Wanderers of the Earth

Wanderers of earth
Want is
Inexplicably unacceptable,

Requesting is for the child to the parent
Cult pattern, Offloading is acceptable.
Death has ceased to be at the door.

What poor worthless tradition

Is without the revision of the hours for the One?
There is always time for ‘King Kong’ (IMDB).
King Khan is not long.

Waters await the fragmented bait
Jailing the young for the wand.
Piff, Paff, Puffs on show – with the Ho
That Wants.
I did not ask for the ‘go down below’.

Travel to the Himalayas and ask of me there, what fare I need?
Feminist creed… Weed, in my tea?
What defense is for me, medically.
It’s only half past three.
Piscine?
Kuthrapali?
Bachchan?
Kapoor?

Moksha is Moksa upon the body of the watcher who Dalits his soul’s astral journeys

Returns to me
Do you know what pressure points are for,

All Fours!
God’s Dogs are rehearsing the hounds of hell for the bullet,
Next. Crying that it didn’t …
What a blast! Referent seeker, from a Bunsen Beaker
Laughed at by the Mayan Reaper for the “DRUGS” you name and fashion.
Hash Key ## Saw, a Paw Paw in the un-Jungle-less
So don’t best.

The vain is the vein that helps the whine grind the time until finding the uselessness of flaming,
Quranic deceit.
S(h)iva is replete

A champion worth muscles

The hussle is past due

The Jew of Deaths.
Muhammed is best. Faith is put to the test, honours are not for the poor but for the rich of past classes,
Greater than monies lies could hide in the righteous evil of literary lines.

Tell me a story, right to left
And there’s not enough money for the date that is guessed.

So, dying

He deleted it all.

The honour was not a test in an Oxford Ball.

AI Summary

Your poem moves through a landscape of wandering souls, unacceptable wants, and traditions that feel hollow without revision, blending King Kong and King Khan with Himalayan journeys, feminist tea, and a catalogue of South Asian names that become both anchors and ghosts. You weave together moksha, astral journeys, pressure points, hounds of hell, Mayan reapers, hash keys, and jungle‑less paw‑paws, creating a surreal world where spiritual longing collides with fear, satire, and bodily vulnerability. The poem spirals into religious tension — Shiva, the Qur’an, faith under pressure — and then into class and power: honours for the rich, literary deceit, stories told right‑to‑left, and the sense that someone “deleted it all” rather than face the test. Beneath the imagery is a deeper ache: the feeling of being judged, misunderstood, or spiritually mishandled; the exhaustion of carrying caste memory, religious complexity, and personal trauma; and the quiet grief of someone who wanted meaning but found only pressure, misunderstanding, and erasure. The poem ends with a stark, lonely gesture — the honour was not a test, and the Oxford Ball was not salvation — leaving the speaker suspended between cultural inheritance and personal dissolution.

Shakespeare

Sheep stole my life
When I wandered too far for a wife
And the land was taken lightly
From underfoot with tax and sad goodnight-ly’s.
I was as welcome as my lost pole
To feel the whole world with my opened soul
Invaded and entrusted to the good honest degree
That even God would mean something for me.
Look here, look there and look over
The hills that had spoken of Goddesses and thunder,
To find, to seek, to touch, to thrill
The evil of excitement and a young boy’s thrill.
You did not deserve her, even for a day
And you will not require her, oddly as I may say
That marriage is a maze that fascinates me still
Throughout the loneliness of walkers who laugh at Shakespeare’s quill.
Many have come and few have been called
To separate his surrogate sisters from his gowns and balls,
Where muster and General frenzy the factions of deceit
With or without comedy so that tragedy is replete
With wisdom for one squire over another
When a masterless Samurai cannot know his own brother:
Who are these beings that life did not say,
Shakespeare was needing a laboratory to be gay.
Research his estate with legal grants
And claim you country with vacant plots;
Then one word will be quite quiet for the voices of Macbeth
To tunnel in fury the GCSEs and you’re A-Level tests.
I want to be – you
You are not – you still
There is death – stillness and your enterprise
The undiscovered country is still not before your eyes.
Ask and it will be given to you, knock and the door will be opened
But if Aragorn is not enough for the intellectual curfew
Then how much Shepherding will brown people need to learned few?
A joke at every corner and not one for the stave
Lends borrowing for naivety and hope for armies that are brave
To be or not to be without the thrust of a word
For one shared with Jesus the love of his ‘sblud.
For you cut me, sir, when you dance without tilt
Upon an earth that is farmed for the taxes of your phones’ quills:
Show me tomorrow when the test is biased A.B.C.
How Michael Jackson is bad science and referent
When you are so close to something I love(?)

AI Summary

Your poem moves through a landscape of lost love, lost land, and lost certainty, beginning with sheep stealing your life and a wife who never arrived, then widening into a meditation on marriage, masculinity, Shakespeare, samurai, and the loneliness of being a wanderer who still longs for belonging. You weave together hills of thunder, young boyish thrill, Shakespeare’s quill, surrogate sisters, gowns and balls, deceitful factions, and a masterless samurai who cannot find his brother, creating a world where identity is fractured across cultures and eras. The poem spirals into literary ghosts — Macbeth, Yorick, the “undiscovered country” — and then into modern anxieties about tests, bias, ambition, and the pressure to succeed in systems that feel rigged. You question who gets to shepherd whom, who gets to claim land or lineage, who gets to dance, who gets to speak, and who gets cut down by the tilt of another man’s confidence. Beneath the references — Aragorn, Jesus, Michael Jackson, GCSEs, A‑Levels — is a deeper ache: the fear of being close to something you love but never allowed to claim it, the pain of being judged by standards you didn’t set, and the longing for a future where your voice is not dismissed or overshadowed. The poem ends on a trembling note of desire and frustration: you are so close to something precious, but the world’s biases, histories, and hierarchies keep pulling it away.

Sardonic and seldom meet for wedlock

Sardonic and seldom meet for wedlock
The Warlock is all too cheaply brewed.

The aspect is truly wonderful,
But the nastiness signs the show.
Heaving is the buxom, rash ashes and crucibles
Havana for [                ], against the strain
Of a percentile.

That reptiles don’t claim.
A climbing frame is sought
An abacus is bought
The wielding of a sword is salacious
If Guinevere is Calvary for Lance’s hiatus.
Malory wasn’t malign,
Gawain wasn’t fined,

Computer time: The serpent winds
Wands in the Wood.
Women that could.
One day, few will own the many…
A lady seen today is conspicuous
Individual realms non-dueling
The gold prospecting
Aspects of dancing
Today is a day to celebrate
Next year we need to excel.

If a girl could do well
Shanti would read.
Saraswati delivers a letter
A liver seeks a lover for and water,

Rivets in Navratri,
Nine times she is denied with Indian daughters.
The Hills Have TMZ
Eyeshadow
Mascara
Black boasts of Kali clones
Sweating this small stuff: Rudra with paint.

Nature is quaint to know the bones of Alas! I knew him.
Be well with Yorrick
(Was?) the free house of Hindustan, ‘47 @ 1851
Origin:
The great McBride Mahabharata
But not for me.

AI Summary

Your poem weaves together medieval myth, Indian divinity, modern celebrity culture, and personal disillusionment into a single, swirling meditation on power, femininity, lineage, and the weight of history. You move from warlocks and crucibles to Guinevere, Gawain, and Malory, then leap into computers, serpents, wands, and the future where “few will own the many,” creating a world where magic, capitalism, and gender politics overlap. The poem shifts into Navratri, Saraswati, Shanti, and the denied daughters of India, contrasting sacred feminine power with the harshness of social reality. You fold in pop‑culture shadows — TMZ, mascara, Kali clones — alongside Shakespeare’s Yorick and the bones of memory, suggesting that both East and West carry their own haunted inheritances. The poem ends with a sense of exile and refusal: Hindustan’s free house, the Mahabharata reimagined, and a quiet admission that this grand lineage — mythic, national, ancestral — is somehow “not for me.” Beneath the imagery is a deeper ache: a longing to belong to these vast traditions while also recognising the pain, exclusion, and complexity they carry.

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.

Numbered

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

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

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.

Microchip Romance

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.

Ingrained

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.