Let me make no bones about it, Mr.Freud,
I have wracked my brains,
To know where you are coming from.
Where I am from, Mr. Freud,
Your subtleties and your caveats,
Your thousand insights into specifics,
Your bold assertions about generalities,
Sound like fairy-tale excursions into diseased minds.
I hear about the bride
Burned for dowry
By the surface monkey.
Thousands of brides
Burned by thousands of surface monkeys
In thousands of homes.
And horrific pictures from the war front,
Wars started by thousands of surface minds
That will give Cinderella to starving kids
And overlook the cinders of lost dreams.
Where is the magic wand
That can stop this malaise ?
Charity,
Like an inscrutable goddess,
Almost like a precious specimen in a museum
Show-cased to inspire awe,
Emerges in sporadic spurts of munificence,
To spreads her arms.
There’s my sculpture.
She is fully clothed.
That’s charity !
The dungeons of the mind
Carry wonderful gifts indeed !
Amidst the dread of hunger
And the nagging persistence of misery,
How do you coax archaic behemoths
To sanity ?
Tell me, and I will listen,
Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides,
Say the ancient Hindu seers.
Should we go looking for instinctual streams
That have evaporated in historical time ?
Or sift through the ceaseless refrains of our discourse,
Running in autocratic grooves,
For centers of meaning ?
by Choudhury Jayant Praharaj
I have wracked my brains,
To know where you are coming from.
Where I am from, Mr. Freud,
Your subtleties and your caveats,
Your thousand insights into specifics,
Your bold assertions about generalities,
Sound like fairy-tale excursions into diseased minds.
I hear about the bride
Burned for dowry
By the surface monkey.
Thousands of brides
Burned by thousands of surface monkeys
In thousands of homes.
And horrific pictures from the war front,
Wars started by thousands of surface minds
That will give Cinderella to starving kids
And overlook the cinders of lost dreams.
Where is the magic wand
That can stop this malaise ?
Charity,
Like an inscrutable goddess,
Almost like a precious specimen in a museum
Show-cased to inspire awe,
Emerges in sporadic spurts of munificence,
To spreads her arms.
There’s my sculpture.
She is fully clothed.
That’s charity !
The dungeons of the mind
Carry wonderful gifts indeed !
Amidst the dread of hunger
And the nagging persistence of misery,
How do you coax archaic behemoths
To sanity ?
Tell me, and I will listen,
Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides,
Say the ancient Hindu seers.
Should we go looking for instinctual streams
That have evaporated in historical time ?
Or sift through the ceaseless refrains of our discourse,
Running in autocratic grooves,
For centers of meaning ?
by Choudhury Jayant Praharaj