The Curse of the Rationalists
The past is an algorithm
Difficult to decipher
For even the ones
Who are in love with it.
So we have the strange case
Of a man who sort of lives in his head
With people long dead.
He is still in love with them all
Even though they can not love him back
Nor appreciate his wonderful being
Rationalists say
He is actually trying hard
To find his own lost pieces
The parts that had the best feel to themselves
The singer, the chess player, the kite flier,
The endless talker etcetera
Parts that came alive with those men around.
Glorify not an ordinary soul, they say
Just trying very hard to reclaim its own purest joys.
True, he imagines another player making moves on the chessboard
But the course the game takes is entirely of his making.
Slow Man
If you are a slow man
Do you arrive at the essences late?
Do you imagine sometimes
Pace is an illusion
Created by a subgroup of misanthropes
The types who call laughter a therapy
And laugh may be a dozen times a day?
If you are a slow man
Do you believe in words like ‘default’?
Or ‘average’?
Do you understand feelings in real time?
For instance the despair after a failed love
Or deep love before unexpected betrayal?
If you are a slow man
Do you feel a strong urge
To assign a number to your memories
Lest someone joke you have too few?
The Perfect Prostrate and Other Shams
Grandfather in a village on the hill
Dying alone
Away from his seven sons.
Grammar with its quirks in his dreams
Past continuous and future perfect, specially
Confusing his jaded brains some nights
The way it did in his youth.
Sometimes his students screaming algebraic formulae
Like victorious soldiers celebrating before a seasoned captain.
Mythic men — their faces resembling his ancestors —
Visiting other nights with brandy and bird meat.
All is good they whisper to him
All is good including the prostrate gland
You worried about the most.
You imagine the rabbit eared seminal vesicles
Sitting perfectly on top of the prostrate and feel relieved
Till a pain in your groin wakes you up
And tells you it’s all a dream
A betrayal of sorts
Promising you a happy death
Before revealing the sham.
The Way Of Czars
Having lost their hubris
The czars have lost their once thick love for each other.
The past as wonderful memory is not an idea
That interests them much.
They prefer to roam the bazaars
When the streets are vacant
Lest someone remind them of the good times
Memory chafes like an untrained barber’s blade.
Once they believed in continuity
In power as one infinite straight line
Without the interruptions of time’s zigzags
The unexpected curves altering the beauty of the straight line
Of their idea of infinity as it were.
Having lost their hubris
The czars turn in to miserable ventriloquists
Interpreting their own sounds in vacant rooms
Their egos finally shrunken like a dying man’s scrotum.
To feel good at the end
Even czars need laughter and a few faces
That can talk to them
Of wonders besides their lifeless anecdotes.
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