Tuesday, August 17, 2004

making love in literary theory

august, three years ago, seems like it was from a different world.... if one thinks about it too long.

since august, three years ago, i have shifted house four times - the last time being the beginning of this month, and into some sort of stability and happiness. (ah, the pleasures of jangpura extension, refuge in a refugee colony, a union in a community that was made by Partition. )

it s d's birthday today, and she was with me three years ago, in a house that was being rid of termites, while th cartons were still unpacked. i called her today, to leave a messgage on her phone, the first time i have made an attempt to do anything remotely communicative towards her in the past fifteen months.

the tragedy is that poetry, even bad poetry, can be prophecy... so a poem from three augusts ago.

Making Love in Literary Theory

Lips locked and groins grinding
Pushing against each other and against the packing cases
As the house falls down around us

Even before they move in
We make secret love among ruins
As the termites turn the cupboards to dust
As seeping insidious water turns
Cement to tunnel ridden mud
And makes bricks bulge out in sodden machismo
As plaster flakes and insecticide drips
On the disarrangement of our clothes
As the workmen on a floor above
Smash wood and punch holes into the walls
Like good theorists let loose on a text
Before putting it all back together again…

This is the house that Jahweh built
And our love is a random metaphor
A free floating signifier of the zeitgeist
We make love in a house that was rotten
Even before we decided to move in
And our love(making) is hidden
For how can there be
Passion in the time of termites
Love in the wind of locusts
So they deconstruct the world to make it habitable
And spray poison to make fields grow green
Spray mines and shrapnel to bring world peace
And spray jargon to make it all understandable
But as we stand under the drip of pesticide
As the world kills its own to make it better for its own
Love dies
In post-modernist undefinition

Don’t you wish that love was a cockroach?
Surviving weeks on end without a head
Without a thought as to why it was
Leaving Descartes rolling headless, heedless
And crawling through nuclear winter




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