Glopowrimo 8

© Koshy AV

Glopowrimo 8 - A Roundelay :D

"8th April

Our prompt for the day (optional, as always), is inspired by Smith’s poem. You may have noted that the central metaphor of “Good Bones” turns on a phrase used by real estate agents. Today, I’d like to challenge you to think about the argot of a particular job or profession, and see how you can incorporate it into a metaphor that governs or drives your poem. This rather astonishing list of professional slang terms might help you get into the mood. Or, if you work a white-collar job, perhaps you can take inspiration from one of the business jargon phrases that seem to predominate in corporate environments (leveraging diverse synergies, anyone?)"

When people keep on asking me, with no vision
What, oh what, is your profession?
I lose my vaunted  gifts of elocution
Teaching is my profession
I pretend I am also good at seduction
But poetry, ah, poetry; has been my life-long passion!

Recently, I went to a rhyming, rhythmic, rocking, rolling poetry festival
A lady was much enthused by causes, and went on reading
Her poetry as if she was the only rider on the roller-coaster at some carnival
Her bosom heaved with all that emotional upheaval
I being a 100 percent, hot-blooded, repressed, suppressed, middle-aged, Indian male got lost in that commotion

A gent was sitting there 'sinisterlily' surveying the hall
You could see that he was a critic and having a secret, damned ball
Which one is in the canon? Which one has no cannon?
He kept on thinking, while I watched him decide who to make great, and who to make fall.

There were publishers and (sub-) editors and copies of copy-editors
There were proof-readers and journalists and would be's and wannabes
Some spoke of God and being and some spoke of dogs and peeing
Never a dull moment, yes, but was it poetry that I was hearing?

Poets, poets, everywhere, nor any verse to choose
Who all were writing iambs, or rhymes, or hemistitches, in twos,
Who all were counting syllables and who all waiting, impatient to go to the loo
Poets, poets, everywhere, all fancy free, footloose!

I began to feel dizzy at this profusion of poetry
To calm myself I chanted to myself the names of some poetic forms
Sonnet, nonet, haiku, haigu, ghazal, 'falafel':  then shifted to names of stanzas:
Couplet, triplet, quadruplet; no, these were of giving birth, the qualms

Nobel, Pulitzer, Booker, I tried to shift my tack
Jnanpith, Sahitya Akademi, I added to make up the slack
Shifting then to keep calm, Penguin, Pelican
Peregrine and Bloomsbury, Harpic, Hatchet, I dead-panned

Having run out of things to do, when they asked me for a reading
I looked at my mobile, chagrined; it had run out of 'beading'
Meaning its battery had died, so I stood there with a hollow, sinking feeling
As if cold water was sloshing around my legs, and in its iciness I was standing

Then gathering my courage in both my hands, I started thinking
Screw the canon, publishers, awards, editors and all who were pretending
I am a real poet, and can 'in an instant,' start leading

So after taking a deep breath and my heart from my mouth down-pushing
(Like Pushpa might have before her speech in Ezekiel's mind living)
I started on a glorious note, and began my composing
On my profession's argot, saying, "When people keep on asking..."
© Koshy AV

:D

Even when and where I think or thought
I am not being read
I am being read
I am spread out in atoms all over the world wide web
This is the brave new world, where I am particles discrete

In Poetry's Fist

Poetry cannot be weighed
measured
judged,certified
rewarded, awarded
can only be read
and pushed to jump off the ledge and fly
like a cat with a ball of twine
pushing it back and forth
back and forth
waiting for it to unwind
fully
Those that do you play with more
while the ones that have knots in it
make you wave your tail at it angrily
Poetry is that ball of twine
Different colours every time
I read and read hungrily
I read to slake my thirst with it
hunger for life
thirst for life
lust for life
it never dies
it lives
it grows
Poems, poets and poetry
Something more must be in store
around the corner
more balls of twine
great balls of fire
and balls of thunder
Poetry rains and falls on my face
like 
an orgy
unslaked
wet, ache
Poetry cannot be judged but some
remain
and some fall away
subjective and relative
like quantum
but absolute in having me in its grip and sway
Am I the dreamer
or the dream,
am I the keeper 
or is it the keep?
Am I the snake or the charmer of venom?
Do I draw out its blood and spit to save its life?
Am I the man rising and thrusting into each poem?
I can never have enough of it
Poetry. So I make everyone write it.
Especially the soft birds of the days
They know its secrets, they know its place
They know how it plays out
its sports and games
They know its grace
They know its hands make gestures lovely
Mudras of eternity
They know its hips are languorous and it buttocks sway savvily
They know the pots it carries on its heads
And no drop of water is spilt on the way 
They are its music makers
Dreamers of dreams
They are its songs
They are the ones each day I frame
to make them be found guilty so they can never escape
Poetry is the answer to the questions
Makes me a gaoler
and me, the forever jailed.

Ten Reasons why You should Vote for the Congress starting April 11th, to rule from the centre with its allies for a better future for India in the coming five years.

1. Congress knows the main problem in India is eliminating poverty and plans to address it.

2. The Congress encourages trilingualism of mother-tongue/ English/Hindi which is better for us globally than the one of Hindi/Sanskrit and truer to our diverse unity.

3. The Congress has young leaders in Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, and Sachin Pilot and others in the wings like Hardik Patel supporting them backed by experienced war horses like Manmohan Singh, Shashi Tharoor, Raghuram Rajan the economist, Scindia, and Sonia Gandhi, and new people like the Shatrughan Sinha family to counter the BJP who only has old war horses, whom people are now totally fed up with, like Modi, Shah, Jaitley.

4. The names I mentioned at the top rung show evidently that the Congress is multi-religious and multi-caste, still, though upper class, whereas the BJP is only one religion and upper caste based, and at the same time also upper class.

5. While corruption was the main charge against the Congress, it is now proved that BJP is as corrupt, the only difference being Congress allowed all to be corrupt, being weak, but BJP allows corruption only among its own ranks and lets others feel the heat. Both are wrong approaches, but one is not better than the other.

6. The Congress eschews violence, whereas the BJP and its satelllites like the RSS espouse and support it. The former trend is any day preferable.

7. The rupee has crumbled during the rule of the BJP showing that economically it could not deliver.

8. The Congress stands for unity in diversity but the BJP stands for uniformity at the cost of diversity and names as seditious, meaninglessly, those who speak against this kind of uniformity by calling a spade a spade, i.e.; as false unity.

9. All the issues raised by BJP like Pakistan, corruption, terror, infiltration of refugees,, Ram mandir, are all issues - except for corruption - that has no relevance to the ordinary, daily lives of most common people in India, whereas the ones being raised by Rahul like poverty alleviation, unemployment or underemployment, and women's reservation or help for farmers now have pressing relevance.

10. Democracy is based on plurality or at least having a binary system of party politics which makes it imperative that Congress be voted back this time so that democracy is upheld and not emotional appeals to only one third of Indians in the North alone, in the name of religion and hate, and division on such lines which only affect a few parts of North India and not the rest of India. To defeat BJP now, it is not enough to vote against them or to not vote but to vote for Congress presently as each vote counts and a vote for Congress is also a vote against BJP and a vote not wasted.

© Koshy AV

Dr Koshy AV is the author of six books and an established literary critic and theoretician of repute. He is presently teaching English literature in Saudi Arabia and is also an editor and compiler and anthologist in the fields of fiction and poetry wherein he has nine more books to his credit. He also works in the field of autism.

I do not know what I deserve.
But I don't seem to have got it -
Whatever it is!

I am ready to let go of nothing
and no one.
My hunger for love knows no limits.

If I gave myself a gift
it would be nothing less than
- the gentlest gift -
the Nobel
for what I am capable of writing which has not yet showed up on paper

The brightest song I, my body, ever held
was thrice, my new-born children
but first, my wife who birthed them

If I gifted myself joy
I would also gift you, my love, the moon
but only if you said I am your universe
could or would I give you the moon
and
everything else which are all in it
including this gift which given alone can be received multiplied
the gift of my love for 'thee'
for free
for all time, y' see.

©Koshy AV

http://www.napowrimo.net/one-week-down/

GLOPOWRIMO #6 IF ODYSSEUS RETURNS I & II or TWO POSSIBLE ENDINGS

If, one day
I come back
from far away
to one more home-not-home
but 'ours', not 'mine'
another rented stay
from where I was, alone
unannounced, and open the door
silently
and find
you there
turn to me, saying, "Dad"
so I drop my bags in surprise
my mouth falling open
that you are now restored
to what others call normalcy
and behind you coming to meet me
yes, they all, coming to meet me
one, tall, with a baby in her hands
behind her, the father
and another, small, with a child holding her hand
behind her, that child's father
and behind them one, silver-haired
I would weep

But then again
if it was not so, but only
that the door opened
to just you
same as you are now
and them too
same; and she, your wife, the same
just that all of us grew older
would it be any less joyful?

It may be, it could be
but it won't be any less joyful
even if...

http://www.napowrimo.net/day-six-7/

http://www.napowrimo.net/day-five-6/

Write a poem that incorporates at least one of the following: (1) the villanelle form, (2) lines taken from an outside text, and/or (3) phrases that oppose each other in some way. If you can use two elements, great – and if you can do all three, wow!

GLOPOWRIMO #5

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
Framed by street-lamp or in candle-light
Why do they think you are the killer, by right?

When a lamb goes missing, in the night
Or some calf, chick or turkey, they shout in a trice:
"Tiger, Tiger, burning bright!"

When a boy is heard of as lost
And found torn apart in some far outpost
Why do they think you are the killer, by right?

When a girl screams in the dead of the night
And her frock is found later, blood-stained, torn, out of sight
Tiger, tiger, burning bright

How dare they pass the buck and the blame
And reach for their guns and get up, you to slay?
Why do they think you are the killer, by right?

To me, you are the god of the night black as jet
The other side of light, and the lamb's midnight, yet
Why do they think you are the killer, by right;
Tiger, tiger, burning bright?

Copyright Koshy AV

Glopowrimo April 2019 (the journey so far)

I. Early bird prompt: "And now for our early-bird prompt (optional, like all our prompts!) Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poetic self-portrait. And specifically, we’d like you to write a poem in which you portray yourself in the guise of a historical or mythical figure. "

Self-portrait as .....

I am hanging between earth and sky
Breathing difficulty
Those who love me are far below
And somewhere up above is the Sky
When I cough it becomes thunder
The Sky answers with lightning
These are the words of my roaring
No one else answers
The drops of my sweat and blood
mingle
with the dust of the earth and the heat
Each drop has a cascading effect
From my eyes as they fall they seem to splinter
into the faces of millions
of drops
and shine
in the pitiless sun
tomorrow to be reborn
as a million different people
infused with my life and breath
Dead, buried, resurrected, ascended or not
The truth will be I will live on
in a million different others
Not in the ones who did not
but in the ones who will
My hunger for love
as vast as this Sky
in the echoes of always
eternity and infinity
being, from now on, fulfilled.

II. April 1
"For our first (optional) prompt, let’s take our cue from O’Neil’s poem, and write poems that provide the reader with instructions on how to do something. It can be a sort of recipe, like O’Neil’s poem. Or you could try to play on the notorious unreliability of instructional manuals (if you’ve ever tried to put IKEA furniture together, you know what I mean). You could even write a dis-instruction poem, that tells the reader how not to do something."

#Glopowrimo1

Instruction manual for poets

1.Better to be known by everyone
than to know everyone
so you can concentrate
concatenate your magic brew or potion
made of frogs, wood shavings and puppy dogs' tails
or lipstick, gloss and mascara's aid

2.Write to be the best
but don't rest
When you send things out and get rejected
remember it was only a misfit
and when you get accepted
don't take the credit lest you become lazy but
ascribe it to the same stars you were aiming for or at

3.The secret is to write
in such a way that
you write your heart out
so everyone reads you
but no one lets on
as they are jealous
as they get accepted
but they see burning in your poems
a fire
Icarus-like
in flight, without wings
soaring sunwards, higher than the heights
and just like Narayanathu branthan
roll your poems up Poetry Hill
then let let let let let them roll down
to the ground
and laugh
uproariously
whether they float or flail
on the ground
& whether they win, or they fall and fail.

III. April 2

Today’s prompt (optional, as always) is based on this poem by Claire Wahmanholm, which transforms the natural world into an unsettled dream-place. One way it does this is by asking questions – literally. The poem not only contains questions, but ends on a question. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that similarly resists closure by ending on a question, inviting the reader to continue the process of reading (and, in some ways, writing) the poem even after the poem ends.

The wall melts suddenly
Then I find it's under me
The devil is after me
Money takes wing and flies away
My health is a pool at my feet that I try
To make freeze into a piece of ice and put back inside
My body. Someone has my throat knifed.
I lie on my bed, stiff as a board
If I move I will be engraved
Too young for that, I do not stir
No dreams interrupt my ragged fight for breath
I'll get up and go for a syringe
A change of medicine will be, right now, just like a refreshing change of scene
It's death I am fighting, but I am not afraid
We fought many times before and each time we failed
To bring it to any definite conclusion
It can still go this way or that like the walk of a drunken inebriate
As for God, God is silent as usual
I put a coin in the slot of the jukebox
And hear relaxing music, deep-sleep refreshing music
Sounds of Nature, something something Hertz (582?), but I forget just how much it was
For six hours or eight hours
Or non-stop Christian hymns
Or worship music that gentles
Or old Malayalam film songs
Or what my Dad used to play
Country-classic gospel songs starting with Jim Reeves
All listened to for healing thatcdoes not come when I am in my sleep
I put a coin into the cup of God as if I am begging him to bless me
I put a coin into the cup of the watchman, the one who stands at the gate, and the doorkeeper
Then I run out of coins so it cannot become thirty
Three is the number of the ones in 'Tolstory'
I once loved a woman who probably loved me
Now she always and only lies to me
Whenever I tried to make the coin clink back in those days then it worked
But my fever I could not pass on when she twerked
Soon she was a tree and someone an axe
Who brought between her and me a tax
Of separation, a divide of contortion
A contraption of four legs that had no name but crawled
It crept into my blood like black ink in a cauldron
And as for all the others, they were axed into perdition
By me who could not stand for an instant any key
That could set me up or put me down to be
To end a long story or cut it short is to let it grow a tail
Am I sheep, pig, horse or donkey? I am unable to make avail
Of butterflies, sisters and three or four women in jail
I don't say it but I am pretty sure God is punishing me for my sins
I wish to stand up but when I sit down I'm on the windowsill
I look down, and the distance is too short to jump and kill
Myself. And there are no faces down there wanting me not to for me to get a thrill
And feel wanted. Just empty street. No kissing or whispering lovers, or songbirds trilling even, still.
My head was spinning and I was falling before reaching the end of the till
They may call it attempted suicide but as for me it was just a home-run of the ill.
A commonplace thing, when the pupa or coccoon

breaks, becomes a wet butterfly. But does it take to crooked wing?

(My poem hopefully does the opposite of the prompt)

IV. April 3
And now for today’s prompt (optional as always). Today’s prompt is based in a poem by Larry Levis called “The Two Trees.” It is a poem that seems to meander, full of little digressions, odd bits of information, but fundamentally, it is a poem that takes time. It takes its time getting where it’s going, and the action of the poem itself takes place over months. Today, I’d like to challenge you to similarly write something that involves a story or action that unfolds over an appreciable length of time. Perhaps, as you do, you can focus on imagery, or sound, or emotional content (or all three!)

Glopowrimo #3

Trivandrum: The 70s

You meet them, the mynahs, on the streets.

'One for sorrow
two for joy
three for a letter
four for a' ...
There you get stuck
so you listen, instead
to their whirring wings
(fluttering: small, chattering windmills)
their "key key key keeeeeeys" -
your home-brown smalls, their slender lives
see their black-and-white sprinkled, dark-brown coats
a variant of the crow-pheasant's browns
those yellow-ringed eyes, their dainty masks

Jeddah: 2009?

You see them again
They are not the same 'thems'
You, not the same you
Even the century, become new
The coconut trees replaced by palms
But the heart -
That longs only for some 'loving kindnesses'
and a few 'tender mercies',
'better than life' -
feels time fall away
and the dust of the past, of a space you love
settle again
on your parched lips
awhile.

V. April 4 "And now for today’s (optional) prompt, inspired by Teicher’s poem “Son“. One thing you might notice about this poem is that it is sad, but that it doesn’t generate that feeling through particularly emotional words. The words are very simple. Another thing you might notice is that it’s a sonnet – not in strict iambic pentameter, but fourteen rhymed, relatively short lines.

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own sad poem, but one that, like Teicher’s, achieves sadness through simplicity. Playing with the sonnet form may help you – its very compactness can compel you to be straightforward, using plain, small words.

Happy (or sad, we guess) writing!"

Glopowrimo #4 - A Roseate Sonnet
Self imposed exile for God knows what or why or what it means to Not Be There/Around

Life and Love are the great betrayers
Judas and Brutus, their embodiments
But even ordinary men, my mate
Can be or feel betrayed by indifferent Fate

As a child, his mother taught him to cycle
Along with his father. till he was happy not to topple
Off its saddle, but when he became a parent of three 'tenders'
He could not be there to run behind his kids' wobbling fenders

The women he loved and he were always parted
The things he wished he'd learned remained dear, but departed

Rose, sadness wears your brightest red hues
Oft, as the colour of a ghastly wound
Seen from the inside, pulsating, raw
Ever not healing, red as an infected craw

©®Koshy AV

Setu ....................... सेतु: The Increasing Relevance of Rabindranath Tagore f...

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pinakinikoshy trial

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Wake Up, India: Essays for Our Times – Dalits in the Spotlight during 2014- 18 BJP Rule

https://countercurrents.org/2018/06/27/wake-up-india-essays-for-our-times-dalits-in-the-spotlight-during-2014-18-bjp-rule/

Best Researcher Academician Jazan University English Department 2018

Dear friends , 
Happy to inform you that Jazan University has given me the BEST RESEARCHER/ACADEMICIAN AWARD of 2018 of the English Department presented to me by the Dean, and Vice Deans of Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Abu Arish College, Jazan, Saudi Arabia. First time ever, so I also enter (their) history. Reward for seven years of non stop hard work.
Also that the President of the University received from me gifts of my/our books Scream and Other Urbane Legends by Dr Koshy AV and LiFi PublicationsSilhouette I & II And Other Short Stories featuring Eternal Linksand Allusions to Simplicity by Authorspress: Publishers of Scholarly Books. Could not give the other books not having them.

Resurrection Day

Copyright Koshy AV

After the battles
after the wars
after the arrest, 'the torchlight red on sweaty faces'
after the betrayals, the denials, the trial
after the scourging, the spit and the mocking
after the falling, the weight, and the hoisting
after the desertions, and death, e'erything marred
despite the nails and the crown of thorns
despite the spear in the side and the wounds bleeding
despite the dark grave after the dying

After the thinning of the hair
After becoming more and more bald
After the black becoming the grey
After the paunch and the becoming ugly
After being one step closer each minute
To the fall of the final curtain for all

Despite everything
despite everyone
despite hunger, thirst, loneliness, grief, suffering and gall
despite the hurt, the pain, the sweat and the tears
despite it all
I find myself, still standing tall
far from the strife, the din and the fray
Despite fighting face to face
with the evil one who wanted to destroy me
I still have come to Resurrection Day
My feet have not stumbled, I did not fall
It was the stone that was rolled away
I am the Truth, the Life and the Way
The light of the world
Let no one now say
'Beyond here lies nothing'
It is a 'new morning'
"Fear not." Over such ones death no more has sway.

YES

The music of YES has accompanied me from childhood. Heart of The Sunrise carried me away into melody. Jon Andersen's girlish voice suited them perfectly and I had never heard a drummer as different as Bill Bruford. Wakeman stole the show with his Moog synthesizer in Close to the Edge and Steve Howe was also a class apart as an acoustic and lead guitarist, unique. As for Chris Squire, late, he was the only one who played bass like it was like lead. For me Yes started and ended with them, except for Trevor Rabin bringing in a  breezy, welcome, fresh, change of pop air in once. I agree with the Hitler meme video that Yes was them and like how LOTR music should be and produced nothing much of significance after Going for the One but for their classic YES period of five albums meaning Fragile, Close to the Edge, Relayer, Tales from Topographical Oceans and Going for the One they are up there with Genesis, King Crimson, Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and secondarily Marillion.  And 90125 makes for a good change from their usual style, as an album.

A White should also be mentioned, of course, as the drummer, but for me he never matched Bruford.

Happy they have been finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, at least in 2017.

Yes has had many other members over the years but only Tony Kaye matters to me of them and Peter Banks for nostalgia and sentimentality's sake, as well as Patrick Moraz. Igor Khoroshev needs passing mention.

Something needs to be said about Buggles' Trevor Horn as singer and Geoff Downes on keyboards as well as  DRAMA which is a fine album after the lacklustre TORMATO.

Heart of the Sunrise (FROM FRAGILE)


Finally, there is no Yes without the art of Roger Dean.

The pic is that of Union Yes which has all the members inducted into the HALL OF FAME

The image has Andersen, Wakeman, Bruford and Howe.


AND YOU AND I (FROM CLOSE TO THE EDGE)

For more information on YES line-ups and albums the best page is this one: http://yesworld.com/we-are-yes/

Metapfiction

Some other place, somewhere, some other time - a tentative start to a novel that may be renamed later

It must have been so. There, then he might have been a man and treated her cruelly while here, now it is just the opposite. He is still a man but being treated cruelly by her, a woman. This makes it symmetrical, aesthetic, if nothing else and hence, in that way, a matter of satisfaction. This does not lead to any kind of satisfaction, however, such a thought. What matters is not to be treated with cruelty and not treating someone cruelly.  Of course, there are no other lives or planets or universes, it is here itself that they have both been one thing or the other to each other. The blame is equally distributed or apportioned as is the praise. It is only in such encounters that one finds out how much of the worst and the best one can have brought out in one and bring out in the other. Looking at it in that sense such encounters are truly significant as harbingers of self-knowledge, if not worth having or beneficial. Maybe they are that too. Maybe in the long run, they turn entirely poisonous or malignant or entirely benign, like cancer cells, if such a thing is possible.


Metafiction - This won't be there in the final draft probably.

The thing about writing a novel is this: where does one start? The form itself is puzzling in 2016 December. Is it about writing a lakh of words? Or is it about passion and intensity? Is it form and genre, structure, style, language, mood, ambience, atmosphere, plot, story, characters, characterization, settings, details, feelings and emotions, points of  view and all the other things he teaches like exposition, rising action, conflict, confrontation, complication, climax, falling action and resolution? Is it having a giant vocabulary and having an impeccable grasp of grammar and syntax as well as dialects and registers and a feel for the language as it is used now and was and will be later? Using lakh reveals one's nationality. "Where do I begin? To tell the story of how great a love can be?" "Let's start at the very beginning." But where does 'a great love story' begin?  One that is 'older than the sea'? And 'younger than the mountains'? Is he a plagiarist for using all these quotes? No. He puts them in double or single quotation marks and it does not matter in creative writing. Is this going to be just that or something more? Can he roll all three stories he wants to into it plus the story of the nation or nations he has been in to make it what he really wants to, an epic novel like the ones the Russians wrote. The novel had died after them. Tagore's Gora and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Anandmath and Lalithamabika Antharjanam with her novel that included Gandhi in it were all written in its heyday in a sense by their getting to know of the greats only later and so they had been still been able to write 'proper' novels. Every great novel after that was proof of its deconstruction, be it Ulysses or Death of Virgil or American extravaganzas like Gravity's Rainbow which he hated and could not finish or Beckett's classics or any other novel that still mattered after the Russians, especially after Anna Karenina. This dissolution of the well-made novel existed even in War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago. It could be seen even in Jude the Obscure and in the fact that Dickens could not finish his last Drood novel.

He is that rare phenomenon, a great writer stuck in the past in a world that no longer cares for such a gigantic misnomer or freak and he wants to write a novel, this one - part of a trilogy but starting with the last one first and not yet knowing how to go about it but feeling his way.

It makes for good reading, though, as it always did.

One could start with repetition. That is how one always starts. The first woman he loved was his mother. Then his sister. After Freud, no such statements are possible without admitting that it is all incest, too, of some kind or the other. Oedipus complex. What is the word for sister love complex? He does not know. There must be one. Sibling love, probably. Interesting. Must google it or look it up. Musil was the one who dealt with it in his classic incomplete novel. Diotima and Ulrich. The novel had killed him or he had died while writing it. Would this one kill him too?

GSA, it seems.

'Roll call of names. Names fly in the wind.' He has written of it in Anamika too and thus in a diary ages back and was now writing it here again. This would not do, one does not talk of love by listing out the names of every girl or woman he had ever had a crush on as if it was a poem or a shopping or laundry list. That does not lead to the novel - what would lead to it is planning, research, preparation, writing, perfect execution - the things he blamed Modi of not doing regarding demonetisation.

So where does one begin?

Humour?

Some other place, somewhere, some other time - a tentative start to a novel that may be renamed later

It must have been so. There, then he might have been a man and treated her cruelly while here, now it is just the opposite. He is still a man but being treated cruelly by her, a woman. This makes it symmetrical, aesthetic, if nothing else and hence, in that way, a matter of satisfaction. This does not lead to any kind of satisfaction, however, such a thought. What matters is not to be treated with cruelty and not treating someone cruelly.  Of course, there are no other lives or planets or universes, it is here itself that they have both been one thing or the other to each other. The blame is equally distributed or apportioned as is the praise. It is only in such encounters that one finds out how much of the worst and the best one can have brought out in one and bring out in the other. Looking at it in that sense such encounters are truly significant as harbingers of self-knowledge, if not worth having or beneficial. Maybe they are that too. Maybe in the long run, they turn entirely poisonous or malignant or entirely benign, like cancer cells, if such a thing is possible.

I gave you my everything, finally
Because I never will, again

When you finally get really, really hurt
it ceases to matter if it was meant or not
if to hurt was the intention from the other side
or it was only the ignorance of selfishness
There's just the shock of getting hurt
of knowing something this time got broken
and that it cannot be repaired
There's only the tears you never shed
There's only the blood you never bled, in this place
The lonely room and the empty space
When you really get hurt, hurt, hurt.

A couplet

I would of have been glad to stay
If only you had not driven me away