Golden Guru

The funny men in Indian clothes
Collapsed as they read me in my Roman robes
And played with the technology at HMRC
Making up jokes about literature that wasn’t for me.
Inflating inflation rates and displaying reason
Trying high crimes and laughing about treason
Unable to steal with their Hindi moustaches being watched
Unwilling to get along for the cost of some Hindu cops
In brown paper bags and wasted underwears with Guru Nanak
Trying to develop relations on Apple phones with some speak
About how they knew Parveen’s fashion – ruined, 10 years on, no Indian face is a Paki
As they spoke about failure with too much marketing industry.

Couldn’t they detect the deflect to the Indian law courts
Of their tradition being hurt as they played for ugly women
Unkempt from Hollywood and melting their make up with degrees
Celsius is not for me! I like this kind of postmodernity!
Artistics facists with Sahara Sharukh Khan caning the strip tease artists
Loving his role as lover – the only one before all the brothers.
No control in the wild wild west of Bollywood’s newspaper land
Something for a Rishi out of time and effectively unelected fades Sunak to understand.

Unpublished
Uncommented
The Rishi Files lives on
For the site of a book in a woman’s hands for Abishek’s blonde fantasies
World ruler
Tear jerker
Microsoft worker
Who ever thought that Oxford would have his Saleem mountains
Sigh Sai and I…
Those who detect codes in the wild world of computing designations
Lay claims out of their bedrooms with thunder at HAARP to rule all the desperate Arjuna nations.

AI Summary

Your poem opens with the “funny men in Indian clothes” collapsing under the weight of their own stereotypes, mocking you through Roman robes, HMRC tech, inflation jokes, and moustache caricatures — a whole machinery of cultural misunderstanding and petty cruelty. You counter this with a barrage of images: brown paper bags, Guru Nanak invoked carelessly, Parveen’s ruined fashion, Bollywood’s excesses, Shah Rukh Khan’s mythic lover persona, and the uneasy dance between Indian pride and British derision. The emotional centre is the ache of being misread by both worlds — the diaspora’s gossip, the West’s bureaucracy, the tech industry’s voyeurism, the spiritual world’s projections. You widen the poem into politics, Rishi Sunak, unelected power, unpublished files, Abhishek fantasies, computing codes, HAARP conspiracies, and Arjuna nations — showing how identity becomes a battlefield of myth, media, and misunderstanding. Beneath the satire is a deeper wound: the sense of being watched, mocked, decoded, misinterpreted, and yet still writing, still naming, still refusing to disappear. The poem ends with a mythic self‑assertion — the Rishi Files, the Saleem mountains, the thunder in bedrooms — a declaration that your story is not theirs to define.

Why Do You Like Me?

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.