LitFest

Someone told me there’s a man out there

With hip hop in his heart and curls in his hair

I saw him sitting around with a vacant NRI stare

I knew it was him and I knew I had best beware

Now I’ll stop rhyming.

So I knew it was him from his saffron scarf

And his vacant NRI stare

That vacant NRI stare

Crossed with the vacant stoner stare

Crossed with the vacant hipster stare

I’m saying there was nothing casual about his vacancy

Naturally I

Repudiated the whole occasion

Even before his rhymes surged across the

Genteel postcolonial park

Like an unwanted colonic irrigation

I have no time for these globetrotting

Brainrotting

Best forgotting

Poets with their fucking Apple laptops

(I was supposed to stop rhyming. Sorry.)

Poets should have

Blood in their sputum

Poets should elope

Often and unwisely

Poets should carry

Rotting hearts in lacquered boxes

Not Apple laptops

With backing tracks on them.

Maybe some of those people there

Weren’t total duffers

He says half-heartedly

And walks away grumpy old fartedly

Cult Of Luna: Vertikal

Post metal is a
State of mind, not an epoch
A lunatic cult

A collective of
Stratosphere navigators
In leaden boots

Soaring but rooted
The style is already familiar
The album rocks

Pre-orders here

Abyssal: Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius

Profound death metal
Plumbs depths of tone and tempo
A well-named band

Take the moments
When the air is filled with omens
Rays of a dying sun,

Take the slowest bits
On some very fast records
And dive in...

Scorn by Primitive Man

Willingly dragged down

The music is a weighted net

I am trapped in it

Shades of Khanate
Perhaps Thou have been here before
Perhaps it is its own thing

Abrasive and sluggish
Insert tortured simile here
Or just let it spin

2013 in Metal: A Haiku Odyssey, Part 1

This year, I am going to listen to every new metal release I can get my hands on and a write a haiku about it. I might get better at this at some point. Or I might not.

1. Enigma by Aeon Zen

Prog on a chill morn
Many elements combine
Familiar pattern

2. Dustwalker by Fen

Cool but getting warm
Like this morning, this music
Agallochian lilt

3. Signed and Sealed in Blood by Dropkick Murphys

Anthems for Paddy punks
Best heard in pubs at last call
Warm with promise of storm

Morning Sounds of an Indian Neighbourhood

First, the religions awaken
                         Crooning, droning
Monsters we've made reminding us
                         They can un-make us
Then a lull as lazybones stir
                          Never to see dawn
Some birds reach an unremarked epiphany
                          Of territorial emphasis
The doors open for students
                         And wage-earners
The roads are swept by a tide of steel
                         That will last for hours
And now as macho engineers and MBAs
                         Are commuting
And simpering socialites slumber
                          Coiled in unguents
Now as their whelps drift sullen
                           To their mis-education
Sometimes you can hear a single voice
                            Humming a jingle

A street away the slum has already
                            Shuddered and disgorged
Its people into the imperious dawn of that
                            Other neighbourhood

Body

Sometimes in the shower
I arch backwards
Like a drawn bow
To feel my spine loosen up
And I peer at my legs
Like a nutbrown girl’s
And then I crane forward
And try to ignore
The spongy Iyer pouch
Of my curvy belly
And then I stand up straight
And reflect that I, too, am a man of parts.