Deathwish

By Vivek Narayanan

I want to be sweet and clear and free, as half a line

of Auden, or an episode of the Powerpuff Girls;

I want to be dew, and honest with mine,

like Bob Marley, or Boesman the Boer.

I want to swing and get it right

at the speed of Pollock’s light,

I want to be deep like Zulu,

tight like Tamil,

and trust my sense of Sanskrit true

with little shame for its will.

I want to dabble in the fields

ignorant of what I was doing,

rub myself on the ruins

with a self-induced disease

and gleefully lapse

the hope to be heard. I want to fix

my favourite English words

into the forty-fifth century—

haw, for instance, or luminary—

hiding them in a snatch of prose…

passed over in silence

like Wittgenstein, no evidence

for myself or Laura Riding,

like Bharathiyar going mad composing,

I want to dissolve into our language

printing too little for my age;

I want to be obscure but not leaden,

flippant if I feel like it, then

I don’t mind being called poetically shitty

in a note from Manohar Shetty,

writing into the time we’ve borrowed,

singing from our utter boredom;

I want to hold in me the heat of my combustion

and leave this sweat-smear as a resurrection:

I want to be sweet and clear and free,

insouciant, insufferable, just like me.

Copyright Credit: Vivek Narayanan, "Deathwish" from Universal Beach. Copyright © 2011 by Vivek Narayanan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Source: Universal Beach (ingirumimusnocte, 2011)