Hot summer days,

Blazing sun’s rays,

The good, the bad’n’ ugly:

Traffic jams

Like Hoover dams,

And early evenings bugly

EXUBERANCE

Poet : Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar

The evening,

Caught between light and shade

The rain falls,

The sky drizzles!

Repeatedly,

See how

The eager wind

Knocks the door-

Expected, unexpected!

Far and near,

In fields, in market places and on the crossroads,

Impassioned,

And knowingly getting trembling-wet

Is the beloved’s body!

 

 Saturday night
and I’m too young
for Honky Tonk Man and Hulk Hogan
at 11:30 P.M. on NBC.
It’s Saturday night
 half an  hour in
and I’m a confirmed Mark.
This goes on,
my enjoyment
for almost 30 more years,
the enjoyment, the pay per views at Josh’s attic apartment,
Ric Flair winning the ‘92 Rumble
after entering third
with no hope,
and Bobby Heenan moaning.
Josh’s mom used to bring dinner home
from the Clifton Club,
and I’d sit and thumb through
PWI.
"It’s fake, you know?"

 "A Summer’s Sunday"

I need exotic music
steel drums
and African beats
stay
rough with me
cold wet lips
and taste heady flavors
savor, put your hands up
put your hands on me and breathe…
I need exotic music,
the pulsating, pounding of drums and incense and love
and lust and get
rough with me
get
inside my head and halfway down my throat
taste
taste fingertips and prints and smell new scents
heady like love and sex and garlic, roasted.
be strong with me
be strong for me
get
rough with me
I need

I am a poet
I work in a bookshop
sounds like bliss
a pig in shit
yes and no
the beancounters measure value
by sales per square metre
poetry suffers
quality suffers
I argue
and argue
they punish
less hours
less poetry

I spit in the face
of any advocacy
of corporatism

When Ms. Carrie tired,
Her patience long expired,
Of her pony’s begging,
She cried, “Go, horse! Shoe!
I’m off to merry Malibu,
Thence to Mall Gibraltar
To buy an extra legging,
A spanking new canoe,
A pink bra peek-a-boo---
Plus a frilly halter …
For the likes of you.”

a true-blue atheist

was painfully abused

and forcefully accused—

by an ex-pacifist— 

of a dereliction

of belief in fiction