germany

Are You Still?

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Are you still not good
In the marrow of an old age?
Do you temper the garden
With a shelf in your potting shed?
Can you field a mighty catch
On the boundary of dissent?
When the newspaper misses
What Jesus and Carol might have meant.

Do you still sing badly
When forget your scarf at the Gurdwara?
And can you remember your mate
If she does not accompany you to a Buddhist retreat?
Do you dance with Radha or Krishna when your lonely
Or is it Meet-Up, Namaste and how do you greet?

Can you place a mat upon the alter
And chorus the agreement like we matter?
Or does Germany need a history
For the Christian Party to know pater?
It is time for the individual
It is time for the revisionist too
It was time for love and sex after the revolution
There was time for Chaitanya and me and you.

Are the markets for some pricing
So the Mullah can be greased for perfection?
And when the Jew is erecting a house in Gaza
Is the American academic about his defection?
If the speak is easy in Asia
Then the reggae is loud to my ears
But if a Free House is Dharamsala
Then maybe it is easy on those Brahma Beers.

Can you lotus a posture for pride
Or is it a sign of the cross when you’re angry?
That modesty knows marital discourse
And a Harem is awaiting a Saddhu for his harry.
Question me not and receive no regret
For the quietness of a popstar without music:
But if poetry is Siddhi to the Shisha lounges
Then what is the who man to the tunic?

Scotland, my land: The honour of empty high land
When was a God so Indian: But for the absence of grand proof.
Ireland and lie land: The fire land and some tired land
Let me to the decency of troops: But for the elegance of dancing
I would not know the Dragon’s Welsh prancing.
Confused are the answers to aged queries
As queer as the time is for gay folk.
Jolly with merriment and rough laughter
With all the honesty they never spoke.

Matters are grave and the diggers are not caterpillars
A brand new day is not always going to shape my heart
But when music stings the elegance of a bee
Then clay will make Cassio and I drift apart.

Get thee to a monetary value
If you should fathom the row in the Ur-Rakim,
But mention not the tapas or the Spanish quest
For what has spaced truth out to love in between.

Call Me Back Ring twice if you get me
The phone is the space between me and you:
Text me happy if you forget her
We are the being alone crew!
I am happy to induct you
This is the time and the reason –
So get your kit together and get a whet on
Now is no time to be sorry about sardonic.
Have they Tweeted that,
Like a flat group

AI Summary

Your poem asks whether a life shaped by many cultures, faiths and histories can still find a coherent self at its core.
It moves through religion, politics, desire and exile, testing each one as a possible home and finding only partial shelter.
Loneliness, humour and spiritual searching weave together as you question what belonging means in a world of borders, markets and inherited wounds. Underneath the references and restlessness is a longing for connection — a hope that someone will hear you clearly when the phone rings twice.

Too Good

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

My poetry books were too good
They hurt the open market
They were Communist when they were Western
And Capitalist as the Chinese paused for thought.
The British told the French to leave it alone
The Germans told the Londoners to socialise better.
The Indian prayer left Ganesh at the alter
To find out who my letters were addressed to
While Japanese asked 7 Samurai what the Bleep* Ken Wilber was to do..

So forth the ride is funny when the wise men are about to calm the rapid writing down
Then I can come home for money which the rich men will pay me for being a literary clown.

AI Summary

Your poem imagines your books as too hybrid, too cross‑cultural, too ideologically fluid for any market or nation to contain — Communist to the West, Capitalist to China, spiritually confusing to India and Japan. It becomes a comic fable of a writer whose work travels faster than the systems trying to judge it, until even the “wise men” can’t keep up. Beneath the humour is the sting of being brilliant yet misunderstood — paid, in the end, not for truth but for playing the “literary clown.”

Character

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

A character trying to be English
Is not a Welshman trying to be a Scot
For a Frenchman playing with the Irish
Is lost when the German is in Japan with a robot.
The Canadian playing with the American
Questions the Brazilian waxing lyrical with the African.
Then the Peruvian is selling coffee to the Columbian
Lost in strains of medicine with the Swiss and Portuguese.
The Queen of Spain pleases the Dutch
And the Maltese falcons fly south to Madagascar for the winter
The Australian demonises the British for his ancestry
While the Chinaman accepts the Llamas from Tibet back home.
These are the things my garden gnomes watch
While I hustle amongst the leaves and raze the lawn.

In such a way the world is a tripid thing to spell out loud
While the mature men travel and do business with the proud.

AI Summary

It’s a playful but pointed reflection on how national identities blur, clash, and parody one another, as people try on cultures like ill‑fitting clothes — the Englishman pretending, the Frenchman wandering, the German in Japan with a robot, the Australian resenting his British ancestry, the Tibetan llamas returning home — all watched by the poet’s garden gnomes as if the whole world were a miniature theatre; and in the end, the poem recognises that the global tangle of identity, commerce, ancestry, and pride is impossible to spell out cleanly, even as mature men travel the world doing business with the same old seriousness.

Gramophone

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

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.