To Ginsberg

“The weight of the world is love.
Under the burden of solitude,
under the burden of dissatisfaction
the weight,the weight we carry is love. ” 
―     Allen Ginsberg 

The destitute old man's
mumbo-jumbo
follows me around
his eyes
have some of my questions
Across cities, centuries , continents
loneliness has the same texture
I listen to Ginsberg
and following my inner moonlight
I show my madness
the world turns away
like dubbed cartoons
who speak a foreign language
merely mouths move
conversations are long dead
heads buried in smartphones
hearts buried even deeper
all of us
are yellow sunflowers inside
looking for a sun
the soul howls
at lighted cities
and the fountain of darkness
spilling over
threading colored beads
on a string
I think of Ginsberg, Kerouac
and Rumi
we the damned
unclassifiables !

pilgrimage inside

Each one waiting
someone to confirm
that they are special
the only one

at the core
each one has
laid down their arms
at the feet of
their ordinariness

on the same pilgrimage
sans religion or belief
all of us
oblivious of
our individual purpose

searching,finding
giving up
back to searching

too many drafts
on my mind
"-so you write?
what exactly do you do?"
People ask while thinking
of something else


I go back to
Eliot in a mental asylum\
Bukowski in a drunk stupor
and sit by Hemingway
watching the sea
waiting for a road trip
with Kerouac

the last image
on the mind's eye
is where the heart is.

Kerouac's soup for the writer's soul

Jack Kerouac's "Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" is one of my personal favorites in all of modern literature for its fresh insights into the writer's mind.Here are some of my connects/comments/reactions to a few of these essentials(in brackets).The original text is in italics.

• Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy (the most important word in writing is joy,your writing should be your joy,if it isn't that forget about it.
• Submissive to everything, open, listening (erasing your slates often to make space for new words,experiences and writing.)
• Be in love with yr life ( life is the canvas,the blank space and the mosaic its both,love this amazing thing.)
• Something that you feel will find its own form (form is incidental to content,it will come if you have the content to fill the shoes of form)
• Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind (let the thoughts flow from where they are coming,don't put check posts,they dilute the essence.)
• The unspeakable visions of the individual (if you are a writer worth your salt,find a word,make a word for the unspeakable and ensure it fits and conveys.)
• Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition (the world will not end with a spelling error but it might be less meaningful without a worthy thought expressed,so let the technical loose,if not all,a few.)
• Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind (the poems,novels and plays are all there,you have to strive to make them tangible on paper and screens)
• No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge ( every context you bring to your work deserves due respect,your craft would be lesser without it.) 

Original extracts from the text - Jack Kerouac. "Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" from a 1958 letter to Don Allen, in Heaven & Other Poems, Grey Fox Press, 1958, 1977, 1983.]