Literature

Spare

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

You told me I was uneven
Like an uneventful good day
Filled with unequal family
With debts and some hazards to repay.
I spoke back by opening up about relationships
I therapied the darkness into light.
Then I motioned the chairs to stand up and be counted
In case I am confronted with a fright,
In my old age which could happen tomorrow
The sight of an unending ghost and a literary dismay
Stand with me as I run over the passenger seated dismal intellect
That watches the world go by every day.
Be kind to me knighted fellows, readers of messages from God
So we can stand together until the end, and be free of a saddening Don.
Let Oxford go and the tutors be aware of the caveat in every chapter
Each man is not read until the time is spent and the church is amock with a canter.
The minds horses, the womens’ divorces, the happiness of every emotion…
Step forward tomorrow and come back from the future and finish the empty commotion.

AI Summary

The poem reflects on being judged as “uneven” and responds with a quiet assertion of self‑knowledge, emotional labour, and the hard‑won wisdom of confronting one’s own darkness. The speaker recalls opening up about relationships, fears, ageing, and the ghosts that accompany a life shaped by intellect and vulnerability. He imagines standing before future challenges with courage, asking for kindness from readers, thinkers, and spiritual companions who might walk beside him. The poem critiques academic and cultural hierarchies — Oxford, tutors, chapters, cantering churches — while insisting that every life is unread until fully lived. It ends with a call to step forward, to return from the future with clarity, and to dissolve the “empty commotion” that keeps people trapped in cycles of fear, judgement, and emotional stagnation.

Chief

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

I used to ground the chief
Searching high and low
Relaxing on the cricket pitch
Things in hell for bad people down below.
I wanted to know the answer
Beyond heaven’s mere innocent representation –
People spent in movies and Apocalypse
Versions on armies on TV in their nations.
What is the meaning of life,
From Royal Patrons to a lonely boy at school?
Taking life too seriously
For economics with the women at Uni – a lonely fool.
Where is the answer going to come from
In the texts of the English literary canon?
The wisest men and sometime women consenting
To examination in Final Honours School.
Lusting after the listed virtues of fame and honour
Consequenting the frequencies of despair
Prompting me to sometime grow it long
Otherwise I was off to shave my hair.
They called it the ineffable and made it into Christianity
Things I could do and things I cannot see.
Now it is moved to the popular population
So some may dance with it in the flame of Spirituality.

So I am undone and found out – merchandised to the futures of the investment class
Sometimes they think of me running the race and finding out things last
A computer for him and every child one day they will say
Until the time has come forth for this merriment to dry up and go away.

AI Summary

The poem reflects on a lifelong search for meaning — from childhood imaginings of heaven and hell to the intellectual rigour of the English literary canon — and the disappointment of discovering that neither religion, academia, nor society offers the clarity they once promised. The speaker recalls taking life too seriously, feeling lonely at university, and chasing wisdom through books and spiritual traditions, only to find these systems increasingly commercialised and hollow. The poem mourns the loss of innocence and the realisation that modern life has turned spirituality, education, and even the self into commodities for the investment class. Beneath the reflection lies a quiet grief: the sense of being “found out,” used, and left behind by a world that values technology and profit more than wisdom, humanity, or truth.

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

The poem reflects on how the speaker’s poetry defies ideological, national, and cultural categorisation, unsettling markets and confusing institutions that try to label it. Westerners see it as too radical, Easterners see it as too commercial, and every nation projects its own anxieties onto the work. Spiritual icons, cinematic heroes, and philosophical thinkers appear as bewildered spectators in this global misreading. Beneath the humour lies a deeper truth: the poet’s voice is too fluid, too hybrid, too alive to be owned by any system, and so he becomes the “literary clown” — the one who exposes the absurdity of cultural gatekeeping while waiting for the world to finally recognise his worth.

Are You Writing To Him

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Are you writing to him?
The gay man at the end of the bar
The one with a handlebar moustache
Checking out the fellows with draught beer.
Do you have some autumnal cheer
Like randy sweet ecstasy befriending the cocoa butter
Dances in the middle of the dance floor
Sweet French kissing when the numbers are up:
What is the showman
When the empty cup is always half full?
How does he know my so well?
Who takes his photos on Instagram?
The shop has a door where the custom is welcome
The personage had a past where these things were shut out.
He likes to scream and shout
The old man called Paul and Jock –
Two o clock and it’s pistols at Dawn’s
She like to play hard to get
And my life is an enormous amount of regret
Shadow debutant feelings
Energising a wet towel on the bathroom floor
And selling some products for London’s COVID environmental workers
The tear jerking from a jerking off man
Planned Satanism revival lamping one on the face of the nearest poet
The Arts are not funded in Royal towns in London
Again and again, he speaks of the medics name
Naked in the rain like Adam buying John Betjeman a cold hard won drink
Dripping with icey perspiration from the thoughts of a delightfully dinner
And some conversation about love making that makes the condensation erotica.
An advert perhaps – announcing the change in temperature?
Sirs. Please. This is Birmingham.
We have so many Civil Partnerships to go…

AI Summary

It’s a poem about watching a man at the bar and feeling the whole machinery of nightlife, desire, regret, and self‑consciousness whirl into motion — the moustache, the beer, the dance floor, the Instagram poses, the old men shouting, the poet worrying about his own life, the COVID workers, the unfunded arts, the rain, the imagined conversations, the erotic charge that dissolves into embarrassment, humour, and self‑reflection; the poem moves through Birmingham streets, bathroom floors, pandemic memories, and literary ghosts, ending with a wry acknowledgement that the city is full of civil partnerships, full of lives intersecting, full of stories that never quite resolve, and that the poet is still trying to understand his place in that crowded, messy, human scene.