Anant Pathak
What am I?
What at all is in the present?
Staring into the skies, at all the twinkling past.
Looking on and out for depth, but scared within of finding it.
When every act I see,
Is done or in process of being done.
When every other act I read of, is now done
was done and is a log, a record now.
When bells that I hear have rung already, and words that reach me to process and react to,
are breaths and vibrations already released at the source,
a source that is now a different note and thought.
When fate wants me to believe I am but a rendition of the past.
For all that is is done and written.
Who am I? And what is the present?
Category: Poetry
Topic: Self-Destruction
Title of Work #2: A Dystopic Wish
Your Work #2:
May the men keep swaying from desperation to
apathy,
and fighting every war like it would be the last one ever,
and separating black from white in a world of many colors.
May the women keep nursing the men, for they keep seeing the broken and the wretched,
May they keep cushioning their next with their flesh,
and nourishing the ones below with the blood they bleed.
May we all keep searching for the same God in religious trains, each running peacefully and parallel from each other,
all until the tracks bend into each other and collide, and the fuel for one becomes 'haraam' for another, the color of one becomes an omen for the one next to it,
and the pursuit becomes that of survival instead of exploration, of lateral propagation rather than forward motion,
of more blacks and whites and saffrons and greens.
May we ideate and tycoon over space, powered by those we consider meagre and lowly,
May wealth ever concentrate itself around a select few, like gravity, only selective and asymmetric.
May war be yet another capitalistic act, of extracting value out of innocent labor, only more abruptly and steeply, through loss of life to 'well-manufactured' artillery
rather than desks and chairs to be sat on for decades of slow decay.
And may capitalism, after all, be more absolute in itself than any other school of thought.
May fights for equality be fought with so much zeal that generations to follow feel too exhausted to use it at all.
May there be privilege, a power dealt on cards based on color, ethnicity, or more creatively based on imaginary constructs like caste, better still!
May the world offer one ray of hope every century or so, where life and humanity appear to converge onto something meaningful, something respectable, only to fall apart again.
May we all always be terrified of the oceans and cling onto puddles for the sake of our sanity,
our sanity of the masses built upon complete crucification of some.
For all in all, the show is endless,
For all in all, the show much go on.