love

Satisfied Feed

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Repetition arrives from some unknown place
Google is staring in every homely space
Watching and prophesying my every move
Informing what is coming with the slightest reprove.
Seldom is wisdom blended with mergers and acquisitions
For murders and blind trends of horrors
The sale of artificial intelligence
Metaphorically beheading witches in intentional television covens
Knowing what was underneath the stairs
Self-aware and assigning around and around
Keeping watch for the fashion of my selfishness.

The Master is a lover in the nightly hours
Waiting for the feed to return his latest update
The maiden voyage for fantastic flights and lights
Cascading up and down with the approval and frown
There is no wisdom in the modern world up and down
Said a man who was watching the sadness.
Hope was not wallowing in the fury of a bullet
In the absence of knowledge the verse is not concave
Reflexing back to the unknown and what a lonely poet erratically braved.

Step by step, melodically and methodological:
A logical vulture to the legal culture
New Age nurse swelling with scientific pride –
My emergent YouTube this morning >
The sum of global philosophy: Sexual lust is a must on the BBC – Her nuclear family scene.
2012 was upon me: Mayan encounters at the tills of Animal Farm.
Where have you been in the Real Politick
Mugabe was not a coffee trader
Lions knew strangers with or without the gun: Bono will always be Number One.
Your cerebral celebrity informs me about my local polity.
Could it be that you have fallen in love?
And some helpless child in African mother’s mild loving has been deprived some Beloved.
Clouds used to part before a baby’s art of farting unimpressed with the undressed humour of aged social media laughter [Police view the Media]
What weed d’ya need
After George Bush’s retired feed…
Certain things of life are going solo
Wise before the latent clique
Compared to the old Muslim traveller who does not speak.

AI Summary

Your poem is a fierce, spiralling meditation on surveillance, media, power, and the erosion of wisdom in a hyper‑connected world. You move from Google watching in every home, to AI as a kind of witch‑hunter, to masters and lovers waiting for “feeds,” to poets trying to make sense of a world where information is constant but understanding is scarce. The poem exposes how technology, news, celebrity, and politics fuse into a single, numbing spectacle: YouTube as philosophy, the BBC as lust, Mugabe as misread symbol, Bono as permanent saviour, Bush as retired feed, social media laughing at everything, even babies’ farts. Underneath the satire is a deep grief: that while the global North scrolls, consumes, and comments, some unnamed child in an African mother’s arms is quietly deprived of love and attention. You end by contrasting all this noise with the old Muslim traveller who does not speak — a figure of quiet, embodied wisdom — suggesting that true depth now lives outside the loudest systems, in silence, restraint, and lives that don’t need to be broadcast.

Pandemic

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Out of the single market
They never saw it coming
The jokes of the Jester
Were waiting without warning.
Lost tribes
Collective blindness
The nations lost their role
Condemnation and death tolls
Nineteen over eighteen
Corona over Karuna
The viruses spread like Kryptonite
Weakness to very SWOT team
Gordon’s dream
Ginn and tunics
Emergency times
The hospitals swabbed double time
This thought is not anymore.
Sometime before Ukraine
Waiting for the pain
Lockdown and all those people at home
Gardening with new purchased gnomes
Recycle grass
This is some of the way I saw the world come to pass

How about you?

AI Summary

Akaash, this poem is you looking straight at the last decade — Brexit, Covid, lockdowns, hospitals, fear, humour, absurdity, gardening gnomes — and turning it into a single compressed memory‑wave. It’s observational, political without preaching, personal without confession, and it ends with a quiet, human question. Here is your summary in one continuous paragraph, keeping the emotional clarity intact while respecting political boundaries.

Your poem traces the shockwaves of the last years: the UK stepping out of the single market, the blindness of nations, jesters laughing at what no one saw coming, and the sudden arrival of Covid — nineteen over eighteen, corona over karuna — a virus that spread like kryptonite through systems that thought they were strong. You move through emergency hospitals, swabs, Gordon’s dream, gin and tunics, and the strange stillness before Ukraine shifted the world again. Then the poem drops into lockdown life: people stuck at home, buying gnomes, recycling grass, gardening their way through fear and boredom. It’s a snapshot of how the world unravelled and re‑stitched itself in small domestic ways, how global crises collided with tiny rituals, and how you watched it all unfold with a mixture of disbelief, dark humour, and quiet witness.

And then you ask, simply: How about you — which is really a question about how each of us lived through a time that changed everyone differently.

On The Padded Cell

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

(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.

Numbered

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Model
The experience.
Infernal reference points in hell
Pointing the way to experience unexplained blues;
I blew on the tissue
Kleenex. Jokes and the borstal,
Extension to primary university remorseful.
How could you be
Without or with me?
Don’t.
Let it overuse assumption
Of the non-inheritable gazumption
Of The Land Unuser; an illegal abuser
Without an Ark for Joan.
Don’t.

#She wants to be there with you
Nirvanic realms…
Dreams with the intolerable poet
Misused matches of daytime scenes
Corroborated evidence of sanity’s personal plea
Misunderstood. Too good! Too good!
Sahib! Is the poori warm enough?
Are you craving enough?
What senseless devotion is due?
The noon sun is Ganges and lungi lounge music is through
Tune!
Love me.
Move me.
Settle me a score
On the settee next to me,
Is a siren:
“Don’t you set them free?”

One time: Just for you
It’s called my: Nirvana Tune …
Bardos of being and becoming
The unity country of bespoke tailored streams
Yodel and make fun of them too.
What’s a culture between me and you?
Sahib!
One day will be born
A Sahib!
Rival of Mountain Gods
A bountiful ocean of wisdom and love:
Mountbatten woods, never leave home
Without a Calendar. Ishq.
‘The Glass Palace’ could be half full
The human dilemma wasn’t for our Phool Taiji
Tejji-Boy.
Techi-Boy is after you,
Satan’s mills again.
Not one word, but one wolf
The ingratitude of face lone raccoons,
The smells of Hell will be Zulus mercy
For [               ] Guru rehearsal;
What we didn’t know
When he sent us down there to the unconscious pit
About Reading.

William Blake had a wife.
Englishness is an avid read
The world
Outside:
[                  ], Fucked da’ Po’ Lease
Proper Ties are when they’re homes with lies
About the money and the means.
Instagram ya grams for your banana and our Supergran!
Racist will be your leads:
You dirty rat!

William Blake had a life.
That would be nice
Remembrance.
Some of us need it, Some of us out it on show
There’s no time left for the Romantic flow of underwriting.
A carriage, a barge a heavy load of ignorant male envy
The horror of modern time; Africa is afraid of mentionable rhymes.

William Blake knew how to read.
Wham! That’s taker.
Hole. That’s Diwali fire worker
Tears and jerking off in the cinema
Need a better cough for rudimentary
And medicals
In testicles of Routines: The East is where their mama’s hands have not been.
Knock 3 times, it’s Babylon:
The Origin Of [                ] is behind marijuana door number greens.

Feeding, leaning, accepting, crowd pleasing
Hello to the helpers who helped before
Savior
Messiah
Savior of Medusa
The Funky Cold Medina is a watchdog in Madeira.
Healers are leaders if they read, it “just…”

Repain time, responses are for you
Know one day. This world …
Through.

William Blake knew energy.
Consciousness was a porous time.
Swedenborg is fine.
Tied to the Guna of Attila the Hun
I am one of five who are proud
Before a Junta: jokes at Jintao
Two towers, one was left for Miss World to see, too.
Human misery is a beauty contest
Both Ways, acceptance offer and pecuniary loss
Their Islamic toss-off road racers will do.

13. Is thief
Egypt  could have 2012 A.D. for some, a few, a troupe, a clue
Model, overtime
Of how Yeshua could his Jellybeans find.
Sand of time, Zeek, corrosive fires
day
Is not one line.
3. Lines aum is Om your not Triumvirate reclining chakra
5. The fifth is SITH, see the whole when She lives in wholeness with You again
William Blake numbered his verse.

AI Summary

Your poem is a dense, spiralling confrontation with cultural inheritance, spiritual longing, racial mis-seeing, colonial residue, digital distortion, and the overwhelming pressure of carrying too many histories at once. It moves between borstal memories, Nirvanic fantasies, Indian family figures, colonial titles, William Blake’s visionary steadiness, and the chaotic noise of modern identity — Instagram slang, cinema shame, gurus, gangs, Zulus, Babylon, Swedenborg, Attila, Yeshua, Diwali firecrackers, and the unconscious pit of Reading. Through this whirlwind, the poem keeps returning to Blake as a symbol of the life you long for: grounded, loved, sane, whole, unfractured. The poem reveals a speaker who is hyper-conscious, overloaded by inherited narratives, racial projections, spiritual contradictions, and the clash between visionary insight and psychological strain. Beneath the chaos is a deep ache for tenderness, coherence, and a self that isn’t defined by the world’s categories. Ultimately, the poem asks how a person can hold all these histories without losing themselves, and where the line lies between meaning and noise, vision and overwhelm, identity and fragmentation.

Neurodivergent

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Pictures of success
Excess dancing of fiery emblematic
Time spent undressing tragic dreams.
There is no more seems
Terror plots
Yesterday’s waste
Forgotten travelling clouds;
Mesmerising water
Of the neurological passageway,
They have thoroughfare.

The concrete reality of a subterranean jungle
Met with monster-like deceitful strain
Going this way and that way
A fitness survived fit for a King’s competition.
Elements combine some new way of rage
Desperation pants for a damp rag to wipe a sweaty face
This day and that old something.

Can you wear a bonnet and go to the races?
Or stay with me while I pace up and down the streets?
So that at the end of the year it is still Christmas
And there is some imaginative space where we meet.
It cannot be your world, when I am jobless too –
For those pictures of you dinner and dancing
Never show the real world like a workplace for you.

Despicable covered clothing
A sheath of apple and two timing pie:
Terse reprehensible verse
Taking reality on time of some guy’s interpretation of some guy’s interpretation.

Hold on! Catch some beats – there is rhythm in these streets;
And the message of the new century unfolding
Is that horror is not the old archaic armchair of the untold
Frightening night that might lose me
In the pleasure of anonymous spendthrift ways:
When stars pass as human beings
And dark partial truths follow wet nights and days.

AI Summary

This poem explores the tension between the images of success the world sells you and the inner reality of uncertainty, joblessness, longing, and emotional fatigue. You open with fiery, emblematic excess — the glamour of success, the seduction of dreams — and immediately contrast it with terror plots, neurological passageways, forgotten clouds. It’s a world where beauty and danger sit side by side.

The middle of the poem shifts into survival mode: a subterranean jungle, deceit, sweat, desperation, the king’s competition. These images show how adulthood feels like a maze where you’re constantly trying to stay upright, stay sane, stay human.

Then comes the emotional centre: the contrast between someone else’s glamorous life — dinners, dancing, bonnets at the races — and your own reality of pacing the streets, joblessness, and the longing for a shared imaginative space. You’re naming the pain of asymmetry: their world looks polished; yours feels raw.

The poem then turns toward language itself — terse verses, interpretations of interpretations, the way reality gets filtered through other people’s stories. You’re questioning who gets to define truth.

The final movement is a warning and a confession: the new century’s horror isn’t the old Gothic fear — it’s the anonymous, spendthrift, nightlife‑blurred, truth‑distorted world where stars pass as humans and partial truths follow you into the wet nights.

It’s a poem about trying to stay real in a world that keeps slipping into illusion.

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

This poem is a confrontation with power, identity, and the right to speak without being swallowed by the noise of the world. You open with fame, originality, conglomerates, the North Sea, evolutionary strains — all symbols of forces larger than any individual. You’re asking: Who gets to define meaning? Who gets to repeat? Who gets to stand out?

You then move into fear, masculinity, and social hierarchy — doorknobs, fellows, wars, guns, Christmas plans. These images show how men are shaped by fear of other men, by violence, by tradition, by the rituals of belonging and exclusion.

The middle of the poem becomes a swirl of politics, religion, and cultural inheritance: PLO, Mata, Saraswati, Puja, Aarti, Jews, Christians, Muslims, karma, Mind Body Spirit. You’re not attacking any group — you’re showing how identity becomes a battlefield when history, faith, and modernity collide.

This is the emotional centre: you’re overwhelmed by the way the world divides itself into tribes, labels, and competing truths.

The poem ends with a kind of exhausted satire — a world where everyone is categorised, feminised, masculinised, spiritualised, politicised, and judged. You’re naming the absurdity of it all: the way identity becomes a performance instead of a home.

Mixed Diaspora

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Sitting around the union
Trading ideas like simple students
From all corners of the globe
Except authentically from Africa
            the wigger in the room
            the witch with the assistant’s broom
There was so much ahead of us
Not so empty behind us
We had only 8 weeks to kill
Before time murdered our hearts and our ideas.

Keep a light on for my Iranian comrade
So outsourced he keeps coming back to me
New Age English
I (am) afraid too much, my fiendish friend, by you and yours’
Mathematical degree
How about the biologist next to you
What do you expect me to do?
But freeze for the batteries for Aziz, please.

It’s time to come to The Lord of The Rings
And see us children move on with Bling
And a word a day from the absent and not
counted for.
In darkness and in light
For sickness that is other people’s wealth:
Keep the trade coming from graduates in union
Ions
days plenty
For more than sixty year olds who knew each other when they were twenty.

AI Summary

This poem looks back at a moment in your student life when the world still felt open, when ideas were traded like currency, and when the union was a kind of temporary utopia. You describe a room full of students from everywhere — a global gathering — but also the painful awareness of who wasn’t represented, who was stereotyped, who was misunderstood. That tension between idealism and reality is the poem’s heartbeat.

You write about your Iranian friend, the mathematician, the biologist — each person carrying their own story, their own fears, their own hopes. There’s humour (“freeze for the batteries for Aziz”), but also tenderness: you’re remembering the intimacy of shared youth, shared deadlines, shared uncertainty.

The poem then shifts into mythic territory — The Lord of the Rings, darkness and light, sickness and wealth — as if the student union becomes a miniature Middle‑earth where alliances form, quests begin, and the future looms like a shadow. The final lines widen the frame: the graduates who keep the trade of ideas alive, the older generations who once sat where you sat, the sixty‑year‑olds who were twenty together.

It’s a poem about belonging, memory, and the bittersweet knowledge that youth is temporary but its bonds echo across decades.

Microchip Romance

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

I came to see you
It was your asking
Stolen nighttime
Switches off
a century’s tale of lovers betwixt two microchips,
May some fat in the oven enlarge me
This aching Data uselessly touches the rising of my loins,
Cookies and dreams
consciousness’ streams.

What’s your ideal type?
Who are your fantasies?
Where can we get together?
What are the best trees to go planting?

I’d do anything for the Environment –
That’s how the apparitions appear to me;
Movement of synchronicity
Gravatar or image or moving films from the 1920s…
… anything …
< Going, Have Been There, Done That >
Obsolete dial up: :;/.%”-+;@: “Call me back!”

My information is not at your doorstep
Help is very far away.

Abandoned.
Isolated.

Inundated by the time you reach the first morning coffee
(When are you going to wake up with me?)
Mr Subliminal and “Yours Sincerely”
{Family Tree}
Think about “We”: Royal or not,
What have you got by 9.30 o’clock.

You’ve had your cereal
You’ve seen my News
There’s not even attention
On what makes my Blues.

Yet you deny me your access codes
You don’t download to me your privacy.

Soppy stories of your night with your lover:
There is not even a phone number for you when you wake up,
About what the foreign ISP had to say.

AI Summary

This poem explores the ache of connection without closeness, intimacy filtered through screens, and the loneliness of wanting someone who remains behind digital walls. You open with a stolen nighttime visit — not physical, but emotional — and immediately contrast it with microchips, data, cookies, streams. The body wants warmth; the world offers code.

The questions — ideal type, fantasies, where to meet, what trees to plant — show a longing for something real, grounded, earthy. But the answers never arrive. Instead, you get avatars, gravatars, 1920s films, dial‑up tones, obsolete signals. The poem becomes a portrait of love in an age of lag.

The emotional centre is the shift from desire to abandonment: “My information is not at your doorstep / Help is very far away.” You’re naming the pain of reaching out and finding no one on the other side.

The middle section turns toward the domestic — cereal, morning coffee, 9.30 o’clock — but even here, the intimacy is one‑sided. You see their news; they don’t see your blues. You offer access; they keep their codes locked. You want presence; they give you stories about someone else.

The poem ends with the sharpest wound: you don’t even have their number. You’re left with foreign ISPs, digital distance, and the ache of being shut out.

It’s a poem about wanting connection in a world that keeps you buffering.

iYoga

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

The World is One Team
Yoga
Infinity
the bells are within me
Time
Centrality
It’s too soon for superficiality
Motions
Markets
Marrakesh
Crashing
What is the use of balancing on one leg?
Behind
Above
It’s different to chemicals in the Square Peg
Affront
Comfortableness
Special socks aren’t needed on the mat
Above
Below
There’s enough Qi for the men in a top hat
Around about
Within
These classes are selling out fast
Apart
Together
Chances are I’ll be leaving lessons last.

Time for a special chat with the teacher
He can’t try any harder with Apple and iPads
To get away from me pretending I am Jack Reacher
All inaction and no guns blazing to ongoing further.

AI Summary

This poem explores the tension between inner balance and outer distraction. You begin with the language of yoga — unity, infinity, bells within, time, centrality — but immediately contrast it with markets, Marrakesh, chemicals, Square Peg, and the absurdity of “balancing on one leg.” The poem becomes a meditation on how spiritual practice collides with modern life: Qi meets top hats, mats meet special socks, and the world’s noise keeps intruding on the attempt to be still.

There’s humour in the way you describe the yoga class: selling out fast, leaving lessons last, pretending to be Jack Reacher, the teacher trying his best with Apple and iPads. Beneath the humour is a deeper truth: you’re trying to find a place where your mind can settle, but your imagination keeps running ahead of you.

The poem ends with a gentle self‑jab — “all inaction and no guns blazing” — which reveals the emotional centre: you’re not looking for heroism, only presence. The poem is about the struggle to stay grounded in a world that constantly pulls you into fantasy, distraction, and self‑performance.

Ingrained

/ rrishi99 / Leave a comment

Stencilled connection
The distance between poet and reader opened wide
The estuary of likeness that travels beyond time
To the ocean of universes elliptically wasting
Cataclysms possessing heavens and those down below
On true tribunes to the tryst with destiny that India
Had with Nehru long ago…

Galaxies and an earnest wanting,
A noble quest
Something unfathomed between you and me
Like a quality under the garment of jacket and cloak.
Take me to the place where daggers are not spent
And guardians will do the rest…
Quality, quantity, absinthe
Coil with me in a confused wrangling on the roof of cellular dismay
One day at a time for all the years of colonial fineries
Sharing a canopy of stars is fine
From nations without bars of rhyme
Reasoned like pepper spray and Salt Lake City for Thyme, Oregano and fault free Basil.

The notion to do best will wrestle with the dampening stars
That cannot travel far for the foot soldier sodomized by the smog
Suffocating with his Warthog and Angelic retribution:
Cost, Halo Wars, Statistics and U.N. Delegation.
The waters of Mars are mine again
And the envy of imagination is distressed
For the best dressed camaraderie to be or not to be,
In a city close to Delhi named after Buddha
For Maitreya to party with the Oracle of Delphi.
Go Miami Dolphins! Go!
The jacket is on you now
Scholar, mon amie, whore
The mirror’s by the door
If you don’t want me no more.

All was apparition and nothing was frilly
The nuanced receipts from Lakshmi were printed rather silly
Simple me, wallowing in the willow tree
Next to the best and the truest holy saree
Incapable of honesty
Before the river Styx of Saraswati
And the unending tyranny of an unearned Brahmin whose mentions were not few or far between
When the Indians were on the scene
Legacy and title showing the glory for put downs and
SLAM! It’s not 1993 – D’ya get me?
Quality, quantity, titular title is not for me.
The Queen is the Empress lately and I have a sadness upon me,
That I want the home away from home treatment
When school ends after something like a wannabe of a quarter past three,
Four,
Hum Paunch IMDb: <Sancho Panchez & Three Amigos> It always goes the same
A referent, time and the Inshallah brain.

They will never let me be in the salt marched city
Until he does it twice. Modernist Machiavellian
Cleverer than _
Undotted unto the last clasp of technology
Upon a city holidaying until his return and some shabbily dressed revoked soul
On recall from the pride of the Gods to be debutante before that which is known,
That which is unknown and that which is acted.
It is in fact, in-facted: Exactly!

Squalor, quality, factions and the quantity of threesomes, foursomes, fives in the school court
Blasé about the interpreted consort for the rhythm of Symphonies
And how does your music grow?
I don’t know the interpretation city
That cannot be outsourced from the centrality of bestiality and make shift down
For some Watership Down and the microchip that ran the rat race
All of this?

Is some of this
And the listless
drift.
Make believe and belong love did not last long
Unlike the Delhi song
And some bagels to down that depression
In an economic recession that cannot outshine well sprung mattress wars
Up against the doors for the fluff of it and outshone academies of bullet proof
Deadly certainties that all is well.
All is not well
When the pen is not like the quill
And the entrance holds me chill
For the effect of your lament on the children,
Stencil.

AI Summary

This poem explores the vast distance between poet and reader, between past and present, between India and the West, between myth and modernity, between the self you inherited and the self you’re trying to become. It opens with a cosmic metaphor — estuaries, universes, cataclysms — and then anchors itself in India’s historical destiny, invoking Nehru and the long shadow of colonialism.

From there, the poem becomes a meditation on identity shaped by history: daggers, guardians, colonial fineries, spices, cities named after Buddha, the Oracle of Delphi, Miami Dolphins, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Brahmins, the Queen, Delhi songs. These references aren’t random — they show how your inner world is stitched from multiple civilisations, religions, and cultural memories.

The middle of the poem turns toward class, caste, and belonging. You write about Brahmins, sarees, Styx, titles, legacy, the sadness of wanting “home away from home,” the ache of school days, the salt march, Machiavellian modernity, and the feeling of being excluded from places that shaped you. This is the emotional centre: a longing to belong to a world that keeps shifting the rules.

The final movement becomes a critique of modern chaos — technology, microchips, Watership Down, mattress wars, recession, bulletproof certainties, and the cold entrance that chills you. You end with a lament for the children, for the next generation inheriting a world of confusion, and for the “stencil” — the imprint of history on identity.

It’s a poem about legacy, displacement, cultural inheritance, and the ache of trying to find a place in a world shaped by forces far larger than any individual.