Text – Falguni Roy
Script – Sharmy Pandey
I, a human being walk from the womb to the funeral pyre
And reap my very own soul from the refrigerator of wilderness
I, a human being can both love and pee
To wash-off my nightmares and in thirst I can use water
in two different ways
By the side of your reality this is my celebration of suicide
This song of my self-desired death
Here with words free from speech all must be done
And I stare in the light of the urban neon
By my solitary shadow not your outline
but in my body a tail
I am without relief just a man wrapped in his fate
Just a man with no destiny wrapped in his violence
Without a party flag I live
Without a woman’s love, I live
In the burning sun to listen to Tagore, I live
Paki soldiers from Bangladesh, Yankee mines from the Tong-King
shores and from behind the sand bag barricades of Calcutta the army
has moved out…. China-Nixon treaty has happened
Jeeps to the moon, wheat to India, soldiers to Vietnam and competitors
to the Olympic have been sent by black and white America
Once upon a time our hearts brimmed with love
Now my cashless-ness has eaten into all feelings
Even rebels can’t make ends meet
Dialogue1 – Perhaps the belly pre-empts a bellyache
Life pre-empts hunger
Dialogue2 – Well said buddy, so life pre-empts hunger, eh!
I have seen the moon as a pyre on flames
on an empty stomach….
Why on earth did you seek nirvana Goutama Buddha you fool
In the land of the muse and darling damsels, India
Who the hell seeks nirvana?
Lord Buddha in place of non-violence we want peace
to flow out of the barrel of a gun
Dialogue3 – Where the fuck have you been so long?
In truth I need to lapse into a magical death
In the muddy movement of viscous amoeba of my life
I hurl carbon dioxide to the cunts of damsels
The burning pyre evokes in me not death but lust
Lazy rascal am I from time to time I seek a life
of a whore’s pet
Standing here with a charminar between my lips
I hear from the chill and warm vapor of blood
the mysterious footsteps of poetry
I listen besides the poetry the shout and abuse of the soul
Right here
The hazy moon of evil hope flows down the
menstrual blood of whores
I am a beauty monster
If god was at hand I would have buried
his live flesh and fed it to the devil
In the locality where the prophet was burnt
I was born, a debauch by birth
Sleeping with other men’s wives
according to me is Tantrik bindusadhana
How terrible this existence
On my left lung lives love on the right perversion
From my phallic arousal I have come to know
telepathic communication
I have come to see there is nothing apart in between
the rich and the poor the bourgeois and the communist
Yet some die lighter than feather
Yet some die heavier than hills
Who winds up my cardiac clock
Who would pay the price of the heart?
Who would provide paper and ink for poetry?
In sickness who would provide care and health?
In hunger who would provide succor?
In love who would give me the beloved?
Can the state give all???
Can communism transform the failed to the succeeded?
Can socialism make a good poet of a bad?
Food clothe shelter we demand
Women and poetry we demand
Intoxication we demand pure and unadulterated
Art is our intoxication
Writing is our intoxication
Intoxication is our sense of hunger
We don’t want to be killed
nor the killer
Instead of being martyred making martyrs of
class-enemies is what we want
Like the mute lonely divine
A wondrous silence exists at the depth of our creation
Without the colour of money the pimp of the whore and the father of the bride
never relent their charge to us.
With the ash of this whorish civilization on us should we then fold our phallus beneath our folds and become hermits?
No, I have no contention with men
To arrive you have to be born with an air-bottle in your heart.
Day after day my heart and my intestines I munch as I chew
I mock the imperishable soul to the stars for the taste of eternity
For the sake of love I am aware of retribution
Poet Jibananda
Of all he saw of the celebration of labour of those swine
Of all he heard of the moaning of those swine
Their descendents
The descendents of the descendents
Still scream around me
I do not know if my poetry can stop that scream
Let me live beyond death
Not in the inescapable sexuality of a woman in the child
But let my being throb in the flesh of my words
I cannot write
I cannot write a word
The existence of books, wisdom
And the Brahma of the alphabet the Brahma of all meaning
Surrounds me
Despite my defiance of obedience
I remain till the end
A slave of my inner being
Translated from Bangla by Graffiti Team’
Falguni Ray was born on June 7, 1945 and died young on May 31, 1981. He wrote only forty-two poems and six prose pieces in a span of five years. His oeuvre was included only in one sleek volume titled Nashto Atmar Television (The Television Of A Lost Soul), the publication of which on 15th August (Indian Independence Day) 1973 had been hailed by the famous postmodern poet and critic Utpalkumar Basu as 'signifying the end of modernity in Bangla poetry, on the same scale as the destruction of Machine For Living Building in USA in 1972.
Sharmy Pandey a young contemporary poet, a self taught artist and now a filmmaker.
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