since 1988 aditya bahl - deletepress.org€¦ · since 1988 aditya bahl “nothing will have taken...
TRANSCRIPT
since 1988 aditya bahl
since 1988aditya bahl
“Nothing will have taken place but the place.”
— Stéphane Mallarmé
a modular need
UNIT 1
6 7
beneath a brick façade a brick façade
ants who live in this house I don’t own know it
8 9
in my father’s dream a potato and my mother thoroughly washed
Tuesday I go to sit and watch
the waiter sit and watch the door
10 11
snow always whiter than the page it falls on
one’s a cloud two’s a company
three’s a counterfeit croc
12 13
in the azaan pauses a kabaadiwallah
calls
fellatio dreaming of misprints in an epistolary novel
14
the hole in the sock does the sock know
beneath white sheets the lady of the night is unbearable without my eyes
19
the lone word trapped inside a megaphone longs to be a stray cat
nightfall you let the empty grocery bag be in the fridge for one more day
22 23
lighting a beedi he becomes the draughtsman he is reflexively
some of the steel pillar shows thru parts of a skinny actress
24 25
once Plato sd
lots ofballotboxes
the coughing alone the neighbour too
wanting to separate from the apron one mends one says I once twice
28
CITY LIMITS a brick factory made of bricks
UNIT 2tch tch tch
32 33
ANDES
anda
UGHGH
certaincisternpistons
34 35
BUT
outofoats
BOUNDARY
dry laundry
36 37
BOULDERS
once her slow-lipped groangrown twice hard of hearing
I know the intimidating intimacy of free fries.
38 39
ITALIC
do lilac lean a lil
skyoffkey
m a y a k o v s k y
40
WHO
HOW
42 43
this endemic sordid static between f and f in of
tinnitusminusbison
incest in cents
44 45
DAMNED
dawndawned
CHORUS
once chores to the coarse ones
46 47
SEMBLANCE
a free sausage looks like one
48 49
ASKEWexcuse mesd icarus
OREO
or forhalo isdudedoleful
50 51
nkot
52 53
OH
back whenI wasa Russianpeasant
ONErunover
racoonrunover
54 55
the whole of weltanschauung is full of holes
SEA
of fs et
56 57
BOSOM
a boothitherconcealed
MALLARMÉ
the crisis ofmandatory crisisdrills
58
POLIS
enjoy your evening
60 61
substantial stilllife suggestsa stubbed toe
JEER
jesus tothe ear, sorryto the eye
62 63
DADDY
spurts of thatwhich hurta cam
DOLLARS
doloreson allfours
64 65
VARIANCE
littlelittle MARMALADE
for the simple tangible visible book
UNIT 3in lieu of surplus
68 69
where my decayed tooth once was now a word enters its grave
monthlytenement
hostagesituation
70 71
individuals only as individualin this world as individual
meat patties
behind a vacant tower dew has formed on the body ofa crushed coke can
72 73
having undressed my wife folds her robe first
tell the dangling the delphinium
first fell on your tongue
74 75
square the sparrows disperse as we approach then we disperse
76 77
inside a single roomthe body of his blue jeans
hangs on a single nail
every inflation my ancestors vow to reuse the value of tea leaves
78 79
a lone thesaurus in
hand in bed in Russia
on the verge of waking myself the pillow is being
80 81
concrete being two-dimensional but for the face of a splattered mosquito
82 83
lookalike
gourdsgourds
he listens to his radio while he oils his rickshaw
84
set in alabaster. The smelly feet of the rival intern
86 87
having to bite all my nails for whom reeds enjoying in the wind since 1988
88
each pine needle made of squares inside each square the twitching of a tourist’s glass eye
as he keeps wiping his prosthesis clean withthe body of her white camisole
92 93
eat praylovexerox
94 95
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
96 97
Some of these poems have previously appeared in ant ant ant ant ant, Lightning’d Press, Lilliput Review, Opon, Otata, and Otoliths.
Aditya Bahl is a member of Radical Notes, a Delhi-based Marxist collective. He is the author of & all (LRL Textile Series) and Three Theses on the End of the Poem (Aakar Books) both forthcoming in 2017. A chapbook titled this is visual poetry by aditya bahl was published in 2012.
since 1988© 2018 Aditya Bahl
Cover painting by Johannes S.H. Bjerg.
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