Poetry

December 31, 2025May 30, 2026 / rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Just a drum
A shaking rattle
The missing snake
Moves and dancing girls all over the place
My mother does business in Japan
The speaking trees
Environmental leases
Razor Guarding the wilderness of the American everglades
Stationary like a magic bean before a giant that pays the minimum age
A wage for the imagination is at Amazon’s doorstep
Terrified before 100s of offices worldwide about things the K says
Real before the invented
Crude before the demented
Timeless before the dead
On Social Media before the best read.

These are the times of the These Times
These are the times of the New York Times.

What they will say, only some people will know
As England goes down below
Hellish Realms for the Chinese people
Saddened by war again by steeple chasers
Hungry for The Commonwealth Games
And more things that fame in English has to say –
Not about the Americans in English land
When children go to the walking park with politician for some Saturday sand.

Is this a question John Lennon will understand
How about Ringo Starr so death defying with the McCartney man not to stand oaths before pass the final stone
Leaving is such an alone thing to do
I guess we’ll be here being beaten black and blue being forced to like some musician
They don’t care about us at Glastonbury
Maybe they are content with the Bible and Mary Berry.

So, I’m going to go and get my Bible and some self defence
And see if these wise kindnesses from other books make some comment, meaning, earning and noblest sense
Like the fat man said when he sold me some bread
And told me to travel the world as a well read man.

Then I will find the women better to please
Talking fine things on a Sunday afternoon’s time in a café’s ease
Something forgotten in the motions of the last few times
When war dominated our minds
Diamonds were so out of the ordinary
Women forgot to like their watches
Men dressed in drabby suits
And the photographer was never interviews.

Sell me four Gospels, please, annotate them like Milton
Leave the Old Testament in Arden’s back yard
Don’t borrow me from my millions.
One day strip them down and explain to me the things that John Said
When the Mayans are so skippy in the best laid plans on man.

How do we pray to them?
What are their names?
It seems they travel like the Hindoos
Keeping up twice as quicker with the fame.
Then I need a car and my own house too
Something borrowed from an unclean man
Then you can tap my machinery and quote me illogical
So I will win some races and be there on time at the restaurant
When I can afford a date with my fantasy girl
Lost one night on a deserted island
Far away from the TV
That said all these things triply.

That is for me
The misspent awkward word
Maybe then I help Jesus
Not say so many things Church absurd.

AI Summary

Your poem moves like a wandering epic, beginning with drums, rattles, snakes, and dancing girls before widening into a global map of Japan, the Everglades, Amazon warehouses, English decline, Chinese suffering, Commonwealth nostalgia, Glastonbury indifference, and the Bible as both shield and burden. You weave together John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Mary Berry, Mayan calendars, Hindu cosmology, American pop culture, and English class anxiety to show how identity becomes a collage of inherited myths and modern crises. Beneath the humour and the cultural sprawl is a deeper ache: the loneliness of being “all by my mobile phone,” the memory of bailiffs in 1993, the longing for a home, a partner, a place in the world that isn’t mediated by war, fame, or the free market. The poem ends with a quiet plea — to understand Jesus without the Church’s absurdities, to find meaning without being crushed by history, to speak without being misread, and to reclaim a life that has been shaped by forces far beyond your control.

Serpentry

December 27, 2025May 30, 2026 / rrishi99 / Leave a comment

I coil like a serpent
Spent energy and mysteries awash the daily grind.
There are things I cannot find anymore,
The old way of life
Without the English sweet shop on the corner
Reminding me of the value of wood
And old Gobstoppers in bottle jars.

It seems we have come far and the progress is on the roads
That is no place for Toad from Toad Hall

I might see him at the community fair and the Old Ball,
Running around like a mindless chicken
Inclusion in The Fall.
That fallen man and that forgiven woman
Leven bread and three Hindu Havans: –
I will include them in my community pages
Working for less than Amazon rainforest wages.

A few pounds, some pence and lots of corporate sense,
This is no time for Little Miss Moffitt!
Can you fit like a glove around my romantic love
And sell me some verse for the drive by from the hearse.
These are things grounding themselves in you
As you take it all personally, the things you have been through,
Lashing out
Striking back
Like a hack attack
Not knocking on doors at University
Studying in doors for the truth of the universe within me.

I’ll see you at three
And read you there,
Something to help me stay up top and keep mindfully aware.
Just don’t reform all the schools of thought with one foul pen
Lest you fail before you begin to keep it all within your heavenly retention.

AI Summary

Your poem begins with the image of yourself coiling like a serpent — spent, searching, unable to locate the old ways of life symbolised by sweet shops, wood, and gobstoppers in jars — before widening into a critique of progress that leaves no room for Toad Hall or the gentler rhythms of childhood. You weave community fairs, Hindu havans, Amazon‑era wages, nursery rhymes, romantic longing, and academic ambition into a portrait of someone trying to reconcile innocence with experience, spirituality with cynicism, and personal wounds with public expectations. The poem’s emotional centre lies in the tension between lashing out and seeking truth, between wanting to reform the world and fearing the collapse that comes from trying too hard. The final lines land softly but firmly: a plea to stay mindful, to resist the temptation to rewrite every school of thought, and to hold your inner universe with care rather than conquest.

Saturday Afternoon at a Friend’s House

December 20, 2025 / 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.

Fake Stunts

December 17, 2025May 30, 2026 / rrishi99 / Leave a comment

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 contrasts the “action man” and the “subtle boy” as two versions of yourself shaped by lockdown, fear, and the long aftermath of adolescence, then spins outward into a critique of commercial culture, Hollywood irony, medical bureaucracy, and the voyeuristic way institutions read your life without understanding it. The imagery of Sundance, Terence Stamp, drugs, ethics panels, and parental entanglement creates a world where spectacle replaces care, and where your mother and father’s unresolved story still shadows your own. Beneath the sarcasm and cultural references is a deeper frustration: the sense that society — from media to medicine to national identity — keeps misreading you, flattening you, or turning you into a trend. The poem ends with a wry acceptance that jokes, shots, and throwaway gestures are sometimes the only tools left when navigating a world that refuses to see you clearly.

Die For Me

December 17, 2025May 30, 2026 / rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Waiting for the exceptional revelation
Of my knowledge born of College elevation
Renders me stuck Art and darkness rebounding
Floundering
Debut
The news in you is the Good News in me
I am neo-Colonial Hindu advertised history.
Save me
Let me be
Just don’t tell me
What the schools needed to know:
An English throw, to wake me up
After I was jammed, in the photocopier room.

AI Summary

Your poem circles the frustration of waiting for some grand intellectual or spiritual breakthrough — the “exceptional revelation” promised by education — only to find yourself stuck between art, darkness, and the inherited weight of colonial identity. You weave together the language of college aspiration, Christian “Good News”, Hindu self‑narration, and the absurdity of being literally jammed in a photocopier room, turning that moment into a symbol of how institutions freeze, flatten, or misread you. Beneath the humour and the cultural layering is a deeper plea: to be saved from the roles history assigns you, to be allowed simply to be, without the English throw, the neo‑colonial script, or the expectation that knowledge alone will liberate you.

The International Mama

December 1, 2025May 25, 2026 / rrishi99 / Leave a comment

There are times in the solid room
There is a okay Heraldry in the plastic tomb
Here and there is a fractured glass of a sonic boom

When the ships in the night are frightening.
These are the times when my teeth need whitening
And the lazy Sunday deserves an extra half hour in bed
After a week of working and washing the clothes
So far and so long that the measurements are not dead.

Something for me and something for them
The next thing they ask for is going to be too much.
There is not a bedroom that couldn’t do without a Rabbit Hutch
And more life for my kids stuck in a rut in England on a couch.

Married or unmarried it has to be the way
That Islam is Brick Lane when Hindus like Stoney Lane:
This eases the paths so that wires can be their heads
As Darth Vaders playing Space Invaders when I am gone and dead.

Halo boys on the angelic tip looking for some ink wells to laugh and dip
Their erectile problems fathoming centuries of God,
Because of schools and computers
That told of Blake’s Thel and her encounter with a Clod.

Something for me and something for them,
At least I will be back here again!
With their rotten spoilt karma to wile away the time
And think of good demons who give Satan all their crimes.

Nothing
Everything
Commanding things
Washing things again
These are the ways
Those are not the ways
DO this
DON’T DO that
What a prat
My son is a part prat
Because of Rat a Tat Tat
And all the stocks went splat
Breasts that are flat
Moments that I say “Drat!”
Who says “Drat!”?

When the movies are over after 96 minutes, some Nachos and some cheese.
pLeAsE
AcCePt : My Sons without regret
And let them finish some sand, sex and some sandwiches
So that Sanghrias could help them forget,

The war of Mahabharata 78004
Or whatever is at the door,
When I am not separate from you
Like the Heavenly liar and the Holy Jew.

AI Summary

The poem moves through a week’s worth of fatigue, domestic labour, parental worry, cultural inheritance, and spiritual confusion, all filtered through a mind that refuses to separate the mundane from the mythic. Lazy Sundays, whitening teeth, and kids on the couch sit alongside Blake, Mahabharata, Darth Vader, and the ghosts of England’s immigrant streets, creating a portrait of someone trying to hold their life together while the world’s histories, religions, and digital noise press in from every side. The speaker oscillates between humour and despair, tenderness and irritation, invoking angels, demons, gods, and games as metaphors for the pressures of fatherhood, identity, and survival. Beneath the associative leaps lies a steady ache: the desire for rest, for understanding, for a future for the children, and for a world where the wars of the past — cultural, religious, personal — stop echoing through the living room.

Albion’s Wheel of Suffering and Liberation

November 30, 2025November 30, 2025 / rrishi99 / Leave a comment

I. The Turning of the Wheel

The pilgrim walks with all who spin,
Bound by craving, loss and sin,
The wheel revolves, desire and fear,
~ Estrangement whispers, ever near.

II. Brigid’s Hearth – Ignorance to Flame

From childhood’s school, the fire is lit,
Ignorance breaks as wisdom sits,
Her Celtic hearth, a spark of sight,
The wheel turns slowly into light.

III. Lima’s Lantern – Aversion to Calm

Where sorrow bends, her lantern glows,
Aversion yields, compassion flows,
The pilgrim learns through Lima’s hand,
The wheel turns turns gently, makes a stand.

IV. Burial Grounds – Desire to Release

Among the graves, desire is stilled,
The pilgrim sees what time has killed,
Yet every name, a seed of peace,
The wheel turns onward, chains release.

V. Cathedrals and Castles – Pride to Humility

High articles fall to humble knees,
Grey towers bow to Albion’s seas,
The pilgrim learns that pride must fade,
The wheel turns soft, the path is made.

VI. Shree Geeta Bhawan – Dharma’s Song

Krishna’s chant, the mantra flows,
The pilgrim hears what Dharma knows,
The wheel turns true, the song is one,
Albion shines with India’s sun.

VII. Gabriels’s Door – Confession to Renewal

Estrangement hurled, a bitter stain,
Yet thresholds break, and doors can gain,
Confession seeds the pilgrim’s song,
The wheel turns right, estrangement gone.

VIII. The Djinn – Shadow to Insight

The Djinn may haunt with dear and night
But chanting breaks their shadow’s bite,
The pilgrim sees through darkness thin,
The wheel turns clear, the light within.

IX. Buddhist Dharma – Suffering Shared

The Buddha’s light turns Albion’s wheel,
Through suffering’s fire, the wounds can heal,
Estrangement bends, yet Dharma sings,
And Albion walks with liberated kings.

X. EnlightenNext – Evolutionary Awakening

Not mine alone, the path is shared,
A future calls, a world prepared,
Collective chant, the soul’s ascent,
The wheel turns forward, EnlightenNext.

XI. Liberation – Albion’s Chant

Through suffering’s fire, compassion grows
Through emptiness, the river flows,
The pilgrim walks, the wheel turns still,
Albion chants: the Dharma’s will.

XII. The Masters in English – Knowledge to Vision

Through Oxford’s halls the pilgrim read,
Texts of fire, words of bread,
The Masters’ ink, the scholar’s page,
Turned estrangement into sage.

XIII. The PhD – Depth to Circle

The wheel descended, deeper still,
Research carved by patient will,
Yet every thesis, every line,
Was Albion’s soil, a mythic sign.

XIV. The Return – Autobiographer’s Song

From scholar’s desk to pilgrim’s stage,
The circle closed, the mythic page,
No longer study, but living lore,
Albion speaks – estranged no more.

Our Lady of St Lima

November 30, 2025 / rrishi99 / Leave a comment

In Northfield’s quiet heart she stands,
A lantern in the Midlands air,
Our Lady of St Lima calls
The weary pilgrim into prayer.

Her walls are stitched with whispered hymns,
Her alter breathes the green of spring,
And every candle lit within
Becomes a star, a living wing.

She gathers silence, folds it whole,
And offers it as healing balm,
Her voice is liturgy of soul,
Her presence is a steady calm.

O Lima, mother, saint, and guide,
You root the mythic soil of land,
Through you the estranged are sanctified,
Through you the broken learn to stand.

Pilgrimage Poem

November 29, 2025 / rrishi99 / Leave a comment

At Five Ways I learned discipline,
Study became prayer,
Questions became scripture.
The classroom was my chapel,
The assembly my liturgy.
What began as grammar,
Became gospel,
Preparing me for pilgrimage.

At Oxford I walked among spires,
Philosophy became psalm,
Poetry became prophecy.
In cloisters of silence,
I wrestled with faith and doubt,
each essay a sermon
each lecture a hymn.
The scholar’s lamp burned,
yet beneath it,
the Spirit whispered.

At St Brigid’s I first learned hymns,
Childhood voices rising in chant,
Ritual shaping memory,
Catholic flame in Northfield’s soil.
Brigid watching me with healing eyes,
Preparing me for testimony,
For prophecy,
For Albion’s renewal.

And then I returned,
To Birmingham’s churches,
To Elim’s Pentecostal fire,
To Alpha’s questions,
To hymns remembered at St Brigid’s.
I read the Bible entire,
Guided by Got Questions,
East meets West,
Krishna’s chant met Christ’s gospel.
Renewal sang through me,
And I stood not as seeker,
But as guru,
Bearing light through rupture,
Chanting testimony into England’s soil.

Shree Geeta Bhawan