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The Curse of the Rationalists and other poems

The Curse of the Rationalists and other poems

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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