On the way to the word spiritual
Is a typical retrospective ritual
To find out all that you don’t know
About who is not you certainly.
Then the definite article can be found
And the usual suspects will be brown,
So don’t complain of the masterplan
To wait for the overshadow and Africa land.
For, if man is not known after 1980,
And the Nobel Prize going Tibet’s way
Then how can human numb more than Sci Fi
When volition is evil for evolution to try a drive by?
Masters and servants are now my table merchants
I eat the vocabulary like potters clay with Islamic love:
Maybe that’s Ishmail anymore on the oceans
And a courtesan is lost in the past with The Kite Runner’s sequel trove.
Mentions are few and far between for what means something to me
Hidden from the dens of Oxford’s dense forests
Where the legacy of litanies was humanism resolved
To court the jester who opened his mouth with problem solving.
That was the opening act of a poet lost in the towers of knowing it
Like a Babylonian Prince of deceit and chasing darkness
Facing hardship for the throws on the internet affair
Where the awareness does not sit well with 19-1000s-Millenniums.
The English land is so betrothed to sand that travellers come and go
With merry love on their hand. Show me again the Titan’s strain
To rove where the Martian knows American music with Holz.
Then the comeuppance can dance with the ordinary and culture can cope.
So on the way to the bank for literary thanks
With my books on the open and not so free market:
Is a word to the Heal who is no show stealer
That today is no Black Friday with such a hearkening.
Stay alive like John Travolta and revolve unlike Revolver
Don’t sell all for an out with the Beatles version of Twist and Shout:
There was more to Jack Lemmon than dancing (white) like John Lennon
So send hoops to Jordan for a brighter affair.
One day we will get there to a bright affair
It just needs speaking again.
Then the table cloth is rinsed and the colour runs out
So the negro is not Chubby or Checkers to cost what it’s all about.
If I was Middle Eastern then maybe my midrift would matter
For the psycho-somatic distress of a Hindu who is fatter
For all the care from the Drs about the nurse who saw
A beef eater love chickens more than Arjuna at the door.
AI Summary
The poem explores the difficulty of pursuing a spiritual identity in a world shaped by racialisation, colonial memory, religious confusion, and cultural commodification. The speaker moves through Africa, Tibet, Islam, Hinduism, Oxford, Babylon, and American pop culture, showing how every tradition has been distorted by history and power. He critiques the way brown bodies are stereotyped, how spiritual language is misused, and how literature and religion have been turned into markets. Beneath the satire and cultural references lies a deeper ache: the longing for a spiritual path that is authentic, uncolonised, uncommodified, and unburdened by the expectations placed on him as an Asian man in England. The poem ends with a raw reflection on the body, shame, and the desire to be understood without being reduced to stereotype.
Wild Stage 