When I Try To Create

I pray well now, when I try to create,

‘Can I use you?’ supplicate at love’s grave,

‘In a dubbed flick of old couples, him and us -

Face turned away, blank smiles, lying, near?

Let me empty albums full of yellowed past,

And fake diaries too. I hear well now, your silence.’

The show starts with an eerie whirring silence

That goes on and on and on used sets I recreate

The original, with extras in the cast,

Stunts, script, plot and actors grave,

Tales, leased or filched, from far and near,

Mixed-n-matched, ready to serve them and us.

Then at the temple, for the ninety nine per cent us,

In a hall smoky with angst and doubt, with silence,

With god, in the queue for dole nowhere near

Enough, cursing them for dreams sold cheap that create

Wants too dear, taking away all, all but the past,

Our dream to have their fate buried alive in a lost grave.

With bravado, without funds, with risks grave,

Into alleys dark and empty, hoping the queer old cuss

Luck will sell her wares to me, but that bitter kind past

Master in playing with the mind, with gags to silence

All protests, prods me to free-fall to create,

With hope ephemeral, vanishing before the end so near.

I spray paint my grey world with imitations near-

Perfect, I smash mirrors with no reflections of the grave

Of nameless faceless without genius to create,

I try to do it alone but I tag along, for my sake, (for us),

Behind a guru, a famous toad with broody studied silence,

A plath and/or a rushdie without her end and/or his fatwa past.  

There’s my last trick, the houdini act to escape my past -

‘Nothing sells better than guilt,’ says guru dear.

I try a woman’s cry, an outcast’s protest, a low-caste’s silence,

I pawn myself, pawed all over, crawling into my own grave,

Admitting, with self-pity and despair, there was never us,

Never love, never that self-destructing desire to create.

Effingo ergo sum, my dictum till last, as epitaph to engrave,

Or nothing, leaving silence and dead bouquets for me, (for us),

Truth left alone near the blank headstone, too lazy to create.