Four years I chanted Hare Krishna,
Flame upon flame,
Each name a bridge to the divine.
Fifty times I walked the Gita,
Arjuna’s trembling, Krishna’s gaze –
My own dharma unfolding,
I entered the 108 Upanishads,
Not as scholar,
But as seeker,
Each verse a mirror,
Each silence a guide.
hare krishna
The Night of the Examined Blessings
Throughout the night of examined blessings
A great being of stressful un-dressings
Wanted to know how I could be Enlightened?…
Given the prosaic stage of living frightened.
Lamenting essences of the envisioned joinery
Assaulting my senses with the medicine
Intelligently designed to question my bravery
Shaky roots, colonial carpentry and foundations weak at the knees.
I wandered lonely as a desperate quilt looking for the maker,
Shopping on my own esteem for bed mates in magazines
Nothing was for me in the violence of the armoury
Unacceptable hemisphere of hate.
Forthright likes and dislikes of confused and confounded foremost thwarting
Latent interest in unknown life
For the bumbling counties of country bumpkins,
Who is whom enthroned on the Thames?
Thanes swirl in cupboards feasting on Chinese cutlery
The European has no tea to trade while the bread and toast is buttered.
Anglo-South American reminisces the night sky with his women and wine,
The African descends a plane of ethereal misdemeanours unimagined consciousness.
Bliss is then my daily remains known by butlers and bootmen
Escaping famed name knowledgeable on London’s streets.
Copper is meeting aluminium with the beat of heavy shoes from laden houses
Hard won are forthcoming days of employed use before white halls and brown wooden floors.
Memory is fathomed by the wise ones up above
Naïve people distance themselves from the experienced:
Thus it was given to India to threaten the business
Of those so sure of second witness and surprise.
True questions beyond name and form
Away from I-Slam poetry and SAWM;
Mastery was survival and kinship was about-turn
I am a vagabond craving eternity staring at my mother’s Urn.
Listless death marches and trolled press
The internet spanned The Golden Age.
Cities earned pages of faraway entreaty
so that Mary could know beauty.
The closed gait, the horse’s mate, the chivalry at the corner’s quarter
God has not yet absolved the Buddha for sins of sons and daughters.
- To be a Quest
- To ask the Question about what a human is
Temporal lines created Stratford
There is a stealth.
Ninjas ghostly guard the gates of The British Museum.
These are The Guardian times
These are The Telegraph lines
These are The Times finesse
Who updates Page 3’s dress?
For if there is a Daily Mail…
What is hatred if you are still able?
Yogi, Balti and also a sheesha –
Life beyond shallowness in pale water
Diviners settled the land for some plans controlling language
Speak to me boldly, like Kirk or Spock
Before you afront a weakened Ronin
Seeing a Samurai like a ghostly frock.
These are the Bardos of time
These are the reminders of great souls
These are the fashions of the noble light
These are the last times of Christ.
Travel widely, then, dear friend and make polite national amends
Settle some settee time with arrogant wine
See through the looking glass of neo-Liberal advances on the telly of the past gnashers and teeth
In the heaven beneath the feet of shouldered giants
Who kept self-help quiet.
Who kept self-help quiet?
(2023)
Carnegie was not the Speak Easy and the come on was not so free as the advantage stamp served for the delicious mountain range and army reserves…
Do you want to fight forever?
Or can time cease to be clever?
For an anthropomorphic world will miss the consciousness of Brahman with its boys and girls.
(Numbers, Dollars and $) – Do that again
After Zen and 8 o’ clock
What is the point of blocking my cock?
Tick Tock, Tik Tok
Sell me a brand and stay more manned
For the Hare Krishna planned for the Indian Shopping Mall
—————————————————————————————————————-
4. The Noble Eightfold Path leads to Nirvana
>John F. Buddha Airport<
If that’s the greatest Creator
Keep it Mother Africa
Then centuries from now Afghanistan
Can blow up something big.
AI Summary
Your poem is a vast night‑journey through spiritual exhaustion, colonial memory, philosophical longing, and the disorientation of modern life, beginning with a being who questions your enlightenment while you stand frightened on the “prosaic stage” of existence. You move through shaky roots, colonial carpentry, desperate loneliness, and the violence of cultural armouries, then widen into a global panorama of Thanes, Chinese cutlery, Anglo‑South American skies, African consciousness, London’s butlers, and India’s spiritual inheritance. The poem becomes a meditation on how religion, identity, and history collide: Guru Nanak facing psychiatry, the Buddha judged for his descendants, Islam and SAWM invoked alongside vagabond longing and your mother’s urn. You weave together media noise, Golden Age nostalgia, civil wars, cosmic origins, and the quiet suffering of ordinary people, until the poem becomes a catalogue of everything that overwhelms the modern seeker — newspapers, samurai ghosts, British museums, Page 3, yogis, sheesha, Balti houses, and the Bardos of time. Beneath the swirl is a deep yearning for meaning beyond institutions, beyond nationalism, beyond the noise of neo‑liberal television and self‑help empires. The poem ends with a cosmic shrug and a warning: Carnegie’s ambition, Zen clocks, Hare Krishna malls, the Noble Eightfold Path, and a final image of creation entwined with Africa and Afghanistan — not as prophecy, but as a reminder of how human beings project fear, power, and myth onto the world. At its core, the poem is about a soul trying to stay awake in a civilisation that keeps collapsing into spectacle, ideology, and inherited wounds, searching for a truth that can survive all of it.
On The Padded Cell
(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.
Wild Stage 