Dubai Days manuscript

book

Russian Roulette



26th Oct 18


If you’re going to play Russian roulette,

Do it properly.

Fill up the bullet chamber

And leave one space empty.

It’s cowardly

To play it any other way.

Same Prison, Different Cell



May 18


There are no heroes,

Only heroic moments.
Lovers of loose virtue,

My pot shots didn't quite reach you.

It irks you that I besmirch you
By saying nothing

And doing even less.

Is it me or is this whole thing a bloody mess?
Strike up the band

And let a man dance how he wants to.
In the hardline according to,

He who bears the cross
Has the right to sing the blues.

And it's a cold world

And times are hard
And it's every man for himself.

Same prison, different cell.















Send in the Clowns!



Nov 17




There's a pasty white clown

With a strawberry red grin

Laughing

As my house burns down.


He prat-falls and fumbles

Picking up the pieces of broken hearts

And honks his horn as the wounded stumble

And tumble to their deaths.



His slapstick clacks

And slide whistle peeps
As storm clouds slide with menacing grin

Over men tossed around by a wrathful sea.

Shofar



Oct 17


Boxers embrace and judokas lurch,

Exhausted from their bout.



A little bird comes close to passing out

Upon its perch.

Beady eyes slowly blink
And it's tiny frame slinks

As it succumbs

To the unrelenting Arab sun.



A man in a mirror stares back.

Sunlight slides across the walls of an aerie.

Magazines, dirty plates and dreams lie in stacks.
The poisoned chalice of life, love and liberty make
you world-wary.

Send my regards

To the broken hearts.

In their sensorium, there is silence.
There was no Elysium after all.

No way to climb back into faded photographs to
relive the Arcadian years of the past.

The spry youth in me

Is bent double, exasperated and aghast.

From afar, everything looks different.
Time and distance are diffident

When it comes to speaking inconvenient truths.

We are disconnected worlds living in separate
booths.



The lynch mob holler for more and shun the
disbelievers.
The relievers have abandoned their posts.

The grievers want to abandon their pasts,

But know no means to do so.

Every moment is gravid with angst and grief.

Another leaf wilts, shrivels and drifts to the autumn
ground.

And upon the no man's land, a shofar sounds.

Sigh



Nov 17


We buried him

Where he liked to play.

There was a day

In his boyhood

When he learnt that love was a luxury.

These are his writing pens
And these the hats

He wore as a boy

With such unbridled joy.

These are the letters he sent

To those he thought

He had built bridges with

In his crippling existentialist dread.
This is the bed

In which he dreamt

And convalesced and felt safe

And in which he relinquished his days of innocence.

Bored out of body and mind,

Born out of the time
For which he was really made,

He lived like a hologram.

An opaque apparition

That left no mark where he sat.

The loved ones

Ambled around him.

Friends and lovers,
Allies, adversaries

All the same.

His name

Meant the wounded ones

Or the authors.

And apropos

He wrote
His pains away.

Words were his morphine,

Poetic narratives his crutch.

Crutches enable and disable

The afflicted.

It was an irony
Of which he was painfully aware.

Seeking himself, he lost his way over the years,

lived out every fear

And his attempts to not care were in vain

And always gave way

To debilitating despair.

This tale ends in a sigh
Of a world gone awry

And sighs have multiple meanings.















Silent Horrors



22nd Dec 18


Leading the loathing is often the self.

Playwrights, poets and painters know it and show it
in their artistic cries for help.

After the warriors have vanquished,
their horrors and the unholy of unholies has been
laid bare in the glare of broad daylight,

Young blood is spilt and left to blight in the sun-
heated sand.

Intense reflections dredge up ancient fears in a
man.

Play the music and let them down lie and quietly
die.

Captivate the stars and intoxicate the moon with a
scotch and a sigh.

One dark nightmare after the next after the next into
infinity.

Terrified bulging eyes belie the fears

Of impending punity.

Celebrities, royalties and dignitaries have their own
macabre self-sacrificial rituals.

She leans down and whispers

Compliments and facts to her doting, lecherous
sugar daddy.

“Love is a commodity and sex a currency...”

Monstrous hands on lamb-white neck.

Inseparable; life and desperation’s dreck.

Relative discontentment seems to be the sentiment
among worn and torn men.

And it is then, the silent horrors begin to howl.

Something We All Know Deep Inside

22nd Oct 18

Those that caused the death of the person in the
coffin,
Will too be lying in one
Someday soon.
The shovels stab
At the soil
And pall bearers look on solemn.
The grave diggers
Will also one day
Be lowered into their graves.
So too the florists
That fashioned the floral wreaths,
The undertakers who arranged the procession,
The carpenter who cut and assembled the casket
And the pall bearers who carried the coffin.
The mourners
Are also mere years away
From the day
When they too will be mourned.
The maggots will come to feast
And they too
Will be feasted upon.
The gravestones
Will crumble and the epitaphs that the stone mason
nimbly chiselled will be defaced by time and time
will condemn the mason to his doom too.

And those graveyards will have new layers of
corpses piled upon them, and the successive
generations will lay their corpses upon those.
It is irksome
That all things come to pass
For those that time passes by.
And that is all of us.
It’s something we all know deep inside;
That everything that ever lived, eventually died.

Stodge



27th Dec 18


In a darkened room,

A thought flashed.

The mind having stodged

Through the pablum,

Arrives at last

At a scintilla.
Fleeting

But formidable.

Stranger Things: Read my Lips

11th Dec 17


The bells ring out
That you look just like arsenic smells.
Sit down but watch yourself.
There's grease on the sofa.
Bacon patty.
Your kids are fat and bratty.
Party.
Do you even want to keep on shaving my legs?
Centipede egg.
Pass me the knife;
Will you bleed into my butter?
I'm an utter fool to love you.
I feel your fragrance like a roast.
Just cut him now.
"You have lips and arms"
"And I also have a heel”
"Singular"
"Yes".





















Strings



21st Sep 18


You’re a marionette

Of clawing, crawling harpies

And you go where their strings pull you.

They fill you with their designs

And have you running

Like a lapdog happily lolloping,
Running, to do their bidding.

There’s no ridding

You of their machinations

And your blinkered gullibility.

They lull and dandle you

Like sirens that give you the illusion

Of self-determined will.
And the ills of humanity

Are manifest

In the unholy alliance

Between the docile puppet

And the maleficent masters

Lurking in murky shadows
That the strings

Eerily lead to.

Take It Easy Please



24th Aug 18


Harmonica wail.

Trail

Of a shooting star.

There’s something crushing down

On your lightness of being.

Tethered.
Those who should be tarred and feathered

Call the shots.

Round

Here

There’s no water near.

Baby snag,

Crocodile bag
And your pigs are walking on twos.

The sky is a bruise

Of loving lilac and bleeding blue.

Fools

Walk around an open wound

And the fire came with the deluge
And the refuge you sought

Was in vain.

Let the reins go.

Sweet slow release.

Take it easy please.

Tales Told by Greeks of Yore



May 18


Curiosity killed the cat

But satisfaction kept bringing it back.

Age slacks the tiles and cables.

In your wonder years you could roam free.

In those olden days,

Those golden days
Life was less marred by regulations.

This generation

Is degenerate.

Like Echo and Narcissus

They are hypnotised by their own reflections.

The toys of your demise,

The sugar and spice of your destruction
Have lost their flavour.

You are no longer in favour

With the Fates.

King Sisyphus can roll his bolder

Up that mountain

But there's no end
To his toil and labours.

Graver still

The sight of empty suits

Manacled to money and marriage

And the cycle of mindless consumption.

Here we err

But have no means for redemption.

The Builders



It felt odd for him to be lying there at first.
The chain gang of construction workers began
their early morning sawing and clanking
outside the window of the apartment. He had
watched 2 of them from the balcony during his daily
morning ritual of tea thickened with condensed milk
and a cheap local cheroot smoked half-heartedly.
In a strange ritual of their own, they clasped their
hands behind their necks with elbows touching.
Then, took it in turns to lift the other man from
behind half a foot off the ground and shake him with
a downward jerk, presumably until some trapped
nerve around the vertebrate had snapped
comfortably into place. It was strangely satisfying to
watch.


Radiant sunshine ricocheted off the jutting angles of
distant skyscrapers of the Dubai skyline.

Humming traffic sped past. Planes descended with
low roars. What was it that he had come here for?
This land built upon the blood and broken backs of
slave labourers. Even the Egyptian pyramid builders
had better esprit de corps and living conditions.

In times of torporific disdain for the system, he
became forgetful and had to remind himself of who
he was. He would do this most audaciously and
tangibly through his rule of civil disobedience; A
petulant refusal to comply with unjust rules and
cruel, despotic orders.

This was often at his own personal cost but he
revelled in it knowing that such casual insolence not
only irked his detractors but the adversity itself
merely girdled his loins and propelled his ambitions
forward like a rocket.



By any means necessary, he would assert his free
will. Oppression was a snake he slapped around with
nonchalance. He had done it his whole life. He would
die doing it.


The bread on the refrigerator had developed a fur
coat of green under the cellophane. These blasted
things always missed his attention. He seemed to be
in a reverie at times pondering on what he deemed to
be nobler, loftier thoughts.



The conversations with friends from last night came
back to him in full echoes. He had been
characteristically forthright and suffered fools even
less than he usually did.

He sat at the table and began to scribble some notes
in his leather bound note book that a friend had
thoughtfully given him. The inked nib of the pen
glissaded across the coarse hand-made paper. It
thrilled him, the scratch and rustle of paper being
scrawled upon. The handwriting spiralled in volutes.
A poem emerged:



The ages are tinctured with blood

And fractured with forgotten regret.
The alliance

Has erupted into rebellion

And the rebels have been splayed

And hung out disavowed and disembowelled

For the flies to harvest upon

And defecate into the open wounds

Their eggs.
The alpenglow of peace

Is fleeting at best.

What prevails above beauty

Is brutality,

Butchery,

Gaucherie,

Folly

And knavery.

The dead have no regrets.
The living live on in their deadness.



He often churned our these stream of consciousness
pieces, if only to understand himself. Who knows
what lies in the hinterlands of our minds?



He picked up a book from the mantle piece.
“Burmese Days” by George Orwell. He opened it at
a dog-earred page. There a line leapt out at him;
“When the White Man turns tyrant, it is his own
freedom that he destroys....”



He retreated to the balcony and sparked up another
cigarette. The builders trundled on, almost jauntily.