Jerked Meat: Devi Prasad Mishra
i followed
i followed a man who bought a grilled chicken at Kentucky and
looked out the glass and talked against me and made up a language
not known to me. he walked down the street in his
car and entered his home in the car and shut me out of his chase. i can see him
sitting at his window sipping his wine. i need a politics as desperately
as he needs a catnap.
transitive verbs
i wrote poetry and followed a woman
who did not disappear till she handed her charm to
someone like her. i walked along the river and then crossed it and then
lived by one and then sullied the walls of the home. in the marketplace
i can say for sure I was replaced.
trucks
trucks ply all night
it is also the time
to write
which also is the time for
murderers to kill
and lovers to elope
and novelists to know of their
mediocrity
i see commodities strewn on the internet-
sperm and blood and counter-revolutions
trucks full of vegetables and petrol and
grain and clothes pass by
where do they reach who do they feed
who do they home as stories of hunger don’t abate
trucks ply all night
poets write all night
crisis
the dogs the ambulance the police van
bark and blare out in unison
there is crisis in the city which is
the extension of the crisis
in the economy which is the extension of the crisis in politics
which is the extension of the crisis in the cabinet which is the
extension of the crisis in the language which is the extension
of the crisis in the corporate
which is the extension of the crisis in the ideology
and Indology
the place
the place reeks of renaissance men and
renaissance women
their humanism smells
of jerked meat.