Serpent’s seditious glare

To fathom a woman’s tressles and hair.

“This is where it will be for me!”

He says under the ignorant Sycamore Tree

With a word as strong as Oak

About his right to fuck hard after a toke.

A token gesture and a reverent remission of cancer’s permission

Cancer’s commission from the Pharmeceutical derision

That the body is his to fatten and flee from

After the farts from Depakote and Deepthroat from Gazprom.

Dark into the night when the oceans crash against the shores

Is the fittest thing, the sexiest Blonde, the holiest Hindu whore

More! Why not sell me your mother to travel on the shared Earth

With wild seas and a few little more than ships from the past

To tell of the wide birth

Beyond the Yugas

Above the Togas

Far from the sticky tobacco and the wives with their stockings and pull overs.

Over and far and fair from the wettest wind

Carrying onto the decks the crouching of shivered boys

Lost to the Port of Spain and the knees that know pain

Travelling men : Back again.

Lost in time : Responsibility is an offered crime.

Crimes that are for me : Crimes that are for you.

Language was thus shared : It spoke of negotiations and upmarket Poo!

Pooh Pah’ing the bandits of the brain

Who mentioned commotion and sold the strain

Of cloth and cupboards and style of Art and affairs

To keep up Consummate Actions so that sexuality had it’s lustful lair.

Proof that Kama Sutra was legal tenacity

And contracts of somatic housing was legality –

They had known us when he had been with her,

So that we could be above this as ours was not theirs…

…

…

… On and on

What a story!

The commotion of The Locomotion

And the trade of The Mona Lisa.

Hey! It’s hay and we have the same bale to make on the shipping

Sell to me your facts and I will fax you some returns.

Burning with the lust to get to the bust from the back bras

And the open bare minimalism of hairs that stand apart from afar –

Show me your Hindu and I will bare a brave resolve

To drink whet and alongside your Islands

Where the unloading is seeing long and Ceylon is my Ramayana song!

Jay Siya Raam!

Ahoy there Hanuman!

You’re my mate with that karma

Since Romantics knew my bonds.

They sold it to me fair

I don’t see why it needs to be sold out late

Now that records speak of the devil

And The Beatles have no first mate!

Still the demons and demonstrate for me awhile, So I can see : —-

—–

—-===++++

— xxxxxx £

$ cost

£Prophet

% Reportage

This is the Spirit of the Age

Again.

{Again is the pain}

And far away is the brain I cannot see on the sea.

These are ships that told of the three line whips

And how Majesty knew to address the dress line

For one or two poetic and rude linearity healthy quips.

AI Summary

The poem is a sprawling, turbulent meditation on history, sexuality, colonial memory, spiritual inheritance, and the commodification of bodies and cultures, moving from Sindh to Spain, from serpents to sycamores, from pharmaceutical cynicism to ancient epics. It blends mythic imagery with modern anxieties, invoking Kama Sutra, Hanuman, Mona Lisa, Gazprom, and Beatles in the same breath, creating a world where trade, desire, violence, and art all become part of the same restless current. The speaker navigates oceans literal and symbolic — ships, boys, ports, storms — while wrestling with the weight of cultural expectation, erotic frustration, and the sense that everything, from sex to spirituality to history itself, is being bought, sold, faxed, or burned. Beneath the satire and provocation lies a deeper lament for meaning, dignity, and clarity in an age where the “Spirit of the Age” feels fractured, commodified, and endlessly repeating itself.