New | Poetry | Kapil Kachru

 

Columbus Avenue Cats

Ginsberg

 

writhing-universal-myopic-amnesia-

denial of our terminal rage, up/down

fury of opposable thumbs hates to love,

loves to hate

 

shallow deluge of silent majority laced

with spontaneous noisy camaraderie of

untuned instruments, groaning, ecstatic,

in self-imposed, sentimental, sub-terrain

squalor

 

all cages are connected, sticker on mail-

box says

 

 

 

Kerouac

 

Dulouz

dreams of starlings

in desert lands

drunk on fermented

dates honey hashish

n’ camel milk

hopping & flapping

dull with delight

along crazy edges

of baseball diamond

loosely sketched

on sloping sands

drenched in moon

shine

 

 

 

Ferlinghetti

 

in that deep

throated gutter

between

 

speech & song

terror of silence

sheds its

 

trembling skin

& dares to dance

naked as flame

 

on a

windy

night

 

 

 

 

 

 

Breakfast of Hunters

 

Happiness, in those days

was hunting for sand crabs

& rock crabs off Carter Road

 

with an uncle

who almost became

a priest in Portugal

 

on the beach

& in craters of rock 

that fell from the moon

in a child’s dream

 

we never caught

a crustacean of any kind

by luck or cunning

didn’t stop us, though

 

going out on weekends

before the sun’s blistering

fingers were firmly on

the day’s brittle neck

 

a time when

decent people attend

to domestic rituals

 

not us, in-laws turned

outlaws, on the fringes

of respectable behavior

 

armed with nothing

but the raw ambition

of cutting teeth

& unfilled stomachs

 

secure in the knowledge

they’d be stopping by

D’Souza’s Cold Storage

on the way back

 

to pick up fresh supplies

of sausages, ham

& pepper salami for

the breakfast of hunters                              

 

                                                                         

American Shaman

 

Still as a statue on a slender post,

he gawks, in the fading glow of

fleeing dusk.

 

Head swiveled, peering over

shoulder, scanning a patch of

garden with stunning attention.

 

Moments after diverting eyes,

whirring in the air, thud on the

ground. You whip around to

 

catch the hawk dancing like an

American shaman, all feathers

and feet, shuffling to a primal

 

beat, whose unwrinkled

wisdom flows unimpeded

in his native heart.

 

 

O India

 

First they cut off your arms

then they bit off your head, O India

 

how eloquently you’ve staggered

through the depraved deceit of decades

staggered & fallen without disgrace

 

in obscenely bright bazaars

where blind bystanders picked

each other’s pockets & looked the other way

 

nobody helped you up, O India

how could they, nobody had hands

 

there was nothing to lend

what wasn’t stolen was sold

you weren’t born yesterday, O India

 

you’ve extracted venom from

kings & cobras since the pagan

dawn of prehistory

 

tasted each poison

natural selection’s dreamed up

 

swallowed any virulence synthesized

by the insatiable imagination of men

 

you’ve burnt every desire, O India

& nurtured every antidote in your bones

for a price, of course, call it faith

 

I don’t blame you

for not writing it down right away

 

you were always a talker, O India

I wasn’t ready to listen

 

now continents have risen between us

separated by oceans of forgetting

 

so many sublime profanities

still left unsung

 

now unutterable, O India

 

Russian Roulette

(for Vladimir Mayakovsky)

  

(raises his hand,

takes center stage)

 

with the singular

desolation of crisp linen

 

he sneers

 

through the unevenly bleached

pages of a 1964 edition

 

now splutters

 

a disjointed curse

on the third party forehead

of bureaucratic decency

 

now wipes

 

angled lips over the dandy scruff

of his perpetual winter coat

 

Do not doubt your loyalty

comrade poet, do not doubt

 

the essential veins

of your tailored homeless soul

were stitched with the joyous iron thread

of Revolutionary Realism

 

your atheist tax evading liturgy

forced down the collective throat

of pleased proletariat like potatoes

 

Do not doubt

 

(he pauses)

 

at the indecisive gunpoint of

introspection

insufficient pen scratching paper

bleeding ink

 

(he pauses)

 

inevitably, the dream was wrought

with pig iron in endless fields of wheat

swaying obedient, glad

 

is God a pervert

clapping in hollow heaven

at our restless naked folly?

 

O tortured orphan

of destiny unspoken,

 

(he moves to the side,

softly)

 

as of writing

life sustains

unedited, poetic

germinating in

 

failing hours of

super-natural half light

disappearing down corridors

of State Office doors

 

rusty hinges

deliberately ajar

to betray glorious

 

promise

of imminent

tomorrow