Majoun by Adrian Khare by Live Encounters

MAJOUN A Vagabond's Fantasy

Adrian Khare

Cover Design, Illustrations

Sandra Aretha Khare

BottleBird Books

Bottle Bird Books

76, Greater Tirupati Colony, Indore - 452 001

Majoun

Illustrations, Cover Design

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by: P. Kiran Rao "QB" Computer Services, 44, Barjatya Chambers, Indore - 452Ul_L(M.P.), INDIA

Printed by: Satprachar Press, PWD Road, Indore - 452 001. (M.P.), INDIA

In memory of my father, Noel Eric, an irascible and unforgiving man, generous and loving in his own strange way. And of my mother, Theodora, a beautiful woman, surviving a fractured relationship. I have learnt much about tolerance and its absence from both of them.

“Being a writer becomes largely a matter of character. It is the writer’s personality and attitudes that allow him to find a new way to go on, or stop him dead in his tracks.”

Victor Bockris

“The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. If you have emotions like that you just sail.”

Susan Sontag

‘A great deal of my writing which I identify with is not written out of any sort of objection at all, it’s more poetic messages, the still sad music of humanity...”.

William S. Burroughs

“You can’t do creative work and adhere to facts.”

TennesseeWilliams

Iam indebted to my daughters, SharonRose and Sandra Aretha and my wife Jean, who helped create the space necessary for me to dredge up what has finally been shaped into this book. From notes, scribblings, jottings, (almost) abandoned journals and jogging my memory through the unlikely medium of gossip. You three don’t realize the extent of your contribution in making this book a reality. Music and reading - heavy metal, blues, rock, country, Abida Parveen and Jimi Hendrix; John of the Cross, The Autobiography of Imamu Amiri Baraka, Electric Gypsy, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, all of them have given me a wide angle vision.

I acknowledge the influence P.J Joseph, svd has had on my thinking through this dreamwork and forthright conversation, allowing me access to Snehalaya, whenever I found the going rough.

This is also to say ‘thank you’ to my brother Mark for possessing the ability to make the impossible possible. Kiran and Ravi of “QBI Computer Services, Indore for putting up with my indecisiveness, Mohan, George and Herbert, svd, Sunil and Ramdas besides the others of Satprachar Press who supported my grand scheme from the start.

Thanks to Clarence Srambical, svd, Founder-Director, Satprakashan Sanchar Kendra, Indore who kept my nose in copy editing and proof-reading manuscripts meant for publication with tenacity and discipline not unlike R.K. Karanjia, with whom I had worked at Blitz. It was a roiling, rambunctious, razz- matazz of a time from which I emerged the more resilient and tempered.

A special thank you to Khan Sahib, his sons Sarfraz and Shahnawaz of Kahkasha Coffee House, who allowed me unlimited addabazi, and for their from-the-heart encouragement.

Not only do I remember Desmond and Shreelata for their unspoken belief in my work but also Vijayan and Premila Pavamani, with love and admiration, for their being instrumental in turning my life around and their ongoing labour among the marginalized and the dispossessed. I owe them much more than I can say.

How simple!

not knowing what to write letting words fall leaves in March.

This is poetry for Adrian Khare. Having read his unpublished work over the years, in fragments, I can say that if poetry comes ‘naturally’ to anyone, then it does to him. Spontaneity is at the core. His poetry runs on a savings-current account word bank balance. Though free flowing, there are soft edged contours and the tell-tale shades of experience in his lines. Who can write without passing through the purgatory of experience? Khare may not be a versifier, but Jome of his lyrics carry a subtlety of rhythm and others are ‘blank’ verse in migratory flights of restless imagination containing his fears, joys, contentment and nostalgia. His poetry is basically personal, but never self-indulgent. It inspires fresh thinking on ground values and what they are about. Often, lines begin on a personal note but go beyond, symbolizing a larger canvas. Khare’s poetry should be read at ‘leisure’, not ‘leisurely’. Through numerous interactions over the years, my own perception of poetry has been greatly sharpened by him.

Nirmala Bhuradia September2004 Indore

I’m handing you this fistful of possible memories, invented and real; short straw observations; these words, sentences, paragraphs jaywalking hand in hand in happy disdain for the destruction of simple common sense. Can common sense lead you anywhere except to a predictable conclusion?

Stop. Public self-flagellation and private hell, these nimbus crowned torments ... I’m giving them all to you. You’ll find something to shelter under when, ‘suddenly, you see too many folk distributing lemon confectionery.

High and gloriously puke worthy Art, what a bloody mess it all is. ‘Tongue wider than a mile, red slit smile, disguise gone to seed; taking, never giving.

They pay for Art not the hands that liberated it into becoming. While it gets anything of consequence, only a label, IOUs and MoUs are left, hardly enough to go around.

Cheap but true. While Art sustains itself up and down the ages, its liberator returns to third rate dust. Books are written, films made, lectures lectured, senseless tours to faraway places undertaken ... Art is feted, greeted, mated with a loathsome, extinct ogre and, in time, a bilious yellow fingered bastard whelp slips onto your lap.

The Art I’m talking about is a descendant of those great men of old who covered in velvet and showered in perfume to disguise the intolerable stink from a body eaten into by a venereal blessing.

The danger of sounding pedestrian or obscure has frightened me into silence. Entire roofless warehouses have been burned down or emptied. No vacant spaces remain, only the past and future hopelessly intertwined from the root.

As you leave, take this satchel of stones and name your kids after the most misshapen of the lot.

And if you think life is a perfect bitch, you’re righteveryone is at some point. Go for it with all you’ve got. Use everything it throws at you.

Lift some scabs of meaning as you pass your hand over these pages; peer beneath and you’ll realize that not two of what lie there are really what they seem.

Had you asked me earlier, I could have told you so...

Adrian Khare September2004 Indore

If you’re writing for

Hourglass spins softly

Conventional narrative

Brothers in leg irons

To us is the kingdom

As a TV newsman

Sand inside the hourglass

Trying to change

Want nothing

I who have lived

Body of gun

Skylights at daybreak

Never get time to

Planet crowded with signs

Daybreak celebrations

Once WTC, dagger spire

Stray starships

A governor

An insane raven behind

Most honoured among women

Both goats were the

What was that ?

Welcome to the lie

Clouds, eyes flashing

Despite frequent skull dances

It is not proper anymore

Bony tree

Log charred at one end

It’s now ! I said

Blue water strips

Somebody passes silently

Sometimes I grieve for

Bitter herbs create

The wind is turning

He died alone

We shall make a hole

The biblical account

He was so shot

You’re happier on the road

Such a wound is opened

Brother Sun

It was a reading

Flying asleep, listening

Critics of the world unite

Better getting stoned

Red apples, red piranha

Where it is coming

Junkie come, junkie go

Forbidden love always

Whatever in the world

If you’re writing for a patron you’re going to think too much of your image and it’s going to cost you if at the point of making a decision between your life and your work you chose your work. Fitzgerald’s image was I threat to his work like death was to Alberti after it wearing the fascists’ mask; like Ritwik Ghatak rowing his not so old boat popping a leak midstream.

Illustration © Sandra Aretha Khare, September 2004.

Hourglass spins softly in the middle of the room; humpbacked typewriter keys stare balefully at me, blind unwilling to work.

Conventional narrative you feed on every morning in narcoleptic stupidness, lard scrap on Hades’ dinner jacket, missing the ring finger’s flick. Obligatory descriptions followed by the religiosity of a monk locked away from the toybox of the world.

Brothers in leg irons, when so many lies have piled up we confuse a roomful of rioting shadows for a stately powerhouse. Purveyors of energy in every form we participate in the life of our times by proxy (preach, preach, preach. That’s alright. Our conditioned reflexes will take care of your bacteria).

To us is the kingdom, the power of bytes, of bits and pieces of the present that are made up of the fullness of the emptiness of the recycled past. Everything performed in the eye’s quick, sidelong twitch… Faust you’re damned. Better to die... The hour has come.... shiver heart, scatter blood, mingle tears... Everyone has a right to his own facts. The brain a palmful of cindered cells.

As a TV newsman during the days of saturation coverage, I saw only two pieces of the ten*man press gang flown in to catch civilian deaths. Peace is bad for terrorists’ PR budget. Bulletins sailed over the viewers but hit the media villain without being proof read; some stiffs are less equal than others. They roamed the streets blood cascading eye sockets. Split screen shots framing coffins and congratulations; the two events occurred simultaneously and to show them oozing blood on the white tiled floor was logical. Vile prospect made flesh events have been triviliased. Scenes from a Count Vlad script.

Illustration © Sandra Aretha Khare, September 2004.

Sand inside the hourglass has taken on a light of its own; the dhows have reached an ancient port rippling to the cries of men and animals, seabirds waltz round riggings of potbellied vessels.

The first maritime empire crashed pirates and kept the Aegean a safe highwaybut Mycenaeans also traded with the strong and shanghaied the weak. They charted leas of unknown oceans and braved gods’ wrath for bronze which had transmogrified their fathers from hunters to warriors.

From an immense cauldron of air a single bell sounds, making a weary descent down a sunless gorge on the roof of the world; bells, cymbals, brass tambourines, the best ones still come from Phonecia, and yet it is Europa who made this country famous.

The daughter of the King of Sidon, an infamous city on the Phoenician coast, ran down to the sea one cloud shadowed afternoon.

Zeus watched her with profound longing, appearing to her as a bull with the constellation of Virgo on his brow.

Astride him she raced to Crete. She bore him famous sons and he gave her name to a continent.

But you know the jealousy of husbands. They say a potion of lampblack and owl pellets was given to Europa, but that may not have ended her suffering.

On summer nights, when the moon is new, we sense wingbeats, a rare perfume, and a lamplit face looks in on us.

Trying to change the system from within is no good. What you write is determined by space allotted to you. How many cms per column. While the chemical composition of freedom is unknown, newspapers unravel soundtracks that remind us of our own unimportance while embalming our lives.

Illustration © Sandra Aretha Khare, September 2004.

Want nothing Do without

Want nothing No exorcism

Want nothing

Be demon filled

Want nothing

Get nothing

Laugh at envy

Iwho have lived in the maw of monsters I now at 58 am worrying about the harvest and flying down the storm belt of your body supine between the glistening belly of the sea and the green line of trees see before me, once more, widowed barracudas nailed to another sun

Body of gun

Brain fired by cordite

Self combusts Burns a third eye

Skylights at daybreak, wraiths peering into the white room...

Pale butterfly

Impaled on my sartyr’s horn, trapped in a nest of pillaged words; Windows catch fire

Newly minted coins

Tossed up at noon.

Never set time to mend barricades. Friends break past with nothing to say in their own desperation; is it time?

What fires will warm me? Snake eyed, lamps glitter downstream.

Illustration © Sandra Aretha Khare, September 2004.

Planet crowded with signs, empty wine jugs, unwashed full moon plates, hands and feet. The bell tongue is silent, a crusted ornament borne on the dialogue of four winds.

Daybreak celebrations, more than a ritual; I wonder at revelations, their reflections bring back the lost, first freedom to mourn, to remember the broken silhouette of the breached citadel, full table and single empty chair, beginning and end.

OnceWTC, dagger spire transcending divinity’s sex, granite rose ascending, sacred index finger holy-breath-chills tradition, celestial monarch, female wisdom abandoned mysteriously. Just one. Most honoured among women; But the white sheeted wooden table is closer now than realized, silver grail and bread laden fresher by the day.

Stray starships, widow brides emerge from long remembered galaxies on pointless vacations, displaced time and fermenting volcanoes; absolute devastation makes you wise, something Azahael can’t. A season in hell is no illuminationthe finger touches, transforming forever a paltry secret, second only to Oswald in his little window.

Agovernorsecond only to the president had been forced to the floor between Iegions hostile to the Top Gun and the almost culmination in murder.

The chase (it didn’t begin with foreplay in an idling car) started between cleft white branches of a blonde tree; massive cerebral damage.

Aninsane raven behind tinted windscreen.

Ave Marias in hellish implosions; hunting owls, Judaswinged, spiral round flaming jolly green giants, exhaling monster cumulous.

Illustration © Sandra Aretha Khare, September 2004.

Most honoured among women, because women themselves, rarely honoured in their own countries, are so like the prophets - all the same thing. Stoned, lashed, cut in half upward through the head, from the center of their world, raped by a chainsaw, hung laterally by meat hooks, shoulder to thighs, bereft of a sidelong glance...

How did Semiramis die? But ... they can never tell us; they don’t know Did she have cloven hooves? We don’t know. Was she a Madonna?

Oh, C’mon ... feminine mendacity? A Queen Locust, blue steel? Most honoured among women? Ask Jane Fonda... would she confess her sins to Semiramis’ mother confessors?

Both goats were the original prophets destined to roam. White pelt curse bloodied by all the tribes.

Whatwas that?

That It we talk of so unbelievingly?

The portrait of Thaddeus flautist and drummer?

Dead in the water, belly up fish white thighs floating, rippling, murky sunset room; getaway on highway in rooster-mud-mongreldonkey drop-tile-thatch hungry village turning blue in lament. Jackals come down before dark, invisible alleys envelope their putrefying fur... Everything I touch, I poison; So, go where, you said?

Illustration © Sandra Aretha Khare, September 2004.

Welcome to the lie. I put before you this Mirror image that you will turn and wordlessly condemn me. Don’t be willingly lured into this unwanted confession. It might have no bearing on your life, except that it’s possible you were once young too. And it’s untrue that you’re young only once or that you die only twice. You correct yourself; others die of starvation and persecution, some of love. Some because of it.

Clouds, eyes flashing within brows deep recesses, rock and pulverize bare breasted sundown hills.

From the east, Prow head of aerial ark hisses, tapering off, a rudder of rain.

Despite frequent skull dances, Minoans flourished on Crete enriching their culture with major advances in art and medicine, architecture, commerce and urban living. After this world which devoured everything had passed, cynical generations made the Minotaur a fairy tale fellow, and like Dante and Virgil, Homer the idle inventor tacked together postage stamps of epics, compelling works of fiction. The windy courtyards were plunged into fields of beatific dandelions and unsleeping vandals, sons of sculpted titans, lost the power of writing and the lust for art and fled to Asia (minor) to begin a new empty life waiting for someone to show them the way.

It is not proper anymore to ask why he smiles; he is smiling at all the flowers in all the meadows that haven’t passed through dark, seasons. We paint these flowers as arsonists paint houses with horses of fire without disturbing the lies that have been layered over the sphincter end of the century.

Bony tree black before dawn shreds into early birds

How simple ! Not knowing what to write, letting words fall, leaves in March.

Filtering back to rebuild your world, touching, laughing. A vagabond’s fantasy.

Log charred at one end

A branch once, A dry tree’s fourth prodigal, Unforgiven.

Deep breathing day hard at work.

Flagstones unmoved, knowing it’s the idle servant running skelter at 6 o’clock hearing the chariot bells.

Speaking of yesterday is always different, every time. New moon footfall crossing the threshold of yesterday and now.

Illustration © Sandra Aretha Khare, September 2004.

It’s now! I said. Broken bangle new moon, cigarette tip full stop. Tomorrow’s a goods train. It now is already yesterday.

The lock on the door

Told me he had gonethe light within the room Said he’d be back soon. A cat with yellow eyes cried in the gutter.

Blue water strips for gift wrapping Green melons in gold dust sand. On a grey rock you sit watching liquid azure kohl staining fisheyes surfacing, lingering for a bite of air made solid in the furnace gut laugh of a summer sun.

Below the eyelid of a Ganga embankment, deep silent depths riffle to fruit falling.

Somebody passes silently, embedding wafer leaves underfoot, clowning parrots rip the heart from drooping fruit. Chameleon sails wind tunnels, open mouthed. I turn to look but no one’s there.

Sometimes I grieve for the wrong things. Dream of a neglected father rises, talking to me on a steamroller Calcutta afternoon street, cut away from fresh growing dawn thoughts; single seater Piper Cub, trembling, hanging milliseconds between the high tide river and bridge bottom twenty feet cut exactly in half, flying fish, wing wiggling pilot showing only the back of his head trussed in leather. Was that a dream or remembrance of a long dead father passing overhead in his shroud of light?

Illustration © Sandra Aretha Khare, September 2004.

Bitter herbs create ecstatic sounds for their users, remember, the Hebrew meal before they crossed the Red Sea. Bitter herbs send you on a trip. The Hebrew adventure probably inspired the first use of this, word.

The wind is turning tonight, I tail spinning hobo leaves across the indifferent road as if they were forever useless. The tarmac lies waiting for her Tigermoth lover to alight, a spent silver roan, disdainful of the aisle of light along her sable body.

Illustration © Sandra Aretha Khare, September 2004.

Hedied alone in his eyrie. He bent, broke his back to get the images right; he faltered; was the deity he was addressing a paper god ? Images replicated themselves, lifeless, uncaring, insensitive, insouciant., Locked into another silence, of grief; for him, relationships were always becoming; gospel of suffering and illumination, isolation’s deep longing filled.

“There’s somebody somewhere and Sartre’s a fool ... Is there any law against thinking... why should I think only of gorges, why not mountain crests?”

He died alone in his eyrie.

We shall make a hole in the heart of the blue sky We must examine the Sun’s dial and listen to its chimes. Skywatchers once clutched rulers to guide their gaze; their sons would be guided by terminals, they would lean against joy and the weight of smoke. they wilt stand and listen to a Cardinal on the rostrum stroking the breast of a tired city sparrow. Dominus vobiscum. Who will snatch this piece of meat from me?

Illustration © Sandra Aretha Khare, September 2004.

The biblical account of the universe’s origin is untrue. Full of weasel words. the myth of Genesis pronounces the death sentence on us. Christ has to atone for our sins.

See this city ... once faithful. she is a harlot now. Silver becomes dross, maggots like a carpet spread themselves beneath you, your orchards grow hamadryads. Where in the world were you when I laid its foundation? Have you taken the corners of the earth and shaken it but as you would a sheet? My blue behemoth dries up, and you will cry from the ground but your voice will be the voice of a ghost. Who are you trying to explain your message to? Your decisions titter along but you pile rule upon rule, a little bit of this and that…Hearing this they put their hands over their ears and taking him away, stoned him.

Creation stories are fables and I’m told that racism is evil because Adam and Eve were the ancestors of all human kind, but parish priests have their own stories about faith, the great cop-out. Imagined heretics have death threats shoved into their inner ears, but believers are the untouchables. Take care should there be any of them among you. By faith, Abram sojourned to receive an inheritance; he didn’t know where he was going. But if you justify yourself by telling me you have faith, I will not respect you. Considering, however, there is little proof of God’s presence, there is little against it.

I cannot think of a being possessing such intelligence and wit yet Augustine had the gorm to confess that he probed the inner depths of his soul and wrung from it pitiful secrets which had nowhere else to hide, and when he had gathered them before the eyes of his heart, a great storm broke within him, bringing with it a deluge of tears. He had not exactly spent the journey in thought or emotion, it was more like becoming aware after waking from a sleep.

When Iscariot heard that the Sanhedrin had passed sentence on Jesus, he hung himself from the waiting tree. Judas was a man smart in his own eyes; more for him than a fool who’s back is reserved for a rod. And speaking of fools, many of us feel entitled to reserve self-awareness for humanity. They say computers can only do what they are programmed to. To what extent artificial intelligence will develop, we do not know and the debate rages round the issue of the degree it will be able to simulate real intelligence and whether our minds possess properties that could not be emulated by a machine. The argument is confounded by religious issues and the concept of the human soul.

Sometimes physicists resent the saying that there is an inner core of mystery we don’t understand and perhaps never can ... When Moses led his people out of Egypt, everyone didn’t grab his robe tassles. They feared the desert and I understand this. As a child, I believed God would protect me, but once out there, this line was a tremulous mirage of a caravan against the Atlas Mountains. Now determine the Hebrews’ intelligence.

David Otten, long time creator of robot mice: each of them have rods protruding in front and to one side, a cross between a calculator and a roller skate. These tough machines were simple with reliable sensors. But can Otten bind the Horsehead Nebula or let constellations loose for a time? Can he muzzle the Great Bear? Who can tip the water jars onto the dust when it hardens into barren tussocks? Don’t be stupid. You have learned that there is no God.And you can never know if the house is not bugged and if we will not fall into trouble ... In heaven there is nobody. But if in heaven there is nobody then I from my side shall worship the tongue. Is faith a higher guide to truth than knowledge? Elijah was only a man, but when he prayed against rain, it did not rain. When he prayed for rain it came, followed by crops. In the Newtonian Age, they said scriptures must be microscoped over; Bultmann’s QED was that the Bible is so laden with the ballast of the unprovable that almost nothing is known of the person of Christ.

Tubingen University’s Rainer writes that Christ preached in aphorisms - his disciples remembered what he said. And why should what he said have been reported if the disciples did not remember?

After the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls could you say there was no historical Jesus ... in the beginning a person, not a coincidental arrangement of vagabond cells ... who teaches the vine to suck water through its roots, fromthence to every chalice? But the mind is in love with evil. Mao’s little warriors destroyed the country for a generation, A briming chalice of evil. Has the clock retraced its steps once a revolution has succeeded? Christian conservatives smoulder, the evangelical church a chest of museum pieces... but in our heads we know ...

Not in your mind Iscariot, not in your mind alone; the destruction of one tentpole of intellectualism is more than a feat of arms. A windfall of improvements... Thus at thebeginning of his exile he did not have any tail until popular belief gave it to him. Horns on his head were set by women who wanted to terrify their kids. He was laden with gifts he did not request. His ears were swollen with every clout the exorcists unleashed upon those he possessed. He has been disfigured and has been given every shape and every name. Millions of spirits walk the earth unseen, when we wake and when we sleep. These are blemishes, though the serpent was more subtle than, any beast in the field.

In the Hebrew, serpent means beautiful and he had every precious stone as his covering ... Maybe at that time he walked about and was blameless until the game was up. The theory about God has no explanation for anything because it only supposes what we try to explain. It postulates the impossible and leaves it at that. A multitude of intellectual tensions. Times when they knew the truth and turned away from it. The growers were warned that at the first sign of the menacing bugs, farmers should spray their fields with the advertised insecticide.

But it was dangerous because its widespread use world have meant offloading vast amounts of poisons onto the environment. Games sinister are played by a chemical control strategy. All basic structures of society are on the way out. Evil is coercive and the death dust is upon us; a stone wall has no answer.

The first of the four horseman is turned loose, and he rides across the pages of the Tribulation. A tremendous white beast... a symbol of armoured invincibility. Go ride, he said to the prince on the red horse; everybody wants peace so badly they’re willing to kill for it. A disaster to end all disasters. Frustrated peace turns to war with 50,000 atomic devices (more guns in Los Angeles than in the Indian Army). The black equestrian had balances ... everybody’s at war who’ll go to work? Oven blackened skins, rationed food, living to eat ... Death on a slime green mount, flailing, with all hell scooping up the remains.

In 1130, a devil visited Hildensheim in Saxony. He would have still been there had it not been for the wickedness of men that stoked his demonic rage. He gained admittance into the palace and won the confidence of its residents by making himself useful with excellent cooking. In those days (as now) no true bishop was indifferent to juicy streaks and the devil lived peacefully until a rebellious maid insulted and beat him. He complained to the major domo, but to no avail. So he returned to the place of the crime and blew away half a dozen wogs working there and disappeared. And out of the smoke, locusts came down.

They were like scorpions, and they were like Crusaders’ horses, with women’s hair and lions’ teeth. They had breastplates of steel, wings thrummed, rushing to battle. They have immense influence over pest control legislation.

Forgive this yaw into fantasy, it’s only a tale of personal outrage.

Hewas so shot through he didn’t recognize me. He couldn’t because he was dead.

The volley of a five-shotgun blast (ten barrels) knocked him against the door of an abyss already half open.

It has always been my belief that I will die by violence, said Malcolm X in his posthumously released autobiography. Learn to speak Whitey’s tongue, he’d tell his acolytes. Don’t get caught with a rope if he has a shotgun, blast not ballot.

Get the puppeteer. These blue-eyed bitchdoctors have taught us to loathe ourselves.

His ancestors had lost their names in the epidemic of chases and great voyages west, and X was the closest he got to his identity ... Rattle of rhetoric and jackboots he stayed with his razorback statements for freedom. The icon bristled despite his trip to Mecca, yet the executioner’s trill was becoming an anthem for someone else’s hell.

I had an awesome vision of this phenomenon, but alongside Adam appears another Adam he’s made a slave, a limbless torso, compact, and stamped onto his forehead the deprivation of bodily rights was confirmed.

I do not foster the growth of human liberty, nor do I make suggestions or mysterious connections, pursuing the lyrics to the swamp’s mouth.

Driven from the mainland to the heart of the coffee house minority, prisoners of a new order created by a reborn Mephistopheles, a fine postlude. A Black bedlamite dug out of an abandoned attic, a verified discovery, the burial chamber of the first Roman Christians, something the Church has denied, that there were women priests ordained by bishops, that they celebrated the eucharist. Lies from the isthmus of Christendom, inheriting the keys, still holding the therapeutic post of priests and deacons.

The hidden testimony of women in Christianity’s phantom dawn was drydocked in Rome’s harbour, Babylon quivering with the blood of martyrs. Bodies in shrouds, quicklime daubed, awaiting the resurrection. Chapel network, symbols of hope, the blessed dead breath held for the last call. The still figures shared an understanding that excludes us. The passivity of the people is dramatized by the Mass; the male essence of the priesthood IS - because the incarnation is a specific event with a specific star. Not a cosmic Christ. This romantic tradition of him may be based on a false truth. A title fight that has lasted centuries. Compendious expression was given to Black anger. A Black Nation of Buffalo Soldiers.

We must accept responsibility for regaining Our people, Our women, Our Blacks who have lost their place, clues betraying final depths of anguish; no other nation has been so grotesquely scattered.

He began as Malcolm Little, petty criminal, junkie, and became far too big for Harlem. His ideas represented necessary ingredients for the making of a Black psyche. X was King’s height and was the observer of the response Blacks can make, though Martin endured more physical violence than him who was never involved in this after his conversion. Only when he died.

But turning the other cheek is the opium of the people: I am a worm, a no man, and despised of people. Antiochus IV built his promenade of blood beginning BC 171; this took seven years, during which Mattathias, progenitor of the Hashmoneans, led the revolution in Modi’in by killing a Greek and a renegade Jew. He took many men with him, along with his five sons, into the Judaean Hills from where he put out a guerrilla campaign. Judah led the Maccabees to shock victories, Jonathan was assassinated. Simon lived to see independence, and land that had been won by David and Solomon but lost by the Jews in years following, was wrung back. This was one of the most scintillating periods of Jewish history, and the story of the Maccabees is celebrated in the Feast of the Hanukkah.

I’m the head of the Brotherhood

And you don’t have to wait for a symbol to get gunned down - but there upon the stairs was a Black guy and it was a B1ack club ... It was six in the morning, and there was, a big Black walking towards me, another Black; he pulls out a’ gun - your watch, he says .., there was violence in those days too, but now they can take you out with a’47 from a long way off...

Our linen is being washed by a White scourge. When you look at the dynamics of criminality, you will see a rise in crime equal to the gap between poverty, and opulence... The Blacks who get streetwise get rich too and I don’t take lifts in anyone’s car because I don’t want to be where I shouldn’t.

Malcolm’s death had flung us around, and we fought over him and Elijah. Had the Nation died? Don’t say a single word about Malcolm - and if you do, don’t let it come out of your mouth. An impulsive patchwork of emotions, he mutated from watching his people get run over to extending his sword arm in painful solutions to a thousand year problem. The first man to block Christ’s progress was Muhammad. Jesus’ own kingdom was hardly peaceable, adding to the lexicon of human suffering; the shadows thrown by ethnic and cultural divides were sliced away with vigour. The center fell apart. close to this man’o’war’s-living-on-the-road death. Jerusalem was turned over a spit

I’m the head of the Brotherhood

close to this man’o’ war’s-living-on-the-road death. Significant storyteller losing his temper with a tree, an orthodox Jew, more than we’d imagine. But , his popular following began rocking the Templers pinnacle. The Romans counted on random reprisals to get their way and the Sanhedrin scurried to the scrolls of the Law.

They couldn’t allow him to export revolution, this anarchist faith healer, a member of the Essenes who flowered near the Dead Sea, doped with venom on the cross, abandoning the boundary of this stagnant void.

Encourage those on venom, now, to donate., . ,: their organs after death and, they too will have been resurrected. Activate a needle of thiopental and one of potassium chloride. Serenity comes over those who are told that their suffering can be ended. Medicide, according to Kevorkian, crashing the taboo of premeditated death, taking it by its designer neck and driving it through politically motivated, cranked up concepts of the physicality and soul of man, public as actors, private as citizens...

If you can get through meeting your father’s ghost, the wind will pass you by on a seaward tolling bell. And out of the emptiness comes the strange pain of knowing who you are and why you have left behind the couch in your own home and, a dandelion, spin with hunger in the center of your chest.

Shining, he stayed with his fanged statements, understanding the odd nostalgia on meeting his father’s wraith. The criminal and junkie had ideas that represented the necessary ingredients for the making of a Black Psyche. Malcolm’s popular following began pounding the bows, his reality beyond the linear vocabular of crew and passengers; he had no use for King’s opium pipe dreams and his mystery ridden prose, whitening Black coffee with cream. He appealed to all dandelion seeds penetrating that lower world his community had been reduced to; no more citizens of the cosmos. I am a worm and no man. No holiness. Empty mirror as I stand before it ... Sometimes I go about in pity for myself even as a great hand tosses me across the sky, isn’t that what he said?

So Attalah joined hands with Yolanda and a late night strand was pulled across the Dracos of this cycle, presided over by a subculture of cenobites. Germs who became flesh indiscriminately. Black is the colour, so don’t let a man make you feel ashamed. Racism in this country is a very persuasive thing; they don’t drift into a life of crime because the word is survival, the most lucrative is peddling ... Life must go on and you are left with no options. The collective was once the most important thing and the Black community is recognizing that it will have to empower itself ... we should make every one of us an individual ... there are very few in our community determined to destroy themselves.

She also insists the Malcolm was far from the first to advocate Black separatism. I have come with a sword to divide families. She encouraged her children to puke back if they encountered racism. (Two more bodies and a large cache of dynamite in the rubble were discovered, Weathermen.) ... I read a small report on this Black haranguer with his anti-White Manifesto. Malcolm had been talking to Brothers who had been in the North and had got wrapped up in its racism... the crowd was Black ... we three sat apart from them, courtesy the ushers - Black calling the kettle a progenitor of rats ... No ordinary vessel and not too much apart from the yowl of TV evangelist mongrels, I was told.

Immersed in what my ears had been tweaked to hear, I left the meeting unsinged. I was overseas when they killed him, his autobiography an ill-fitting chapter to my own unwritten book. His was the chromatophoric use of colour to describe the national disease.

You’re happier on the road. No one to depend, on, you carry your own load; you sing your own song, tuneless a lyrical riddles; no auditoria, no acoustics enhanced applause. On the road there’s no one to call home to; no place called home; why should there be. Home where the heart is anchored, unchanging, barnacled. On the road, you’re carrying your heart and spirit and everything else to keep you free, happier and unplugged. On the road, a reality check.

Such a wound is opened that trust, once a shared silence, has become solitary confinement; that shaking hands, once trust, is a seal on a conspiracy; that a kiss has become the symbol of a betrayal; that beneath children’s togetherness is envy taught to them by parents; that growing and relating is now the fire of isolation.

Brother Sun, free from easy cynicism, dispensing new hope to : bands of miracle seekers in a voice that skirts round to reach us; offering fresh consolation from within the dimension of pure truth to anguished discussions with suspicion. Brother Sun, unconcerned about converting barbarians, a mysterious creature of time-music energies; a mystery beyond portrayal faithful to the substance of your spirit. Laughing and summer bronzed, exempt from manic doubt, political myopia, implacable mirages, feverish anxiety, you offer fresh consolation from within the dimension of pure truth.

It was a reading room (only) at the foot of St. Thomas I Mount. A small reading room biscuit washed outer walls, white inside, three baby-blade ceiling fans trying to cook up a storm with lazy daisy news sheets, sprawled alongside journals, all a-tic and asbestos oven bubbling. The body rests at forty-five degrees in a ninety degree hardback and bottom chair.

There were five, six, seven men and the blue-black librarian. Wreathes, vines, coronas gf cigarette smoke sheathed his torso, swathed his face, wrapping him Delilah like ... Protruding from his white khadi shirt collar a toadmouth speaking in wisps. Past and future epistles, authors dead or pickled in bhang ranting silently as I drank water from the black balloon gut vessel, handwritten dry leaves uncovering love-notched naked tabletop, squirrel scampering the rough floor.

Toadmouth got up, collected the dry leaves with a grimace, toadlike, went back to his smoking desk to read my ink rivulet lines. He spoke with hands and mouth. “I know no tell Yinglis... I read...” offering me a dark cheroot. He put my hieroglyphic sludge into his white khadi shirt pocket.

Smiling smoke, he drew the thin, dust hue wrapper volume from a square, brown board box. Tamil poetry. Autographed in Tamil held up to me in bastard English and a rain forest grin. “I no tell Tamil”, I said. He nodded knowingly.

I slipped it into the sentryline of books on the windowless sill. A palm of paper slipped under my door some scalding days later simply said, “Most phine” in crippled capitals, signed in Tamil.

What did he understand of my blue-black on white chiselling? I had been writing of a King Frog with a jewel in his mouth.

Flying asleep, listening to witches by the well, I asked I myself whether the cross of changes, being an enigma was rock and roll. Yes, it was, they all shrieked ... okay, tell me what’s rock’n’roll, he said. Rock and roll’s you, me, us, them and I ... rock and roll’s give two rupees for a gold flake and not ask for the change because what will they think, I’m so nice... rock and roll’s asking for the two rupees back without speaking because you know he’ll give you the change. Rock and roll’s getting married to the right person and breaking up goodbye don’t come around this way again because it was the wrong person and rock ‘n’ roll’s getting married to the wrong person breaking up and realizing it was the right person.

Rock and roll’s a flesh stripped away day and then the power goes off and the phone rings and the person the other side thinks you’re in the dark about her arrival ... surprise surprise ... but you’re still lying on the deckchair in the dark room filled with strange forms and a locomotive goes crashing across the bridge, crying, one eye open, and you don’t get up, you don’t want to do a blindman jitterbug.

And rock’n’roll’s a snapping of the third string, breaking off from holy smoke hometown, dodging a dhobi’s Nicholas Nye donkey drop, up and away from glass and steel city center sepals.

What’s rock and rol1he asked... It’s repeating everything I’ve just said and it’s also kids spooking each other on the unravelling stairs and it’s you and me and us and them and we and he and she and they spooked by an empty room whispering quietly to itself; rock’n’rolls the remains of a sheared ponytail and the idiocy of saying I belong, shadow chasing gold mountain moon down the lane swept of yesterday and rock and roll is sitting in a babul thorn’s shade watching the morse code of cars, tractors, trailer trucks on the highway from destination to destination from tangents and death of nirvanic harpsichords blues.

And then rock and roll’s the undiscovered cortical vitamin gone with Eden... never got time to go home and return with an answer because answers never return; they come begging a question which isn’t there and rock’n’roll’s two daughters I said, who laugh all the time and shout down the phone like it’s not there and their hiccups and sleep smeared faces, morning stars in jeans, repartee; books, painted feathers, claret crimson, ocean blue lipstick range and rock and roll’s a desert-rose-on-sea, sunflower petals, stacked chimney high and the long Endurance Road, stepsister Impatience chewing on stones... Rock and roll is all that and Everything you and I and us and them ever were, are and will be ... like all the music seen and heard and dreamed and ate, slept and walked and ran and spun.

All that’s fine, but forever give us plain old rock’n’roll.

Critics of the world unite. you have nothing to lose but your ghetto heads. When you push someone to the limit, something has to give ... Why have the guns, violence, the poverty allowed to grow, filth drenched? who? The Blacks or short-circuited heads who have allowed and vehicled the drugs onto the sidewalks? There has always been friction between the police and the Black community ... Fundamentally, we have to look at the situation we find ourselves in. What future will my daughter have if they’re selling crack fifty yards from my front door? ... Pride is about selfrespect, we lack unity... ,

The collective was once more important than the individual but the parivar can no longer espect its eldest son suspected of being deceitful ... Mass agitation does not punish an erring government but harasses us. Real or imaginary issues deprive us of employment, block arteries and violate sections of the Indian Police Act... Baba Amte is also guilty because he snapped the highway at Khalghat... Bandhs are the now examples of the misuse of satyagraha... The electorate responsible enough to punish the ruling party?

India has failed to develop on its own in painting, a series of foreign invasions never permitted a purely indigenous style to be left for posterity ... all its traditions are from alien cultures. Amrita Sher-Gil was trained at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and was influenced by Gauguin. She owes her figures to Modigliani and though she assimilated Pahari Iyricism, she lightfooted across continents, colours from her palette concentrated in her blood. Husain, Padamsee, Mukherjee continue in the same lane and speak of developing a native style, but this is wishful thinking. The weight of history is too much to disregard. Indian painting will nev.er become the definite form of expression for the subcontinent.

But carrion birds have always defended their position on precarious perches by saying that art is for few, understood by the few and that pavement plazas are only smoke in your eyes... We no longer know or care; individuals get used to the crap they crap, to the exotic mundane, listening to the mandarins stating the obvious differently, but each day the means of intervention and surveillance appear more normative and harder to resist. It is an erosive tyranny of the minority.

Critics of the world unite, every pill you administer makes it less likely that the system will ever change for the remains of a frightful urban hellhole of a day…

Better getting stoned – what floundering Inch by inch on the rox… Memory remembers new friends; muted euphoria drowns with mangy tailed cat’s ass in the moonlight.

Red apples, red piranha. red signpost; neophyte’s heightened suggestibility, tight numbness; relentless evangelizing, hustling trips, cross-legged atop grass piled blue carpets.

Where it is coming from, all this hate? This terror, a noontide warm skin? Greeneyed cats soundlessly negotiate silence knotted streets, holding a brittle truce with hunger enlivened mongrels.

Somewhere and somewhere else urns are carried away, tepid ash, spent fuel.

Stories of torture and betrayal seep under closed doors; communities swept up in hate mongering hysteria, revenge flies unreigned ripping up cobbled lanes for mobs’ armoury.

Rooftops are the best vantage points to spot crowds in movement. The dangers are obvious though - you could get shot by them or by them, or even by the others. From here they’ll point out graven image black towers, degutted corpse breath, open-to-sky morgues, once precious household definitions.

Where is it going to, this hate; these a la carte meals beyond understanding or budget? Premonitions of torch signed death warrants haunt the consciousness, soak in a timebound blueprint; two, three, six, eight bricks split doors, crash eaves ... kattas’ cordite attar for an unending sweet-smelling offering ... swords whistle, smothered in living and dismembered bodies ... The city slips into a coma hiding a sliver of moon in its rags.

Junkie come. junkie go. Slowmarch, sleepwalk. deadmarch. A stone’s roll away, power, skill, grace just out of underworld pimphead’s hungerworld reach.

Sewer swimming hardcore braindamaged narrative strewn highway... dark song center’s clarity breeds hope: redemption once more, but for now flickering visuals, overburdened stressed out... there are limits ...

Forbidden love always returns from nowhere. It always does; it can never be otherwise. There is no apology for it having gone away, no explanation for where it has been. And it returns withered, felled by diseased jokes, a world crowded by things it has got lost in, the red herrings of memory.

There is no understanding why this love returns on rafts of water hyacinths, sights and sounds of jungle beasts, green toads slick and wart poisoned camouflaged skin. Remembrance prefers black and white toucans. Birds of paradise, out of place artifacts, watchful distrust.

Forbidden love is a lifeline, unashamed, nostalgic, migratory things in the night, untiring intensity, days keeping me room bound, implicating hands that detonate final demolition. I seldom do not turn back from returning.

Whateverin the world is Nirvana? I do not know. When was it discovered and by whom? Was it discovered? Did it exist before Time was a foetus? Before the First Father of the cosmos grew a shadow?

Does the apple gain nirvana after it is consumed? Does the mustard seed gain nirvana when it is transformed into a petrified tree?

Does that squalid sewer rat reach nirvana when it is emptied into the sea?

Is nirvana completeness? Is it a final black or does it give the cobalt sky is colour? If nirvana is completeness, then of what? [s it a deceptive food fit for craven fools? Who are wise in their own eyes? Or an ancient landmark to which they skip, going backwards down the stairs trying to get higher?

The morning sun dries the tears of a lotus heart, like every memory of every past experience whisked away without a thought of what has been lost. And because I do not know what nirvana is and therefore, do not know if I shall profit by it, I shall awaken this shirt of marrow and metal. I am what I am, but I do not know what.

And I do not mistrust my dreams because I know they are skilful interpretations of bicameral infiltration across the line of control.

I do not mistrust my dreams because in their safekeeping I walk, stroll, train-hop, change platforms, thrust myself through high grass to a knoll from where I can watch driveby shootouts, breathe in the airless tureen of a disorganized library, set a torpid dragonfly into flight.

My dreams tell me I am.

I have grown heavy with illusions certified by dreams, but I dare not jettison them, dare not stir a feather in my ignorance.

A miracle is outside the arc of any law, devised or eternal. It repeats itself like a dream, where I am always missing a bus or a train, often finding myself lying in freedom afternoon country boats, fish nibbling my fingertips trailing over bow’s edge; or flying naked and alone, arms outstretched over terrified lion pri0es, manes singed, fleeing a forest fire.

A dream is a miracle’s child who tells me I am. When I awaken, I am in pursuit of another nirvana, trying to finish what I have not begun.

But to the question that pulsates at my wrists - what is nirvana...

Is it beyond completing what I have begun, or picking up the frayed threads of an errand left for a decade and then gently drawn into the silver miracle bowl of dreams to begin resetting the compass?

ls virtue the root of all skilful dharma; does anger always rest in the bosom of fools? Is wisdom always better than strength; what strength, what wisdom? What if in the strength of your dreams you, like myself, come to know you are? Dreams are born from the labour of miracles. I know the language of the wind, filled with insect and pariah kite; I know this from the wisdom of dreams given to monarchs against whom there is no rising up.

Like a mosquito on warm skin, I probe the bloodstream of dreams.

I am smoke from a cigarette tip, am mouth deep in hibiscus nectar; flesh of passion fruit, the last sentence of a book, fullstop erased.

Inset: Original Cover Design, Illustrations

Sandra Aretha Khare

Majoun by Adrian Khare

MAJOUN

A Vagabond’s Fantasy

Adrian Khare

MAJOUN A Vagabond's Fantasy

Adrian Khare

Cover Design, Illustrations