a figment of my reality

your mind is a live painting 

I can see my strokes 

on your conscience 

and your mistakes 

reflect on my 

inability to draw 

how I wish 

you lived on canvas instead

so I could

fuck you up 

and call it 

Abstract art. 

Stranger

People ask me
How is it that I live in a stranger city
That I visit far away strange places
Laugh with strange people

I tell them
I have been raised by strangers
Known- unknown were but a divide of time
That I have been passed from strange hands to stranger
That every one in my life have shown
how the best of them could be
Stranger.

Strip the flesh, Salt the wound. (Chant of a Masochrist)

STRIP THE FLESH, SALT THE WOUND

His wounds

Like parted lips kissing

The coffin on his back.

Strip the flesh, salt the wound.

Crack of leather discipline,

Whips through the arid air

Caressing the skin with scars.

Strip the flesh, Salt the wound.

Above his brow

Rests a crown,

Thorns prickly sweet.

Strip the flesh, Salt the wound.

Mallet crashes from on high

Nail driven through flesh

Wood suckles like a hungry babe.

Strip the flesh, Salt the wound.

Behold his form

Stretched against the oak

Revel in the pain

Strip the flesh, Salt the wound.

Sin shalt only be cleansed by pain

He suffered so we did not,

The selfish prick.

Strip the flesh, Salt the wound.

The Salesman

THE SALESMAN

Hello,

May I bother you for a minute?

I sell in fake smiles.

It will cost you nothing,

On my honour I swear.

The trick is

To pull your lips back,

Just so.

Expose the first molars,

Just so.

Notice

Just how my canines

Show the fierceness

Of my joy.

If you wish you can,

Use your fingers

To pull apart the sides,

Just so.

It may be hard to talk,

However,

The pure beauty of it,

Is you don't have to talk

At all.

reflective essay

Reflective Essay

I really found this course to be very productive, I believe it taught me many valuable skills to help me progress with my thinking skills about poetry and of course in my music. This course is set out clearly and logically and has all the information necessary about poetry. It was really a well-structured course and here I also got to know how things take shape and how things structures step by step. It was a great experience to see a small exercise converted into poetry. Initially, I don’t have any idea that how we would do this but gradually we start getting the idea. Our knowledgeable faculty Mr Akhil Katyar who were able to balance constructive criticism with positive encouragement. They have been very supportive throughout the year. I've really enjoyed learning from faculty and getting their professional perspective on my thinking, I now feel that I have the necessary knowledge to develop some ideas about poetry.

I am not from the literature background and never  wrote poetry in my life and here I got chance to learn poetry and the lovely part is I am also getting love towards it. I think I will never stop writing poetry from now. Basically, I am a music practitioner, I have learning Hindustani music for a long time and Hindustani music is something where we more emphasis on swars rather its lyrics but now after did this course I am thinking about its lyrical value too. And not only this there were many things which I have never thought but after being the student of performance studies and crafting poetry student I am able to think towards those words and areas. This course not only limited to poetry rather it was a whole package of many different skills.

I really enjoyed the teaching method here and the way faculties treat us. In our initial classes, we did some discussion on love poetry and sir said that love poetry is a way to get in the poetry world. Being a student of music I have heard lots of poetries but never think about the genres of it here I learn about a big world of poetry and its grammar. this kind of poetry is really new for me I am really thankful for this course for introducing me this kind of poetries and method.

I really like the way when we read poems in class and discuss it together in small groups that really helped in connecting with the poems and with my classmates. And the way they give us freedom for thinking on it and also doing it freely really helped me.

As I reflect upon on my strengths and weaknesses as related to this course; my greatest fear is the public performance and in this course, we have been performing in front of the public which I found helpful to overcome from my hesitation although I performed so less in this course I learned so many things about performance. There were many different stages of the course where I enjoyed so much one of them was writing gazals. Gazal is something which I have been listening for a long time but I have never thought of writing it, this course made me do it. When I was writing, I was in a big confusion that should I write in Hindi or English? Although I choose to write in Hindi and translate it. and  other difficult thing for me was to write political poems. As the major part of this course based on different genres of poetry because of this, I could understand different dimensions of it.

 Somewhere I have regret because I missed many classes due to my other engagements and responsibilities I didn’t want to miss but I had to I am really thankful to our faculty that they understood my problem supported me.

It was not just a course for me rather it was an experience of life which taught me many different things about life, about people and most importantly about music. I am from a music background and this course was connected with music in a different manner but that manner was new for me and that’s really an interesting part for me. I have been trying to take practical courses from the starting of my second year. First I took materiality and performance that was also very interesting and my experience was really good. And in this course crafting poetry, I got through many different dynamics of life, Music and professional things. It was a fully practical course which made us more knowledgeable and opened more paths in arts. I have to say that I changed after this course. I did many things here which I never did in my life. 

In closing, I would like to add that I have really enjoyed the experience of this class. It has been good for me to learn with experienced faculty and my lovely cohorts. Thank you for your help and patience.

Pitter Patter Poetry - Reflective Essay

" Click click. Tick tock. Words drop. Tongues suture. Time flows. You try to leash it. You try to box it. You try to restrain it. You try to reverse it. You try to hold it dear, deep within the recesses of your phone’s gallery. Filled with screenshots of unfinished conversations. Vistas from untouched lands. Fragments of incomplete rants. You scroll up, and down. But the pictures never change. The conversations remain half-said, and full dead. The vistas remain immobile. And the rants still make you self-conscious. I have been in this city for nearly nine months now. Each day the city shrinks in its capacity to contain or offer. And I sit here, writing about the mundane experience there is to know. About living in a third world country. Having boys barely out of school, come and deliver drinking water to me. Other boys offering to pick up my garbage every morning. Other boys preparing tea by the sutta shop. Other boys beeping their rickshaw at me. And I sit here, soaked up in my privilege. Cocooned. Insulated. Isolated. Cordoned off. In a world of make-believe threats. A world of major digressions. A world of microaggressions. A world of inequality. A world without humour. A world without light. A world without adventures. A world with just enough to keep you alive. I sit here, pretending that I philosophise, I call myself a writer. I am deeply self-reflective, but just reflecting on the hollowness that exists is only making me hear the echoes better. Echoes of not conforming. Echoes of not living a life deeply. Echoes of the past; echoes betrayed by my memories. Memories which smoothen out the creases. Recollections which straighten up the clutter. Reminiscences of catastrophic lethargy and indifference swept out. Harking back to instances of humiliation - the first slap, the first rejection, the first inquisition - promptly expunged. Poetry brings these memories back. In fragments. In metaphors, images and epithets. Like summoning half-forgotten dreams. Distilling experiences. I attended a political meeting recently where a professor just before reading his poetry said, “Poetry is a luxury where action is necessary.” Poem implicates like news reports explicate. To survive in a world where educated children are human resources. Where wind and water are natural resources. Where all modes of kinship with objects both inanimate and animate are reduced to their material value. We need poetry. To name the nameless so it can be thought. Think the thoughtless so that one can act. Act impossible to know the constraints of possibility. To subjectify the world around us. Not to colonise."

response poetry

Pencil…

In the context of a sketching artist

Since the beginning of that sharply beautiful art

It made many masterpieces to comes alive

It doesn’t belong to eternity itself

But on the contrary, whatever drawn by a me

I can make that piece of art eternal