Pop Nonstop

I learnt to fly
It was before I could drive
It was before I could hardly walk
When my father kicked my ass from the rooftop.

Oh boy, fun it was in those days
Just run and play along the tilted metal roof
Those days we’d wave to the CRPF men calling them bhaiya
We’d sing Rabindranath Tagore’s national anthem by rote   
Happily, smoothly, along with our-father-in-heaven prayers
And Ganga and Jamuna had a threesome with Jesus Christ.

And the jolt! The kick in the ass!
And I fell from the roof like a sparrow
The sort of a poor drenched ’parrow, just out of a pond
Just that I was an animal, and not a bird.

And I learnt to dive before I could swim
When another day my father hurled me into our pond
Like a circus monkey lost in a dreary town
I ingested, in twenty seconds of sinking, an eternal experience
Of darkness and nothingness, outside
Of a blunt physical experience, inside;

Father, those were nothing—with today’s life, living
But you are not even here to listen to these craps.
It is no surprise how anthems and prayers imply nada now
You wouldn’t know all these craps now. You wouldn’t.