21. Someday I Expect
Someday I shall die.
Someday my shell shall reunite
With my tired mind in decay.
That day I expect my wife to weep.
I expect sis to laminate my lines
Leave them in my casket
To eternal sleep.
I expect besties, friends and adjuncts
To family to speak like sages
Humbled by my finality
Then break from reveries
Through meet-and-greet with
Kith and job prospects.
I expect chatter over my cold body
Perhaps a punchline or two
And, by its end, my lifelong company
To bury me in a hole in a ground
Be merry and live life just fine.
I also expect worms to enjoy.
22. Fever Heat
Down in lands level and low
Melted laptops and phones fry like fried eggs
On red rubbles of soil and stone
Once called sidewalks. There rest bones
Of walkers rattling in rowdy winds—
Moving at last on footpaths, not paved roads besides!—
Where brown cars broken in
Are home to hornets and hot nests.
Vultures scuffle to scavenge, while
Rats share and vomit over green paper.
23. Economics of Poetry
Aha! I see you have made that deranged decision
Borne from hay-headed ambition
To profit from your sour air,
Treat your shrink like toilet paper
And wager your wares as poet!
Join the club!
Find like-minded merry hypocrites
Throttling each unit of feeling
Till euthanized in empty verse!
Befriend mates better or worse
At alluding to Shakespeare’s earring
For nothing really
Spare saving crap lines
From butchery and jibes!
And, God save you,
Should real sentiment arise
And threat splitting through your skull,
Bleed it dry by writing it out
In as many limericks, sonnets or couplets
As you can count!
No man, woman or poet claims
To read cantos of mumbo-jumbo
Unless they lie.
Spread your thoughts to spread your wings
You never know when
That well of fans will dry!
24. Why Try?
Let us be brutal, incisive and vicious beings
As our predecessors—
Who rampaged from land to land
Without remorse, breeding biases
Like bastards and runts
Because they knew they liked to.
Why temper our temper? Why expend energy
On fairness, feed a famished polity
Congratulate the participants
Conscript yourself to the same wife
Deal with anxiety in polite life?
Why not nuke it all
Since it seems we are racing there
After all?
25. [Untitled]
Cherry-top Eric, waste to good parents
Laments life like misplaced pencils.
P.S. I hid behind the moniker of TINTA since the account was opened on Instagram. Truth be told, this has always been my natural impulse. If I had my way, none of my works would be attributed to me. I write a lot of miserable stuff, which I don’t want attributed to my character. I am proud of my writing, but it is also comfortably the worst of me—where my most cynical, nihilist and antisocial tendencies come to fruit.
For a while, I hoped I could hide behind TINTA forever. Perhaps anonymity is cowardice, but it has always been my impulse. But people tell me there’s nothing sustainable about the moniker strategy—that I must put my name, centralize my content, ensure I take credit for everything in a brutal industry, blah blah blah.
So, briefly, let me introduce myself: I am Neil Nagwekar from Mumbai, India.
I don’t plan on abandoning the moniker TINTA though. Because there is a story behind TINTA, and I think it will take quite some time for it to be completed.
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