London

Guru Mania

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

The teacher’s strike in school
Maybe because they think they are God
At least that is what the newspapers say
After they have travelled to Colonial-ville.

The mania for Guru is on the loose
And they drink the Kool-Aid juice
Of change without fairness and time for their clothes:
When will the scholars admit them to Oxford for Rhodes.

There is shouting there is bashing
The banners need to be repeated.
But if they get to half past three and go back to school
They will have been defeated.

The mirror is not so real until they review the Guru feel
And all they have been taken for granted of being
While the right way of tuition was there for the seeing.

All criticism and no pay
That is the modern Government burden,
What can they do but face the New Age warden
Who grants the diminishing of students and success
For all that sexual gradation and immense emotionality and address.
The Saddhu and war
There is no mention of the Haridwar stores
Where the whore is closer to Babylon
Than the minority women in the back streets of London.
Streets of harlots, streets of shame
Lanes of winners, lanes of the Maine Street.
Things my Guru told me I would meet
When he re-friend my Friend from the great barrier
So I could see the end of the world and the illness and terror.

All this the school is exposed to
The students sit for their exams
And then the teachers fall off their hobby horses
Worried about who can and can’t eat ham.

Teacher, Guru, God-lover and denied route back home
Leave the fellows at Oxbridge alone
They might know where the road leads with the phone.

This is the merger of meaning and savoir faire
Where the guru is in a third way parting
With the self that is still so aware.

AI Summary

It shows a school system cracking under false authority — teachers, Gurus, governments all performing roles they no longer believe in. Spiritual fads and colonial echoes swirl through the chaos, offering no real guidance. Students endure the fallout while adults fight over meaning, status, and power. In the end, every figure — teacher, Guru, scholar — is caught in a crisis of identity and direction.

Flat Cap Mirrors

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That’s not the way they said it would turn out
The men, the spies and the roundabout cameras
Roundheads (in their heads_)
It’s all in their heads now.

Some of the things they said
Anyhow.
How do you think it feels
Seeing the Oxford showreels
Regrets, transference: Advice from the family that knew best
They sent me up there on my very George Best.

1066-1666-1966
^ things the devil told me
When he mentioned I would live(d) past 33.
Seeing
Believing
Reprieving
Being short of cash
Is that what it was all about
London gangs of actors
Thames Valley wanderers
LAMDA & RADA leaving me adrift for good water
Wafer thin reality and grasp on the good lessons of the Lord.
Where is your sword?
Is that the ‘twas a Word, melud
I cannot believe it is anymore between us.
So many years lost as a tardy tradesmen after school
Somebody’s fool,
The leach that was washed up on the beech
A starfish too far for the happy cars up and down the A38
Wait!
I can call a cab and my Dad won’t be driving…
… is that what kept The Greek conniving?

Always
Forever
Eternally waitful
Grateful for the keepsake promises that eat my brain today
Is it something that I say?
Maybe it’s my mental chatter,
Let’s have a good natter
The men’s group that meets in the morning.

Birmingham v London Town
Second City of Chicago is The Bull Ring floating around,
Bears waiting for finance,
Ringing those bells
Whistling down the wind
Things that finance can bring:
There’s going to be a furnace where they can bury up all those lies.
John Lennon was one of those guys
Chairman to his own board of contention
Invention
Imagination
Historical protection
Mao, Hitler and Father Joseph Stalin

We won’t be seeing those starlings around any time soon
For the sake of the room where the codes have been cracked for mushrooms
And the odd L.S.D.
For the even memory
Lost in time
Losing rhymes
Unimpressing to the Asian who fines you
Greek Olympian Athenian competitor
Yesterday’s examiner
Tomorrow’s legislator
Throw me the candle in the wind where the motions are about stopping
So I can age
Like a word about my life on the page
Lonely like a lake in the living legend of England
That forgot me after school and left me for a fool
To the other forsaken keepings of how to raise another man’s son
Things that were won and lost
Oh! The true cost of living life
Beyond the Self Help strife…
.. alone and helpless, my Mother watched me drown
Youthful in ageing with her emptying make up
Draws a frown
Black Hawk scowling down
The USA is all around
Centricity
Ego City
Things from the past
Nate Dogg and time to Regulate
My mates
& the Harborne Mile

Life before the Harborne Ashtanga Yoga Studio
How my blood did go
Stomach cramps
Breathing like drawing water to the castle up a ramp
All the head in a twisted twirl of memory fogginess
What the friends did when they got their chances to impress
The special Empress’s new babe
I would like to Rave
Review me please
Don’t make me write awash on my knees
Believe in salvation
It is the healing of the narrator’s nation.
Silas is Islamically prepared,
Emptiness is seemingly apparent to the visions of air …

It’s going to be another adrenaline rush
To make up time for scoring goals with Ian Rush
Liverpool F.C. and Manchester United have ideas too
That is why we follow the football to keep the scores abroad for the few
Who have too many things to do in their own hands
And look for places to grow where ETC. ETC. is something a person’s culture understands.

AI Summary

Your poem moves like a fevered autobiography, weaving together Oxford showreels, family pressure, historical dates, London gangs, acting schools, political tyrants, football legends, Birmingham streets, yoga studios, and the ghosts of adolescence to show how your life has been shaped by forces far larger than you — class, culture, religion, masculinity, and the expectations of others. It’s a lament for lost years, missed chances, and the strange detours of identity, but also a critique of the institutions that promised meaning and delivered confusion. Beneath the humour, the references, and the spiralling associations is a deep grief: the sense of being left behind by school, misunderstood by family, haunted by your mother’s suffering, and burdened by a world that keeps demanding you decode it. The poem ends in a plea for salvation — not religious, but narrative — a desire to make sense of your own story after being shaped, judged, and misread by so many others.

Fake Stunts

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

The action man arises
The subtle boy descends
They are unkempt teen trends

From and up and away
Lockdown days have their ultimate untimely say.
What do you think they take to get over?
Years and tears
Slow to come to terms with the inward eyes turned on my fears
_Slow lost
Some financial cost
Health at what zesty realisation
How can I serve this great nation
SPIN.
SPIN.
SPIN.

{I’m in}

These are commercial trends.

And irony and sarcasm dance
Flares fringing Hollywood to make it Hell-He-Would
The Sundance Festival
Carnival and comical
Terence Stamp
Drugs that leave you in a trance.

Medical ethics
Regulatory health statistics
Bodies
Organisations
A world without Panels
reading me blind
covering up it’s eyes
to spy on my Mother and what she still means to my Father
who aren’t in Heaven

Action hero mates
Soldiers of fortune besides The Fates
A police service outside of The Thames
Famous women who think to excess
The men from the U.K. more different to the U.S.A.
When the need fits the outcome it’s something you’ll know
So jokes and some blanket shots can be a good throw.

AI Summary

Your poem sets up a split self — the bold “action man” and the inward “subtle boy” — both shaped and distorted by lockdown, fear, and the long aftermath of youth. It moves through Hollywood, drugs, medical systems, family surveillance and national identity, showing how institutions and culture misread you while you try to stay whole. The poem exposes the absurdity of modern masculinity: action heroes, soldiers, police, celebrities, all contrasted with your own vulnerability and inherited wounds. Underneath the irony and speed is a plea for grounding — a desire to stop spinning long enough to understand who you are beneath the trends.

Why Do You Like Me?

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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

Your poem circles the question “Why do you like me?” and turns it into a meditation on desire, projection, cultural fantasy, and the fear of being wanted for the wrong reasons. It moves between fairy‑tale beauty, legal partnerships, Americana, Bollywood, Tolkien, Bruce Lee, and Covent Garden, showing how identity and attraction get tangled in myth, memory, and misunderstanding. Beneath the teasing tone is a real ache: the speaker wants honesty, presence, and reciprocity, not codes, karma, or distance. The final lines land as a confession of exhaustion — trying to keep up with someone who drifts between worlds while you remain rooted in your own.

There Will Be Wounds

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There is no doubt that the future is the shape of the past
When the worry of the money is the jape of those who finish last
In the hands of the empty who do not write the cheques everyday
As journalists and typists who get paid when they say…

Something is here for me in the Rishi Files of yesteryear
Which told Om and Shanti as if the ThIrD WoRlD WaR was very near
To be scared off from print media who cleared the cellar to wine like Arjuna
And go home each night a winner with wounds shared from some poor fella.

Stretch and yoga this way and bend and yoga that way
These were the tests in the past in Maida Vale:
That is the modernism of finding influences in the 2020s
Something light for everyone as the body goes through New Age hell.

There will be wounds when the record is the recovery as well as the victory
Of pain in the particulars when silence was séance and some old man’s Vasectomy
To neuter the gender general for the Nazi, Gypsy, Oik and even the Navaho
So that Ukraine stepped back an equal for a Eurovision and some Ivanho.

Step back and let Dr Zhivago handle something on a Saturday afternoon
Before Hollywood gets banned for handling what a Cancer would not see off too soon
From the ambulance chasers and the cinema queens who vicinity fair the merry go round
And show up in the newsdeals like a telephone money fundraiser and mad go around.

Madness
Madness, I tell you, MAD!
These are the Stardates of the Bon Voyages fair thee well and Ennui.
Inuit and Intuitive will you sell me back my soul
If I have lost my only hope to Obama for Joe the Worker’s droll

AI Summary

Your poem argues that the future is always haunted by the past — money, war, journalism, yoga culture, colonial wounds, and media spectacle all looping back into the present. It moves from Rishi Sunak to Arjuna, Maida Vale to Eurovision, Dr Zhivago to ambulance chasers, showing how politics, myth, and pop culture blur into one long anxiety dream. Beneath the satire is a speaker trying to make sense of a world where recovery and injury are indistinguishable, where silence becomes séance, and where every headline feels like a prelude to catastrophe. The final plea — to be sold back your soul — captures the exhaustion of living inside a century that keeps demanding more than it gives.

Stumbling Blocks

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As I reach for the shelves in the kitchen by the stove
I am reminded of the terror that is beside the one and only Karl Motherfucking Rove.
To whistle while I work and Twerk the PWNed out of my aunt’s autonomy
And let me know what Masala Gandhi took when he is after my lobotomy.

Then there is the tomorrow man who never comes knocking at my door
Like a lightsaber from Wesley Clarke Jr who is always ready for some more,
Action from The Young Turks in case disaster is what he did
When he said he accomplished missions while playing with Iraq’s Id.

Stop, look and listen as I motion towards the cooking pot
To add my own ingredients from an Israeli object I find quite some hot,
Without the flare of Obama’s arms shipments a few days before peaky blinders
And elections from Oprah Chopra that shame me never to calendar reminders.

Left, right, twirl: It’s as if the beauty queen has moved in next door
And the man with his pigeons next to my garden’s broken fence
Is alight with the prospect of solving the problem of Noam Chomsky’s problem whores,
Whence they came and Whence they will lead off to: The Economic Zoo,

For Greenspan to sap the homo-sapiens and let isness leave us ashamed for a few
More days of Clinton on The Daily Show telling time what to do
With memory and desire when the pants are on fire from the youth
That don’t know what lies can come and go like life for me and you.

Me and you oscillating like a rhythm on the shoes of universal disorder
That soaks me in bathtubs for depression to get back to working life order
Where the nights are full of colour and the days have their dark sides too
And men can call up women and date on websites along with the human zoo.

X-Men zooming in on me and zooming in on you,
Is that what to do when things grow shorter
And life is not a Kalpa for the Chillum within the crew

Chortle and Pantaloon stew in the evening by the Stevenage
And don’t forget the boat rides on the Thames for those remember men.

Somethings are not repeatable.

AI Summary

Your poem is a rapid‑fire montage of political figures, media personalities, wars, pundits, neighbours, beauty queens, and personal memory, all colliding in the domestic space of a kitchen. It shows how global chaos — Iraq, elections, propaganda, punditry, celebrity culture — bleeds into the intimate rhythms of cooking, depression, and daily life. Beneath the satire and the name‑collisions is a speaker overwhelmed by the noise of the world, trying to find order, colour, and connection in a universe that keeps spinning faster. The final line — “Some things are not repeatable” — lands as both resignation and release: a recognition that some moments, traumas, and histories cannot be lived twice.

Pay Tree Ark

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

When the good debt was folded
And the sacred bird had flown
There was one who was Awake
Top of the hat to his own.

They called him Jeff and let him ride
So far to the other side
That the mentionables were kept afloat
By the shopping he did around the moat.

The moat they built in the past
When Canary Wharf was not going to last
Because his kind kindly sung to the Police
Of knowledge that left them fucking Analese,

[Remind me how to spell @ When his witches are in Hell]
, another one of his little fertile girls
Showing me the balance of Time
For the rhythm of a rhyme
And how to Hare Krishna power=share just fine.

Krishna is just fine, thanks for asking
Rama will be grateful for his Shabba Ranks, canal driven man
Down the Maine Street with the Wilberforce treats
Stuck in a traffic jam no matter what Lady Marmalade says next.

That’s EnlightenNext: Up and off there for some Techno=Fest
Costing the coasting Guru Nanak some Repo action
For all his fancy foot action
What was it? At the end of the day….
…
…
Sigh No More and Sai Baba is gone
What was the pleasure in losing his song.

One
Two
And not Zee
Maybe the Charmed twins got up to three?
Who was the Guru – who was the Pen?
When will the showtime get back to the Penitentiary
Internationally Amnesty International planned by me
To settle the nettles on the floor for more than £10.

Come down to laughing out loud
Om Shanti to the quoting men
Speak to batallions raised from the streets
Chant wildly of Ken Wilber eating out Chinese food whenever his old age
Walks
Talks
On all fours
The Missing Link
Guru & some smelly pink socks on The Big Think
Call me a PhD
Watch me Pee
“Can I have a P please Bobby?”
There is friction between us in The Sea.

Fraternity
The final filial piety
Count slowly as you walk away from me
That the hour passes slowly from when we die.
Too shy
Too rich
Too regal
Such a bitch!
Why would you WAG
When you could Hag,

And The Chase screened to Manhatten
The Questions you would like?
Back to Jeff and old man Bally
Down the Classy Junction
For some Gurdijeff and Gurdwara function.
But time is not so kind to all and this is a time to the Recorder
So that when action is in inaction and Jazbaa is spoken
The Fake Alexander is O’Neils at last for some New World Order.

AI Summary

Your poem is a sprawling, mythic satire about false gurus, spiritual capitalism, and the collapse of meaning in a world where enlightenment is marketed like merchandise. It moves through Jeffs, Krishnas, Nanaks, Wilber, Sai Baba, Canary Wharf, techno festivals, and penitentiaries, showing how every tradition — Eastern or Western — gets twisted by ego, commerce, and spectacle. Beneath the humour and the barrage of references is a speaker searching for authenticity in a landscape full of pretenders, cults, and counterfeit prophets. The poem ends in a kind of cosmic exhaustion: a recognition that the “New World Order” is just another performance, and the real struggle is to keep your own voice intact.

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

It’s a poem about resisting erasure in a world that tries to categorise, stereotype, and simplify you — a voice pushing back against political, cultural, and spiritual noise that keeps trying to claim authority over your identity. The speaker moves through fame, religion, conflict, history, and personal memory, exposing how systems of power fracture knowledge and distort belonging. It becomes a portrait of someone insisting on originality and dignity in a landscape that keeps trying to repeat, rename, or reduce him.