Vivek Narayanan #2: Current Materials, an Invitation

Hello my compadres,

Here below some of the ‘materials’ I’m currently working with.  I get a great many of them just by burrowing through the footnotes and commentaries.  I may find a way to turn these into poems, smuggle them into real? full-bodied? poems, or not. 

I would welcome you all to please feel free to incorporate, argue with or zing off these in your own texts.  Please do feel free!  Death to copyright!  (Sorry)  I am interested to see how you imagine these materials with your own.

p.s. – Rather than using confusing diacritics, I’ve tried to do phonetic spellings of the Sanskrit words.

Vivek

Current Materials

layhyaan – “lickable foods”

the commentator quoted
         his grandfather’s poem
   to explicate a line of epic

maha-veygah – “very fast”

when mountains had wings
the scourge among gods
      was to amputate them

roorodha hrydaye praanaan –
                  stopped   in his heart   those breaths

Vivek Narayanan #1: 'Same Words': a response to Cui Yuwei's 'Key Words'

See Cui Yuwei's Key Words here.

Same Words

            Looked at me thinking I was one of them,
      did the foreigners living in my city. 
  They like to wear grey and recite
          Bukowski.  These people!  Such beggars
            of attention, such fancy merchants
 of fart and feces and pee!  How the hell do they think
  they can get away with using all the same words, just culled
  from the sorting of the poems of the year?  Nothing but
 disabled mouthpieces, prostitutes!  I’m not one of them, believe me, believe me.

           (on a bus  the only other passengers
        my mom and her daughter
      later I’ll keep the story
  from the students in my class, disappear
          behind the peasant workers of
                   a textbook’s pencilish sketch)