"The mind is a drunken monkey"
                                         -M.K.Gandhi

half-past midnight, with the rusty voice of a dead man singing romance into my ears, i decided it was time to start dying, becasue living had gone out of style...and so i said to the monkey,
"start dyin' your dudeness, coz livin's gone outta style,
when the lifeworld gets bureaucratized, you are nothing but information on a file, or a floppy,
and your existence gets carbonized to a copy of a copy of a copy."

skipping corporeal milestones, leapfroging from one body to another,
cutting himself free from the viscous web of failed relationships,
the monkey seeks salvation in the cluttered nothingness of hostel rooms;
nothingness punctuated by Marx, Foucault, Bhagat and Sartre,
ethnoscapes of a student life glowing in the golden dampness of the dim table-lamp light,
deamplifying darkness and mediating memory through amnesiac tunes flowing along the moist edges of beer mugs;
lifelines dotted with two beds and two tables, an old dusty computer, some old dusty books, half a pack of marlboro reds...
and some half-burnt fragments of a third-world life lying stubbed face-down,in the forced ashcan,
colonised and re-colonised by the assembly line of the empire.

and amidst all this, the monkey stays drunk....on romance mostly,
watering tiny revolutions with idealisms,
and then wails watching them burn down to ashes against the simmering winds of pragmatism.
it consumes Palestine, Darfur, Iraq, New orleans, Gujjars, Gorkhas and Monks,
smokes up with nicotine the lefts taken by the right and the rights crushed by the left...
and seeking purpose in its refusal to barter magic for fact,
the monkey floats down the undepths of nihilism,
asserting the annihilation of the self as the ultimate expression of existence..

CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME FINISH IT?

mahim P singh