These two poems are taken from a sequence featuring a ‘linguistic alter ego’, Mr. Subramanian. Other poems from the series can be found at The Manchester Review, Blackbox Manifold, Tehelka and Almost Island.

On the Necessity of Speaking of Caste

First the dreaded fear of caste, wearing its little corset
on trained and bumpy ribs. It stains your vision, corrugates
your fucking body, bawdy as it is and cussed and with
no language to speak of itself
outside of itself. Then a more
untethered fear, of a kind
of polarity, a cathode
leaping current into
the other eyes, a betrayal
a way of merely
repeating with each
denial; you cut away
that plaster cast but your limbs occupied
the same space
they did before. Always
the coast of saying too much versus
the inland of saying little. Often
the boast of castelessness
cast about while coarsening
the mixture in tentative
proffered proof, corset-
ripping, habit cleaning, cross-
questioning each minutiae of
self performance for evidential
taint. The problem is
you are no one,

least of all yourself, chatterbox, tubelight,
and any skin scanned curséd acre by curséd acre,
any videograph plotted image by captured
amputated frame, will not unearth the mounting
or final particular, will neither incriminate
nor exonerate. Better head for the coast
of everything, a trip you won’t
be coming back from, the death-salve
of total re-polarity; for yank that one thread
of caste and the whole shebang unravels
and no word is sacred: not culture, not history,
not ancestry, not identity, not community(!), not kismet, not daddy mummy
thatha pathi aham veedu vandi mooku paatu
chappal apple application beating nadai sakkarai confuse
suppose close decide—not even to mention the fruitless farce

of having to footnote the debacle. You can escape to those places
where they’ve barely heard of it then, a little joke, a quaint
curiosity of textbooks, casting yourself
across, casting yourself anew—with your English
in your secret pouch—but that is no escape. There the questions
that dogged your open eyes grow terrifyingly academic where
squared in the brace of not quite similar corollaries your amnesia
buries the whole bone—and the cost no longer shows up
on the balance sheet, even if you’re still
paying, back on the coast of caste where
the current is rapidly dragging you into
the deep and everything except the polarities
has shifted, for everything must always shift,
for your senses are no guarantee and
the easiest possible to destabilize
and the handshake of the everyday mocks you
in its forthrightness despite
the downcast eyes, cut across and overwritten and
underwritten by other feints
and fealties going far back or sprouting anew,
submerged deep below the public curse, the demure corset
of citizenship, the bearish casket of implication,
predestination, the cathode’s rays reaching to
turn you inside out while the wise
voices say—o silly Subramanian give it up, relax, cool it
with that pathetic irritating upper-caste self-flagellation
again, cool it with that uneasiness in yours or
anyone else’s skin, cool, the quicksand of your abstractions,
cast yourself into the waves, leave it alive, live
yourself, leave us alone—while the heavens open up
and the cussed gods and the cussed demons and the five missing castes
churn the land from the sea, draw out the everlasting distinctions
or at least the idea of distinction and the older boys
gamble over games in the street and the tailor sits in his little room
with the TV on and mends again the corset’s seam
and the night broadcasts itself in wave upon wave
up and down and up and down the simmering coast
and what is written comes back to haunt
what has not yet been written
and the dogs howl and bark and howl and the late
workman still hammers away at the building and
the foundation is ript from the earth
and the stars in truth know nothing of the future
and the clouds they smear the light
and the dust it rains from the sky.

A Mostly Friendly Argument with Wallace Stevens

Tell me, when did my countrymen first cultivate their disgust for verse?
Why to express itself only as blind unreasonable rage or blank servitude?
Let ashes form the season’s true lamina.
Now crack my skull on accidental stone.