let me tell you my friend
about whiskey and ****
a demonic combo
that can lead you to death

whiskey and ****
make you think you are strong
make you feel invincible
you can do no wrong

whiskey and ****
forget all the rules
they were made for weaklings
cowards and fools

whiskey and ****
make night into day
until one is the other
and you lose your way

whiskey and ****
make you anxious for strife
you load your pistols
you sharpen your knife

Whiskey and ****
they cost me my wife
they cost me my children
they cost me a life

whiskey and ****
attract the law
and into it's clutches
you will certainly fall

so that's my story
of whiskey and ****
leave them alone
or prepare for death

you are my alarm clock,
the vertical curve on the corner of my lip,

but you are not the urgent tap against my skin,
not the creases between my brows.

you are a tabloid magazine,
a stifling bank of encounters,
but not the ringing repetition
of electronic dance music.

you are a pair of socks with stains on them,
the warmth of the sun licking my back,

but you can never be a filthy fingernail,
and you will never be the bottom of a single serve of whiskey.

hey, ma. it's been a while.
i don't know if you remember
the sound of my chirpy voice
anymore.
it still comes up, every now and again;
when i'm baked beyond my brains
when i had just cracked the rankest pun
when i'm tangled in a boy's arms, lost -
lost. just like you ma.

i wonder where your mind takes you
when the ringing in your ears doesn't seem to go.
when you dissociate into the otherworld, and
the lashes of your
third eye sweep me away from your vision.

i thought the power of the universe was
supposed to be
abundant.
yet i have lost you to the vortex of your gods -
the same ones that leave
only the wind
to rock me to sleep.

ma,
i am pockmarked with your bad habits.
i lose touch with reality
myself, looking for the warmth of your
recognition.

i guess space is too large
for me to find your meditative corner.
or perhaps
i'm just looking in the wrong spaces.

space is nice because you have
no weight on your shoulders.
i miss the feeling of having
no weight on my shoulders.

when i grow up, ma
i want to be just like you.
lost.

Dear God, I need a moment
I know it's been a while
You know I do not go to church
That just is not my style

I do not pray like others do
I believe in what is right
So, God I ask you hear me
On this dark and lonely night

I do not ask redemption
I'm too far gone you know
I'm not one who is worth saving
Deep down you know it's so

The people who are righteous
Who are here to spread your word
Are wolves wrapped in sheep's clothing
Working hard to fleece the herd

I'm not one who will follow
I don't buy the tales they sell
When I am dead and buried
I'm not in heaven but in hell

I'm cutting out the middle man
For they don't own my trust
They're ******* their believers
They use your name with every ******

I hope that you can hear me
Though I've used your name in vain
They confess and pay their penance
Then they do it all again

If the only way to heaven
Is to buy a ticket in
Then I guess I'm well committed
So, I'll live my life in sin

The sinners should be punished
I know you and I agree
But, who made them judge and jury
Who chooses what they see?

Dear God when all is finished
My soul is mine alone to lose
But, where I spend my future
Is up to you to choose

So, God, I'm here just talking
Not confessing to my sin
I'm not here to say I'm leaving
I guess, I'm only checking in.

'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
    in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
    where wave pretends to drench real sky.'

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
    or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
    is our life's whole nemesis.

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
    about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
    implacably from twelve to one.

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks
to knock them down with logic or with luck
    and contradict ourselves for fun;
the waitress holds our coats and we put on
the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun
    who insists his playmates run.

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,
would have me swallow the entire sun
    like an enormous oyster, down
the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark
of comet hara-kiri through the dark
    should inflame the sleeping town.

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames
in dubious doorways forget their monday names,
    caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
    playing his prodigal charades.

The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish
in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish
    blessings right and left and cry
hello, and then hello again in deaf
churchyard ears until the starlit stiff
    graves all carol in reply.

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans
to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;
    brazen actors mock at him,
multiply pink harlequins and sing
in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing
    while footlights flare and houselights dim.

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins
and separate the flutes from violins:
    the algebra of absolutes
explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes
that jar, while each polemic jackanapes
    joins his enemies' recruits.

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing':
though prima donna pouts and critic stings,
    there burns throughout the line of words,
the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion
which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:
    an insight like the flight of birds:

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing
the secret of their ecstasy's in going;
    some day, moving, one will drop,
and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals
only to reopen as flesh congeals:
    cycling phoenix never stops.

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells
of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells
    and heavens till the spirits squeak
surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's
bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks
    away our rationed days and weeks.

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
    in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
    the simple sum of heart plus heart.

Dear Papa,
Yesterday I saw something that I didn’t understand.
They were walking a little ahead of me.
But walking isn't the right word,
because there were two people
and only two feet.
It sounds like a math problem,
But nothing added up in my head.
It sounds like Vikram Vetal, papa,
But unlike the story you told me the other day,
there was no strong king or sly demon.
I saw, however, one ***** underfed boy of eight
dragging his crippled mother across the street.
Adhunik Shravan bal.
A Lilliputian on a Herculean task.
I couldn't decipher her age.
When you're that poor, does age matter?
Do they keep count of the days that pass by
when their aim is to survive just one?
Do they have a mirror to look into
and count the wrinkles on their face?
What does age matter to an eight year old boy
who, instead of attending school,
is hauling his handicapped mother across the road
on a seating board with wheels?
When I was that age, papa,
you bought me a skateboard
that was the exact leaf green
from my 50 colours oil pastels set.
I couldn't see the colour of their clothes.
There was the dark of the night,
yellow of the street lights
and everything was in sepia
like the picture you showed me
of your childhood.
You once told me you were raised in poverty too, papa.
Are there different kinds of poverty?
Did you get toys to play with
or were your clothes in sepia too?
I told you this sounds like a math problem, papa,
And here’s what doesn't add up.
Isn't a parent supposed to hold their child's hand
and show them how to cross the road?
I remember holding your hand,
looking left-right-left
and matching my steps
with your strides.
Fast, but never run.
Who taught him, papa?
Did he have his own papa to teach him?
How did he learn to walk fast enough
and pull hard enough
so that he and his mom made it across the road in time?
How did he find the strength if he was underfed?
He truly reminds me of Shravan bal,
because who else would carry his mother
across such distances.
I told you it sounds like Vikram Vetal, papa,
and now that I think about it, it really does.
Maybe this little boy is a young king.
Maybe he brings his vetal back home every day.
Maybe he hears her talk about her day.
And maybe, papa,
when he succeeds every night,
she saves him from an evil tantric.
An evil tantric called hunger.

There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
     finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
     throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.