i can recall that as a kid i got hooked onto words. tiny words. small understanding. simple thoughts. i remember fondly peeking into my father’s milton ( still have it 58 years later). & wham i could not but write poetry. & the rest has been a long journey in translation, discovery, rebelling and expressing. & let me tell you my best friend in this meandering has been my diary. never demands; ready to accept. & year after year i keep my diaries safely.

                 i can spend a whole night staring deep into my room and not arriving at anything. it could manifest in a dull interminable headache the next day. or an angst ridden poem; after all i need to be comforting myself. bless the spirit on those nights i need to escape. i can write a poem on these nights and demolish the warmth of relationships, the futility of philosophy or write paeans of the refuge of dark.

                 being sensitive, i can only feel. being introverted, i search. the more i try to fit into societal norms, the more i am uncomfortable. i need to set my own terms. my own meaning of what I have to organically exist. my belief being cerebral. the brain detects. & this detection i  try to convert into poetry. it confuses me to digest that poetry needs to be crafted. i would rather leave it raw and crude. being blunt and having to be understood thus, is what i aim at. to me the demand of embellishments reflects the need for acceptance. by whom?  these yardsticks bug me.

                 & coming back to poetry i never felt the need to be perfecting my writing skills. in any case, suggestions are welcome. while i’ve tried writing all sorts of poems i don’t know what kind of poetry i write. not that it matters. but just well the same.

                 religious bigotry makes me mad. after all, all religions teach you to be good. try this distillation. the answer is always the same. so what’s the big deal. i realised i don’t need religion to practise being good. i remember having rejected religion since the age of 10. & i haven't been worse of. i am still alive and sane(?).

                 i hate borders. i hate belonging to a country. i reason out, pre-historic man was after all a human being. where were the borders then? & if some escape annihilation which country would they belong to? we’ve shed more blood on that thing called nationality. remember colonialism, wars, nuclear tests. what purpose did any of these serve. i don’t know.

                 i hate governance. the politician master and his bureaucrat slave. you need to see how they have wreaked havoc in this part of the world. and maybe everywhere else.

                 i hate man’s injustice to man. war, capital punishment is the impoverishment of our collective conscience. only the poor die. the rich after all are the bloody icons of governance. i like to chip away at pedestals.

                 i try to pull down the cloak. fear, pain and death cannot be explained away by religion. we need to accept their inevitability.   i reject the ballyhoo of immortality. a born flesh is after all going to be dead ash. & that’s that.