Goirick Brahmachari

Lying naked for hours together, we escaped to Wales for weeks.
You sang to me of Codeine, the vivid extraction process,
Sketched, step by step, in your journal.
The skeleton faces, your naked breasts, distilled encryptions-
Your self-portraits of your black hole flashes, your head rested on corners of the walls, trauma.
Existential fears, childhood, youth, substance, punk, abuse. My silent heaves.
Your sublime eyeliner presence, your aesthetic body, voice like that of the winds of the woods.
Watching the Bloodstock photos together, you sketched abstract images on my bare back.
How you coloured my nails with different shades. I miss cooking
For you when you were unwell. How you panicked when I became unconscious,
Testing my pulses every 5 minutes. Death then would have been a perfect ending.
The drunk impromptu singing sessions; the crazy Valentine’s feedback, ruminations about benzodiazepines
And opioids. The silent metro rides, drunk screams at pubs. The kitchen smoke. And, how I
Would always end up running down to your house through the grey late night,
Lost, every time, when all the gates are closed.
Only to taste your folklore dreamscape and the pasta that you would cook.
Colours of all colours, oh, the queen of anarchist performance masks!

All I am left with now are your whispers,
Some torn pages from your journals and a frozen
Rose that you had put between my teeth.

A purple leafless tree
How do you feel?
Thirsty
What is in your mind?
…
What do you want?
To die like a waterfall
Where do you want to go?
Where the roads melt into yellow rhyme
What do you love?
Slackery
What is in your mind?
…
What is in your mind?
…
What do you see?
End of the world
How do you feel?
…
How do you feel?
Scared
What do you hate?
Anything slick
How do you feel?
Insecure
What is in your mind?
Electric wires
What do you want?
Cigarettes
What do you see?
Radiating light
What do you hear?
Loud isochronic tones
What do you see?
…
What do you see?
…
What do you see?
Blue grass, green skies
What do you like?
Distortion
How do you feel?
Stifled
How does it taste?
My mouth is dry
What’s on your mind?
…
What’s on your mind?
…

I won’t die alone.
I have learnt that in a hard way.
It required years of drunken rants,
Months of nausea, anger, jealousy, and hate,
And crazy meandering and random,
Unsafe, interactions with strangers.
I have lost my money and I have lost my fame
I lost my self-worth and I have lost my ugly self
In an attempt to restore my mind.

But the day must finally
Spread its wings
After cold hard years of night
And like boats, we sailed together
And the hills were calling
And the sea forgot her name
And we lost ourselves in the idea of death
Only to start living again.

Memory is a needle and a long white cotton string
Stitching yesterdays in hope and loom
Only to hammer in this indestructible reality
Every time I try to pen down my gloom

It’s not about the pace
Nor about this race, or how one must slowly learn to earn some disgrace;
Why one chooses to do the dishes first
Or, for that matter loves sweeping the floor.
But the onions must be cut, the garlic peeled,
Washed one by one, left alone to dry.

You can move slow, you can be fast
Change your pace, slow-burn
The oil or speed heat the water
Bay leaf, salt, turmeric, cumin seeds. Sugar?
The choice is ours

Not to hold onto a set instruction
As long as the taste works.

editors note: The proof is in the pudding (if you like pudding). – mh clay

For U Srinivas and John Mclaughlin

A turn, a curve
A body bitten by a Gamaka
A slide, a deep swipe
of a fret-less life
Lovers stung by a Gamaka

A sloth, a murky sun
Bleeding fingers of a Gamaka
A wood of warmth,
that rubs your heart
A body aches in Gamaka.

A night dies between two notes
measures its distances through a Gamaka
The morning is drunk
The workers are out
Sleep has come to the old city in Gamaka

Rain has no gender.
Why are tears then often assigned gender roles? We, who defy, cry immersing
ourselves in rivers, for life is but a long hallucination of memory and miseries we cull. Love
and loss are often one and the same- they eat our brain cells like ants swarming over
stale, decayed bread by the side of your garbage bin, early morning.
I have lost count of my lovers in imaginary strawberry fields, now purple in evenings without
crowing crows. Often, I have tried to lose my memory. Sometimes by falling
in love to seek pain- sometimes by disappearing a little every winter.
And escape came running down the green paddy fields, through a broken shortwave
radio whining in pain
Or, in guitar solos that illuminated my lamp lit, power-cut evenings. Other times, in lyrics
we gathered from the album covers.
Skipping lunch, biking for hours under the hot, arid sun, saving
to buy, to listen to the songs that remind you of your favourite lover, the punishments you
received at the school, and so on. May be, crying was just an excuse.
I was probably just longing for some goosebumps.

The dust I have acquired over the years
has hid my eyes from all that is before me
And I rust, disappear a little from your memory
Your vision
It has been a slow ride
And now the hills have turned their back
And I am not exactly sad
Or happy, I can’t see very well.

1. An amateur explains Bop Part I

it throws you up
cuts you off
flirts with you
off
the
scale

it can run through your bones
in slow motion
slide.

It can
hang
like planets in the sky,
fall off the cliffs
fingers
keys

Jumps, catches you by your feet
It can
feed
a fat fish,
Slither inside your throat.
The double
bass now gives you a headache
sometimes in poverty
sometimes in rhyme.
who knows,
a river might just set itself free?

2. An amateur explains Bop Part II

run, run, run
money
The city has taken off its clothes
and it rains, naked bodies
window panes
sliding doors
escalators
evaporates into a smoke

the black hands

iron chimneys

waves
a sky of filth. above
lonely planets
who get high.
chemicals leak intestines.

The gods are in town and they are
burning the stage

one by one
they come and disappear

at odd hours of the night.

3. Coltrane

A cold train in rain.
A breeze through your veins
An acid in your throat.

Is he angry?
or is he just searching
the distance,
two points of time?

Hills breaks into rivers
Cage morphs into a bird

Hunger, an old trick.
In slavery, our freedom.
Through notes we can’t fathom
And a rhyme we have chosen to forget

An ancient snake breathes out her disgust.

4. Jazz for the have-nots

It is heavy like a thali.
A bag of stones over your chest.
It bleeds through the age, enslaves you
But they drink it with white wine

A city grown old
Counts its rage