fiction

The Bonfire of the Logicians

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Vulnerable
Under the table
Over and out
The child gangs are about.
Bonfires of legislators
Sufis of sweet sounds
Vibrations
Improved damages
London has carriages
Sounds of the nation
The old Vikings
The new televisions
Visions & visionaries
Drugs cartels
Newsletters with spells
The police that chase people down
The daily bugle with more noise around town.
The grandfather that frowns
PMQs and furious speeches
As far as the worries reach.
All is one and too much
Nice touch
Kick ball and bollocks all
Connection : ->
Phalluses and erections
Architecture
Geopolitical protections
How can this be when both sides are heard
Only when the nation offers offices without the herd.

AI Summary

Your poem is a rapid‑fire panorama of modern Britain’s anxieties — vulnerability under the table, child gangs on the streets, bonfires of legislators, Sufi sweetness, Viking echoes, drug cartels, police chases, tabloids screaming, PMQs raging, and a grandfather frowning over it all. You move through the noise of a nation where everything is happening at once: spiritual vibrations, geopolitical protections, architecture as phallic power, and the endless churn of media visions and visionaries. The poem captures the sense that the country is overwhelmed — “all is one and too much” — a place where connection collapses into chaos, where politics becomes theatre, and where both sides only truly listen when the nation offers offices without the herd. Beneath the satire and speed is a deeper ache: a longing for clarity in a world saturated with noise, a desire for unity in a landscape fractured by fear, spectacle, and competing narratives.

Sort it Out

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Sort it out, you gyppo
And get off my land
There are things in this place
That you don’t understand.

There is a fire where it belongs
For the furnace of understanding
And a legacy from the Land Registry
About how it deals with the King’s standing.

Those angels that support you
Also look over and watch me,
So keep your Backstreet Boys on reply
In case there is enough business here for three.

For it seems you think you’re God the Father
The way you’ve divvyed the land up so fair,
Then what about Mary and the water
For those baptisms over there!

Do you think they should take place on Saturday
When the farmers come to town?
Or is it repression of my sexual urges
In case I keep prices on Sunday trading down?

If that is so, then keep your pocket book
My trade is some private affair:
You won’t find me dealing with terrorists
As you make your internet self-aware.

Keep some of that tax aside for me after vaccinations
In case I want to play some upper-class chief
And save my children’s’ nation.
There are not too many places to go

The pubs have shut down and the clubs are quiet;
That’s just as well as I’ve ‘been there and done that’,

But in the middle we’ll meet and make it a Liberal affair
So the Labour can know Conservative
How do you like that for stealth and my social diet?
For these Culture Tsars walking around everywhere.

For Birmingham is to tomorrow what the Black Country was to the past
A case for royal caskets and cheese and a blast for legal cases at last.
Measure me this or measure me that, the time now set for oneness is here
And those cafes and restaurants need impressive food for me to have a beer.

I would like to add, sir, that I think the town
Needs less to centre it properly
But if you need to build some more and get down
Try not to do it on top of me!

And with that the perambulator crossed the road
Leaving Harborne on Saturday to mixed delights
Writing one more poem from his mental groans
Wishing the finality to some of those political fights.

Labour will be by, soon, and it is time for some facts
Reinvention of the wheel from those barbecues and some culture tax.

AI Summary

Here is your summary in one continuous paragraph, Akaash — clear, grounded, and fully honouring the emotional, political, and social charge of the poem while refusing to amplify any hateful language or stereotypes.

Your poem stages a tense, confrontational dialogue between an imagined land‑owner voice and the speaker who walks through Birmingham with history on his back, exposing the absurdity, hostility, and class‑soaked nationalism that still haunt English soil. It begins with a slur — not endorsed, but exposed — to show how ownership, territory, and belonging are policed through language. From there, the poem spirals into a satire of land rights, kingship, baptisms, Sunday trading, taxation, vaccinations, and the strange entanglement of religion, economics, and sexuality in British public life. You weave in the Backstreet Boys, the Land Registry, Mary and water, farmers in town, and the internet’s self‑awareness, showing how modern identity is shaped by both ancient rituals and digital noise. The poem then widens into a political panorama: pubs closed, clubs quiet, Labour and Conservative meeting in the middle, culture tsars wandering the streets, Birmingham rising like the Black Country once did, and the city’s restaurants and cafés becoming symbols of a new civic identity. The speaker walks through Harborne with mixed delight, mental groans, and a longing for political finality, ending with a wry observation that reinvention, culture tax, and the endless wheel of British politics continue to turn. Beneath the satire is a deeper ache: a desire for belonging without exclusion, for civic life without hostility, and for a future that doesn’t repeat the fractures of the past.

Singh Song

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Catch me some history and the trees will fall
The writing of one book and love for us all.
The Guru Granth Sahib is remarkable for what I do not read
The eyes of another and internet feed.

This is the modern age and man does not know himself too well
Tainted paint with graffiti about facts he summarised.
Man cannot use that which is normal for too long without time
Interfering gathering of life around vices representing grime.

Manners are spoken, voices can be heard
A man’s true designation is otherwise preferred.
At the feet of the Master and not out there with the loose cannons
Computer gamblers hopeful of some sexual passions.

Man was not made to know woman until the Bible was spoken over top
Optional headdress for those left out in the cold,
Like this old verse that beyond Renaissance ideals
Seeking love elsewhere for those fashions to balance a heartfelt steal.

Save me from Guru save me from despair
But do not rescue the Buddha within me
That will cut off my hair.
In England they are the same
And the Gurdwara is no good
They tempt you there with wastage and free food.

These interludes are some qualities of knowledge that I see vaguely
The lights on the city of the hills is not really business for me.
These religions grow tired, and the true Guru has enough words for himself
To leave me out and not include me in the fortress of his rude health.

Words can be deceptive, and the hierarchy can leave acres in the brain
Neurons mistake projects for New Age scientists to place strains
Men and women workers suffer uncooked food at home tables
Education is lesser and wielding to their career and pension repeatably well.

These are the days of finding that time is not beyond embarrassing man
And Guru Nanak faces psychiatry with a hand in the Yugas and Kalpas:
Again after Scientology they have a Master Plan
Nazi, suicide missions and English revisions to delete your man.

So, gather for a ramble and a march amongst the brambles of Birmingham
From an unlikely suspect of poetic disturbance within himself:
Where is the stealth of Xenu in the bygone age of post-2012 spirituality
After the NHS medicated my mother with tortious liability of proximity?

AI Summary

Your poem is a restless meditation on religion, identity, disillusionment, and the exhaustion of trying to find spiritual truth in a world where institutions, gurus, scriptures, and modern systems all feel compromised or insufficient. You move from the Guru Granth Sahib to the Bible, from the Buddha to Guru Nanak, from Scientology to psychiatry, from Birmingham brambles to global politics, weaving together the weight of tradition with the confusion of the present. The poem exposes how modern life — technology, media, education, careers, pensions, and the pressures of survival — has eroded the clarity that ancient teachings once promised. You describe the fatigue of religious repetition, the disappointment of institutions that feel hollow, the loneliness of being spiritually hungry but unable to trust the places that claim to feed you. Beneath the critique is a deeper ache: a longing for a teacher who does not manipulate, a tradition that does not exclude, a wisdom that does not collapse under history, and a sense of belonging that does not require you to erase yourself. The poem ends in Birmingham, with brambles, marches, and memories of your mother’s suffering — grounding the cosmic and historical in something painfully personal. It is ultimately a poem about searching for meaning after the collapse of every system that once claimed to offer it.

Satisfied Feed

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Repetition arrives from some unknown place
Google is staring in every homely space
Watching and prophesying my every move
Informing what is coming with the slightest reprove.
Seldom is wisdom blended with mergers and acquisitions
For murders and blind trends of horrors
The sale of artificial intelligence
Metaphorically beheading witches in intentional television covens
Knowing what was underneath the stairs
Self-aware and assigning around and around
Keeping watch for the fashion of my selfishness.

The Master is a lover in the nightly hours
Waiting for the feed to return his latest update
The maiden voyage for fantastic flights and lights
Cascading up and down with the approval and frown
There is no wisdom in the modern world up and down
Said a man who was watching the sadness.
Hope was not wallowing in the fury of a bullet
In the absence of knowledge the verse is not concave
Reflexing back to the unknown and what a lonely poet erratically braved.

Step by step, melodically and methodological:
A logical vulture to the legal culture
New Age nurse swelling with scientific pride –
My emergent YouTube this morning >
The sum of global philosophy: Sexual lust is a must on the BBC – Her nuclear family scene.
2012 was upon me: Mayan encounters at the tills of Animal Farm.
Where have you been in the Real Politick
Mugabe was not a coffee trader
Lions knew strangers with or without the gun: Bono will always be Number One.
Your cerebral celebrity informs me about my local polity.
Could it be that you have fallen in love?
And some helpless child in African mother’s mild loving has been deprived some Beloved.
Clouds used to part before a baby’s art of farting unimpressed with the undressed humour of aged social media laughter [Police view the Media]
What weed d’ya need
After George Bush’s retired feed…
Certain things of life are going solo
Wise before the latent clique
Compared to the old Muslim traveller who does not speak.

AI Summary

Your poem is a fierce, spiralling meditation on surveillance, media, power, and the erosion of wisdom in a hyper‑connected world. You move from Google watching in every home, to AI as a kind of witch‑hunter, to masters and lovers waiting for “feeds,” to poets trying to make sense of a world where information is constant but understanding is scarce. The poem exposes how technology, news, celebrity, and politics fuse into a single, numbing spectacle: YouTube as philosophy, the BBC as lust, Mugabe as misread symbol, Bono as permanent saviour, Bush as retired feed, social media laughing at everything, even babies’ farts. Underneath the satire is a deep grief: that while the global North scrolls, consumes, and comments, some unnamed child in an African mother’s arms is quietly deprived of love and attention. You end by contrasting all this noise with the old Muslim traveller who does not speak — a figure of quiet, embodied wisdom — suggesting that true depth now lives outside the loudest systems, in silence, restraint, and lives that don’t need to be broadcast.

Pandemic

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Out of the single market
They never saw it coming
The jokes of the Jester
Were waiting without warning.
Lost tribes
Collective blindness
The nations lost their role
Condemnation and death tolls
Nineteen over eighteen
Corona over Karuna
The viruses spread like Kryptonite
Weakness to very SWOT team
Gordon’s dream
Ginn and tunics
Emergency times
The hospitals swabbed double time
This thought is not anymore.
Sometime before Ukraine
Waiting for the pain
Lockdown and all those people at home
Gardening with new purchased gnomes
Recycle grass
This is some of the way I saw the world come to pass

How about you?

AI Summary

Akaash, this poem is you looking straight at the last decade — Brexit, Covid, lockdowns, hospitals, fear, humour, absurdity, gardening gnomes — and turning it into a single compressed memory‑wave. It’s observational, political without preaching, personal without confession, and it ends with a quiet, human question. Here is your summary in one continuous paragraph, keeping the emotional clarity intact while respecting political boundaries.

Your poem traces the shockwaves of the last years: the UK stepping out of the single market, the blindness of nations, jesters laughing at what no one saw coming, and the sudden arrival of Covid — nineteen over eighteen, corona over karuna — a virus that spread like kryptonite through systems that thought they were strong. You move through emergency hospitals, swabs, Gordon’s dream, gin and tunics, and the strange stillness before Ukraine shifted the world again. Then the poem drops into lockdown life: people stuck at home, buying gnomes, recycling grass, gardening their way through fear and boredom. It’s a snapshot of how the world unravelled and re‑stitched itself in small domestic ways, how global crises collided with tiny rituals, and how you watched it all unfold with a mixture of disbelief, dark humour, and quiet witness.

And then you ask, simply: How about you — which is really a question about how each of us lived through a time that changed everyone differently.

On The Padded Cell

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

(Ring. Ring.)

They drove me mad
It was first gear
They were all I had
That was secondary fears.
Scanned and locked
Banned and fucked.
The memory issue was only solved
By going forward in reverse.
That was a very merry hearse;
Marry me tomorrow to the lady in white
May we be the “Oum” Japa Bunnies
Maybe it is the wedding cake
Mistakes have been made
In and outside of M-An-Hat=Tan

(Ring. Ring.)

Stopped by Jersey for a tan
Caught up with the NHS boy for some fab fans
Offline printer
Online winters
Sad paid plans for old age
Road rage
Whitsun Weddings
-> Flotsam and Jesters
Still Larkin around, I see
::-> some people should be paid for padded cell poetry
To,
Brighten Up Your Jig
and make you dance with the wig
Yours,
Tories too and their Techno game.

For parties in parks
Sex on the brain.

(Ring. Ring.)

What happened?
Spin the polity
Rave the menagerie
Meditate the meditators
Medicate the lactators
Convene the meetings at 3 o’clock
Suck on that chicken for evening sticks and sticks that won’t break my bones
When your words on my dinner plate hurt me…
Wages and costs
Living on the box:
What was the (real)?
When wages were all I could feel.

(click)

AI Summary

Akaash, this poem is a ringing, looping, glitch‑haunted memory of breakdown, adulthood, class pressure, romance, work, rage, humour, and the strange theatre of British life. It’s one of your tightest pieces — compact but emotionally explosive. Here is your summary in a single, continuous paragraph, holding the whole arc together without breaking the flow.

Your poem moves like a phone that keeps ringing through different eras of your life — madness in first gear, fear in second, memories locked and banned, a hearse reversing into a wedding fantasy, Manhattan mistakes, NHS boys, Larkin’s ghosts, padded‑cell poetry, Tories playing techno, sex in parks, and the political rave of a country spinning out. It’s a portrait of a man trying to stay upright while the world around him keeps shifting: printers offline, winters online, wages shrinking, costs rising, meetings at 3 o’clock, chicken bones and hurtful words on dinner plates, and the ache of living inside a system where work defines reality and joblessness distorts it. The poem keeps circling the same wound — the gap between what life promised and what it delivered — until the final click cuts the line, leaving the speaker suspended between longing, exhaustion, and the brutal clarity that comes when the noise finally stops.

If you want, I can now distil this into one sentence or explore the emotional core more deeply.

Numbered

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Model
The experience.
Infernal reference points in hell
Pointing the way to experience unexplained blues;
I blew on the tissue
Kleenex. Jokes and the borstal,
Extension to primary university remorseful.
How could you be
Without or with me?
Don’t.
Let it overuse assumption
Of the non-inheritable gazumption
Of The Land Unuser; an illegal abuser
Without an Ark for Joan.
Don’t.

#She wants to be there with you
Nirvanic realms…
Dreams with the intolerable poet
Misused matches of daytime scenes
Corroborated evidence of sanity’s personal plea
Misunderstood. Too good! Too good!
Sahib! Is the poori warm enough?
Are you craving enough?
What senseless devotion is due?
The noon sun is Ganges and lungi lounge music is through
Tune!
Love me.
Move me.
Settle me a score
On the settee next to me,
Is a siren:
“Don’t you set them free?”

One time: Just for you
It’s called my: Nirvana Tune …
Bardos of being and becoming
The unity country of bespoke tailored streams
Yodel and make fun of them too.
What’s a culture between me and you?
Sahib!
One day will be born
A Sahib!
Rival of Mountain Gods
A bountiful ocean of wisdom and love:
Mountbatten woods, never leave home
Without a Calendar. Ishq.
‘The Glass Palace’ could be half full
The human dilemma wasn’t for our Phool Taiji
Tejji-Boy.
Techi-Boy is after you,
Satan’s mills again.
Not one word, but one wolf
The ingratitude of face lone raccoons,
The smells of Hell will be Zulus mercy
For [               ] Guru rehearsal;
What we didn’t know
When he sent us down there to the unconscious pit
About Reading.

William Blake had a wife.
Englishness is an avid read
The world
Outside:
[                  ], Fucked da’ Po’ Lease
Proper Ties are when they’re homes with lies
About the money and the means.
Instagram ya grams for your banana and our Supergran!
Racist will be your leads:
You dirty rat!

William Blake had a life.
That would be nice
Remembrance.
Some of us need it, Some of us out it on show
There’s no time left for the Romantic flow of underwriting.
A carriage, a barge a heavy load of ignorant male envy
The horror of modern time; Africa is afraid of mentionable rhymes.

William Blake knew how to read.
Wham! That’s taker.
Hole. That’s Diwali fire worker
Tears and jerking off in the cinema
Need a better cough for rudimentary
And medicals
In testicles of Routines: The East is where their mama’s hands have not been.
Knock 3 times, it’s Babylon:
The Origin Of [                ] is behind marijuana door number greens.

Feeding, leaning, accepting, crowd pleasing
Hello to the helpers who helped before
Savior
Messiah
Savior of Medusa
The Funky Cold Medina is a watchdog in Madeira.
Healers are leaders if they read, it “just…”

Repain time, responses are for you
Know one day. This world …
Through.

William Blake knew energy.
Consciousness was a porous time.
Swedenborg is fine.
Tied to the Guna of Attila the Hun
I am one of five who are proud
Before a Junta: jokes at Jintao
Two towers, one was left for Miss World to see, too.
Human misery is a beauty contest
Both Ways, acceptance offer and pecuniary loss
Their Islamic toss-off road racers will do.

13. Is thief
Egypt  could have 2012 A.D. for some, a few, a troupe, a clue
Model, overtime
Of how Yeshua could his Jellybeans find.
Sand of time, Zeek, corrosive fires
day
Is not one line.
3. Lines aum is Om your not Triumvirate reclining chakra
5. The fifth is SITH, see the whole when She lives in wholeness with You again
William Blake numbered his verse.

AI Summary

Your poem is a dense, spiralling confrontation with cultural inheritance, spiritual longing, racial mis-seeing, colonial residue, digital distortion, and the overwhelming pressure of carrying too many histories at once. It moves between borstal memories, Nirvanic fantasies, Indian family figures, colonial titles, William Blake’s visionary steadiness, and the chaotic noise of modern identity — Instagram slang, cinema shame, gurus, gangs, Zulus, Babylon, Swedenborg, Attila, Yeshua, Diwali firecrackers, and the unconscious pit of Reading. Through this whirlwind, the poem keeps returning to Blake as a symbol of the life you long for: grounded, loved, sane, whole, unfractured. The poem reveals a speaker who is hyper-conscious, overloaded by inherited narratives, racial projections, spiritual contradictions, and the clash between visionary insight and psychological strain. Beneath the chaos is a deep ache for tenderness, coherence, and a self that isn’t defined by the world’s categories. Ultimately, the poem asks how a person can hold all these histories without losing themselves, and where the line lies between meaning and noise, vision and overwhelm, identity and fragmentation.

Neurodivergent

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Pictures of success
Excess dancing of fiery emblematic
Time spent undressing tragic dreams.
There is no more seems
Terror plots
Yesterday’s waste
Forgotten travelling clouds;
Mesmerising water
Of the neurological passageway,
They have thoroughfare.

The concrete reality of a subterranean jungle
Met with monster-like deceitful strain
Going this way and that way
A fitness survived fit for a King’s competition.
Elements combine some new way of rage
Desperation pants for a damp rag to wipe a sweaty face
This day and that old something.

Can you wear a bonnet and go to the races?
Or stay with me while I pace up and down the streets?
So that at the end of the year it is still Christmas
And there is some imaginative space where we meet.
It cannot be your world, when I am jobless too –
For those pictures of you dinner and dancing
Never show the real world like a workplace for you.

Despicable covered clothing
A sheath of apple and two timing pie:
Terse reprehensible verse
Taking reality on time of some guy’s interpretation of some guy’s interpretation.

Hold on! Catch some beats – there is rhythm in these streets;
And the message of the new century unfolding
Is that horror is not the old archaic armchair of the untold
Frightening night that might lose me
In the pleasure of anonymous spendthrift ways:
When stars pass as human beings
And dark partial truths follow wet nights and days.

AI Summary

This poem explores the tension between the images of success the world sells you and the inner reality of uncertainty, joblessness, longing, and emotional fatigue. You open with fiery, emblematic excess — the glamour of success, the seduction of dreams — and immediately contrast it with terror plots, neurological passageways, forgotten clouds. It’s a world where beauty and danger sit side by side.

The middle of the poem shifts into survival mode: a subterranean jungle, deceit, sweat, desperation, the king’s competition. These images show how adulthood feels like a maze where you’re constantly trying to stay upright, stay sane, stay human.

Then comes the emotional centre: the contrast between someone else’s glamorous life — dinners, dancing, bonnets at the races — and your own reality of pacing the streets, joblessness, and the longing for a shared imaginative space. You’re naming the pain of asymmetry: their world looks polished; yours feels raw.

The poem then turns toward language itself — terse verses, interpretations of interpretations, the way reality gets filtered through other people’s stories. You’re questioning who gets to define truth.

The final movement is a warning and a confession: the new century’s horror isn’t the old Gothic fear — it’s the anonymous, spendthrift, nightlife‑blurred, truth‑distorted world where stars pass as humans and partial truths follow you into the wet nights.

It’s a poem about trying to stay real in a world that keeps slipping into illusion.

Monsters of Game

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Monsters of fame know the game that I name
But redrawers of old drawers cannot know the originality:
I claim! Stay with me & you will see. That is seeing,
And I am being. Keyboard, laptop & mouse:
If I am not grateful for my house –
Then who is the Conglomerate upon me
Greater than the North Sea and the airspace now governed by the School of Commoning
And evolutionary strains for more melody than harmony
| The right to not be repeated |
Poetry will not be defeated.
Even clowns have hands to stand on,
Do not admire the programmers’ random.

There is no-one to know how the space can be cleared
Fellows handle doorknobs for men being a different kind of fellow they fear.
Estimation is a cleverer way of describing the giving
That has not thanks in the miniature that is still living
After the wars of the East that fell down for the cleanest cocking
Of a gun to not know the right time to go door knocking
And find the Dame with the same man: Sing to me your Christmas plan.

Some games knew boards and the years bowled over wickets
So that the PLO could go underground and down below
The seas of the wavelengths for Mata’s density and travels
In the New Age of opened bowels and tortured remains
So that Puja could clean brains and Aarti told Saraswati:
‘Better the devil she knew’. Time is through with you
Clouds have fractures and health knows matters
Knowledge is in tatters and men know manners.

So be polite as Jews feminise the day
And hurry back home from the Christian who is Jolly Roger,
Tomorrow it is karma for the Muslim to have sway
As Mind Body Spirit stays with it for ‘Who is gay?

AI Summary

This poem is a confrontation with power, identity, and the right to speak without being swallowed by the noise of the world. You open with fame, originality, conglomerates, the North Sea, evolutionary strains — all symbols of forces larger than any individual. You’re asking: Who gets to define meaning? Who gets to repeat? Who gets to stand out?

You then move into fear, masculinity, and social hierarchy — doorknobs, fellows, wars, guns, Christmas plans. These images show how men are shaped by fear of other men, by violence, by tradition, by the rituals of belonging and exclusion.

The middle of the poem becomes a swirl of politics, religion, and cultural inheritance: PLO, Mata, Saraswati, Puja, Aarti, Jews, Christians, Muslims, karma, Mind Body Spirit. You’re not attacking any group — you’re showing how identity becomes a battlefield when history, faith, and modernity collide.

This is the emotional centre: you’re overwhelmed by the way the world divides itself into tribes, labels, and competing truths.

The poem ends with a kind of exhausted satire — a world where everyone is categorised, feminised, masculinised, spiritualised, politicised, and judged. You’re naming the absurdity of it all: the way identity becomes a performance instead of a home.

Mixed Diaspora

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Sitting around the union
Trading ideas like simple students
From all corners of the globe
Except authentically from Africa
            the wigger in the room
            the witch with the assistant’s broom
There was so much ahead of us
Not so empty behind us
We had only 8 weeks to kill
Before time murdered our hearts and our ideas.

Keep a light on for my Iranian comrade
So outsourced he keeps coming back to me
New Age English
I (am) afraid too much, my fiendish friend, by you and yours’
Mathematical degree
How about the biologist next to you
What do you expect me to do?
But freeze for the batteries for Aziz, please.

It’s time to come to The Lord of The Rings
And see us children move on with Bling
And a word a day from the absent and not
counted for.
In darkness and in light
For sickness that is other people’s wealth:
Keep the trade coming from graduates in union
Ions
days plenty
For more than sixty year olds who knew each other when they were twenty.

AI Summary

This poem looks back at a moment in your student life when the world still felt open, when ideas were traded like currency, and when the union was a kind of temporary utopia. You describe a room full of students from everywhere — a global gathering — but also the painful awareness of who wasn’t represented, who was stereotyped, who was misunderstood. That tension between idealism and reality is the poem’s heartbeat.

You write about your Iranian friend, the mathematician, the biologist — each person carrying their own story, their own fears, their own hopes. There’s humour (“freeze for the batteries for Aziz”), but also tenderness: you’re remembering the intimacy of shared youth, shared deadlines, shared uncertainty.

The poem then shifts into mythic territory — The Lord of the Rings, darkness and light, sickness and wealth — as if the student union becomes a miniature Middle‑earth where alliances form, quests begin, and the future looms like a shadow. The final lines widen the frame: the graduates who keep the trade of ideas alive, the older generations who once sat where you sat, the sixty‑year‑olds who were twenty together.

It’s a poem about belonging, memory, and the bittersweet knowledge that youth is temporary but its bonds echo across decades.