I was met with Whitman's dream on a salad night
[that's last night, last evening to be precise]
Whitman's dream of stalwart loins, lean energies, tall sunbaked frames
Transcribed onto men waiting on men and women at my brother's wedding reception
Serving iced Pepsi and icy glances as a throwback between repartees

Now for my old friend who felt sad and thirsty on many blank afternoons
And scribbled lines to toss around the ball of insanity about his weakened limbs
Buddy I have a distant hello for you,
A hello that's soft and almost inaudible, a hello trembling in trepidation
Apologizing for the watched telephone at your end that didn't ring when you wanted it to
[perhaps I know what's going on in your mind—a comparative tabulation of punctual 'how are you's pitched against belated but stylized apologia]

We were reading "The Wasteland" the other day and I went on a piggyback ride on my memory
Remember nausea and remember comfort women in love
I had said Gudrun couldn't love Gerald and only I knew why

Last evening I had become a Gudrun you know
I had an ailing friend and a generous friend to attend to
But I was inadequate, a silly Dalloway, clammed up in 2003
Days were younger then, nights less weary
I was co-riding a careless canoe of freewheeling fashionable instability
All at leisure, though at times we did speed up
But being a Gudrun has its casualties, for example you're clubbed with variegated Geralds in safari summer suits
And are expected to be compassionate when you can't deliver
Then are tagged those bland metaphors like sorry attachments with bulk mails
Insensitive.doc, arrogant.jpg, coquette.txt
And I mused at your blank afternoons with FTV mannequins
Like Whitman's vision of perfect breasts and butts, so congruent in their variability
Adjudged tonally, or a suntan above and below the bikini line, souvenirs of warm Seychelles beach days, kiss of the wannabe Baywatch Pamelas as we see them on TV
You shadowboxing with vague images on channel forty-seven
You jaundiced and fed on Indian equivalent of porridge [with due reverence to postcolonial relativism]
You fighting meek battles with unseen miniscule intruders
With naked universal lines to pep up exiled souls
Waiting for the twenty-fifth hour to strike

I'll give you a series of lies
for I'm trading in the fabrications of ancestral bones
I'll talk about my irrelevant crimes
In just about a moment, when I can announce I've sinned
They won't call me La belle dame sans merci
They won't call me anything, won't call me back

I'm hopelessly free, free to live or die
To love or lie, to fasten or untie
I stink of freedom, yet they're enamored of my perfumes
They sniff at every beat and breath

I can booze, fag, fuck, scribe, lecture, debate, cook, sweep, shit, bathe
My color ain't a problem, my sex too isn't anymore
At times I look out for harassments to dig up buried contours
And wonder what I'll pass on when I procreate

I'm more than biology just as all of them
Condemned to be chained in liberty, for it ain't a cause but a fashioning
Liberty like everything else comes and goes
And Sisyphus you were born too soon so I pity you

My Romeos are lonely wretched men forever walking the Gin Lane
For their beleaguered selves
Now suddenly they betray the pages and become rebels
Become Hamlets and refuse to die upon a kiss
Say an anamorphed skull's got the right appeal

I thought I needed a guilt to nurture, a secret to hide
my womanscape must copulate now, sow some germs of innovation
my intimate Sahara has dried up many an oasis of tenderness and am forever thirsty
am not your Ceres, Juno or Venus, am none of them but am fertile with a dash of metaphoric barrenness to proffer up during defensive moods
am not a static image but a circling hot nude moon stripped of bikini clouds
am piranhas trapped in prolix fields, am stingray fighting somnolence, am ichthyosaur renegotiating extinction
my clan is at war with history but I've gone astray and heading nowhere looking for a place to hoard my illicit bliss that they call ineffectual and eunuchlike
but I say it's still undigitized, it's forever falling apart but coming together too, and that 'eunuchlike' is emotionally incorrect
yet they're forever building new lexicons and prodding me into buying some
I'm incapable of a legitimate fury to call my own, or a consummate passion, though I have drives and needs and I think I love as well
I don't dream of building citadels, I don't dream at all, or maybe I do, those puny daysights that chase you while you're shitting, eating, mating
I sort of like them too, posing as this self-confessed self-satirist living off instincts and animus pools, dissolving odd equations and disproving all axioms

They've formatted Whitman's dream to suit the time
It's stored on their hard disks of Intel Pentium IV PC
When they grub they taste the blighted face of Jerusalem or London tube stations
And thank their stars that make them spoon in the spaghetti and paneer tikka
[they love combos, the odder the better]
nodding regretfully, 'Brown is the black of the day.'

You and I scowl when we are the non-participants
and email sometimes to stay afloat