Work meeting, Tuesday night, humid rains, traffic in front of the Sheraton

Work meeting, Tuesday night, humid rains, traffic in front of the Sheraton

ETA 5 minutes. Deserted foyer. the lobby smells of chlamydia.

glimpsed giggles, three bellboys shooting up behind the generator room, frequent April power cuts working overtime, streaks of burnt diesel hover awkwardly down the chandelier-lit hall.

The downstairs toilets buzz and hiss with their grunts, less pleasure, more pain,

modulated jollies.

In the elevator, run into the lizard cunts. Stand in silence as it trudges up, punctuated only by their habitual gulps.

Cunt one and Cunt two: Both work for the Directorate Generale Farces Intelligence.

two’s great-grandfather was waterboy for the faction that gave away the Prophet peace be upon him in that cave.

Anyway

everyone knows already

this convention is only courtesy

All funding this financial year, come June, after the rains, we know, is going, where, we know

Anyway we,

are only here for the free champagne. W-waqar, our blue-eyed boy at the division )—conjectured earlier the batch had come in last night from airport customs, where civilian Honeymooning couple returning from the maldives had tried to sneak it past our vigilant colleagues—into the motherland.

Could you imagine? Repulsive.

We will drink them tonight therefore.

Someone has to, only because. Only because someone has to.

If people weren’t stuck-up righteous about it, they would recognize this sacrifice. In time.

Golf game, moving through a shaft, punctuated at intervals, the sound grindr would make to let know he’s again hot and bothered beneath the Strip.

One wonders if the lack of ventilation plays a part. This is a serious medical question; check with military corps.

A knot tases this perineum—even swallow a ball of spit like Cunts one and two.

We worry for the pager turned into the locker where the ambitious twink out-to-get-it down-to-bend-over unpaid intern strives miserably to impress mid-level executive cloning all of our phones.

The dude, ostensibly a prude

As per the organization’s prescribed habitude, has been dm-ing lewd nudes from his study in low altitude beyond the longitudes of that which is deemed by the prudes drawing up charters of moral turpitude—that allegedly make the civil world.

The tunnels.

Well, partially, it’s on us, partially

Twenty-six years ago in the closet of a frat house in Columbia had mumbled, no, confessed, on being ravenously turned on by claustrophobia.

Thirsty. need a refill. it’s a bad time, but.

Everyone’s all slightly worked up, a commotion stirs surrounding the funding allocations, balls in a bunch, mid-age-crisising crotches draped in their Raytheon-gifted, Northrop-powered, Lockheed-presented, Boeing well-wished satin Raymond,

revving, clutches yanked beyond saving, revving, revving belligerently so the tire burns against the asphalt and either the tire or the asphalt melts and turns a pungent vapor, revving still, aching to rub against each other’s

Raytheon-presented,

                     Northrop sponsored,

                           Lockheed thanked,

                                Boeing wished a long life

                                       Raymond satin

and skip instead straight to the dick-swinging contest,

what they really only ever want in the State department.

 grow

                                                                     ,,,,  restless  ,,,,,,

We wish this tongue would take risks

risks this head have long deserted in favour of the private peep room attached office

in the headquarters of peeping rooms

 a salary, entirely in credit

They offered the excavator after the promotion to Special branches,

to ride around town, veins bulging. the engine ran on testosterone.

for we are one, we wish i, or this tongue would take the risks involuntarily shoot out, arch

back short of the General’s wife’s Banarasi draped hips, bend bypassing the middle row And glide on down

towards the rear, into the tub, bootleg they’re having the committee source from the retired military officers’ “welfare” brewery.

I can do that.

I am a frog.

*****

In Defence of shifty deserter from File#407 Moderately Longer exposé on shifty deserter walking back diagonally:

Remember this, this slant of light. This is it.

Do the condemned,

                                Depraved

   deviant

Beyond repair the unredeemable,

unoriginal with no allegiance or anchor,

             chameleon-like, slimy

                                               scum of the

                                                    earth

deserve to tell their story—any story?

Listen. There’s only a quarter of an hour left. Please listen. By the time we finish speaking, the storm’s out, waterlogged streets of Dhaka drained, the cavalry drydressed for battle, before they plant bait and have the luscious-lipped hairy chested informant who shaves armpits in Agamasi Lane phone to drive down this time of the night (it’s april and hot but the wind blows a morbid sexy nauseous thirsty) to the dunes by the aminbazar bridge where four police vans lay in ambush where we are expected to be encounter-ed, ostensibly in gunfight, allegedly, the weapons later discovered on our person, you need to decide, presumably.

By Midnight, several colleagues at the little-big peeping mother offices had begun deserting. The Great Expulsion. Murmurs, shab-e-namas left on the walls of the city at night spoke, of Her Highness growing, exponentially unhinged, metastasizing spider, spine split open at 3. As saltwater seeped farther, farther upstream, drowning, townships and drowning rivers with names murmured

to fall

asleep as a child, Khowai, Parbatipur, Panchbibi, Bhimruli, Kanchan, Dudhkumar, Dhaleshwari, Damodar, Hili, Sandhya, Atowari, Kushiara, Surma, Neelphamari—

they piled overnight

drafts of executive orders upon

piles of draft bills, seeking out, awarding, unforeseen unchecked, shoot-at-sight to us to seek out them,

frothy mass, tar-oozing, viscous, foaming,

  tumorous expanse trickling, racing up the legs like hot piss, absorbed fully by my boxers fabric   but trickling, warm and alkaline, soaks the hair on my chest yet trickling still, tepid and relentless currents trickling until inevitably imminently in not much longer

it will have

choked me breathless                 and stupid

 Would it? Could,

                         It? Might it

                         Still?

 It May

Or has  already

Don’t forget that I exist. Don’t forget that I exist and love you.

                                    Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Galatea Kazantzaki wr. c. April 1923

How did I become this person, and not any other—/ ?

When did this sickness seep in? Fizzled, as its enzymes ate away at the bones, then broke down the cell walls of the alveoli—the fall of Saigon.

Why are you here? Oh. What have I come for? Yes.

mother, have I lost my way?

You have.

Fully.

You need to know I wasn’t always this way. Before. After.

You must listen.

i’ll listen, But get a hit of this first. Tell me what you see, do it like we rehearsed.

aided by no continental air, abalone drift, Into bleak oblivion, sandstorms roar, white-yellow smog, weeks on end, a rift, Where naught, only decay lies at the core. but in this stalemate, release, embrace, in the quiet, mad ravine, a welcome pace. our malaise blue and damp, oddly kind, In silence, solace in grease, we find. Chimera! devise shores lined by coconut trees, serene, a lagoon shimmers, city long bereft, red stone, weathered marble, beyond time careen, Temples in moonlight, crosses rivers deft. Here, in these visions, amma’s quiet absolution does gleam, Amidst the silent whispers of a dream. In the somatic hushes of a dream.

     Allah, my nose! what the fuck is that?

****

on the eve of Rani ma’s national address the neighbouring nations already, for a fortnight now, had their warheads flashed unclothed, positioned hanging on the horizon visibly despite the razor-sharp sandstorms and sulfur smog; unflattering but nonetheless animated and brute, stupid-looking rheumaticky appendages

when the cyclone lay precipitating in the bay when it is so unbearably searing the mangoes ripen and begin to ooze like boiled molasses—

the mangoes ripen and begin to ooze like boiled molasses that threaten to spill over now so the air hangs still and heavy, sultry, oven-like, the heat melts and then bakes my zippers onto my skin, sultry and bothersome oven-like, delirious and repetitive, sultry, oven-like, and, so, boiling to boiling point

i renounce my pasts and drink from the rain, so god lets me see him.

I thought he was peeping, the bantam cloud of chlorine-tinted vapour, hovering above the flickering morich battis and ridiculous red-and-green-coded surveillance drones atop the Parliament, and since I had renounced my past and was now abluted, i charge god bellowing, why did you take my mother?

Instead, the cloud bellowed back, why did you take my mother

my mother

My mother

We are all swimming in the dark, phantom heart

We are trying

to do

what monsoon does to the coconut trees

cluster of fruits smother and fidget, disrobe, scale the koi struggling viciously against the aluminium pot and

rainclouds in labour bite the plum off my mouth

A singular crab, brine in May, rests on the shores of Lakshadweep seven past midnight, the one fishing boat or cargo’s yellow lights hovering on the horizon since dusk and the one phantom Olympic swimmer flapping about the furious waves his double-a battery headlamp lighting the way but way anyway save the act of mooring oneself to the tide while my bloodstream slowed to a low hum, salted lips whisper in disbelief, mashallah. Mashallah.

I knew then god had been for six weeks the dead Surma frozen in the fridge, humming into existence while i snorkeled in sweat, murmuring from the depths of that icy vault on loadshedding nights defined in part by these Adani-powered monsoon powercuts, buoyant and murderous, part in anticipation of my final act, imminent and treasonous

i told him, which he intercepted in a nod, kohl-lined kind-eyed blinded thing,

I am a coward

I am your god

I am a coward

And I am your god

I am a coward so

I am your god

soon i will be gone

In the simmering heart of the confluence where the Jamuna meets Meghna, i witness something only my eyes can see. Spirits, rising from the riverbed, bubbling mud, cracked saline, famine, famished earth—the elusive Shishu-gangetic dolphin water gods, and civets, took their own lives when the State refused them irrigation water, parched, when they closed the dams in April, inundated in July, ghosts dead from goom, war to the city beneath the city where the minced pastes of roadkill go. The souls of the dead ascended, glided up. Like sunburnt fishermen breaking the surface, swimming towards the very womb of the tide, limbs splayed, ethereal dance. And these fishermen souls, boatmen ghouls, joined hands and feet, intertwined, in dance, but like a marsiya, too, muscle and muscle, interlinked, ankle to ankle, a vast, ephemeral mesh.

And this web of vaporous souls swam up to the mid-noon sun because no one is ever truly gone.

Now, then

hence

may peace be upon us.