Since the time of the early Christians, Pontius Pilate’s outstretched hand indicates the presence of the human, scourged and wreathed with a crown of thorns, to the monstrosity of the multitude. I am thinking of a Bosch painting, Ecce Home, with the reluctant governor presenting Jesus to a populace howling for his crucifixion. The situation is poignant. But I wonder why Christ is so pitted against the multitude. And, on the other hand, what renders the multitude so solidly united against the Man.

Here I am thinking of another Bosch painting. Either narrow eyed and squinting or with eyeballs boiling out of their sockets, the masses surround Christ carrying the cross. His eyes are serene, closed and lowered before the ravenous faces that envelop him. Priests, tradesmen, peasants, here are men from all walks of life, their jeers and hisses amongst themselves offering a counterpoint to the silence of Christ at the conclusion of his solitary mission. Significantly, only one woman appears on the far left of the canvas. Her face is averted from the spectacle of the suffering Christ. Like Christ’s eyes, hers are also closed and lowered.

Surrounded by a mass of irreverent devils, it would require little stretch of the imagination to conceive of Christ reciting the penultimate chapter from the Qur’an:

Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind

The King of mankind

The Master of mankind

From the mischief of the Whisperer who withdraws

Who whispers into the hearts of Mankind

And he may be from among the Unseen or from among Men.

There is a a whisperer within the heart of the mob, an inciter that withdraws, one who may belong to the Seen or the Unseen. But what whisperer does the Christ encounter through his eyes, closed and searching inward? Or does he shut his eyes to the masses only to encounter them in the form of mob within his being? What is the significance, then, to the devilish appearance of human faces? Where must we go, then, but to the heart of the Man himself, to Christ as subject to the mob’s judgment? He closes his eyes in the face of his suffering only to encounter a procession of jeering demons? This shift of Christ’s gaze from the outward to the inward renders the seen into the unseen, transforms humanity point-blank, into the demonic. Let’s reverse this shivering inward gaze and ask that subjectivity justify itself, that it justify this transformation of the human as an object of social inquiry– something that must be sought after in the world of objective facts– into the unseen whispering inhuman that must be guarded against in the very depths of one’s heart. We are asking, absurdly, that the subject justify its suffering to the core. But the question remains meaningful despite the absurdity because it brings us to the role of suffering in the pursuit of knowledge regarding Man as well as to the social legitimation of that knowledge by turning it loose upon the Masses who oppress Him.

through the night’s late hour, as others sleep, we stay up, working.
Through this blinding whirl of dust of we will nurse the lamp of love,
draw water from our eyes for ablution, peer behind the form,
roam from village to village, from house to house to rouse the masses.

the sun has hid, its redness lingering
dying for you to turn back and grant another glimpse
regretting, I did not go after,
i dance.

mother, don’t delay me again–
the boats are gone, they could not wait.
i was mad, i did not go with the boatman
for whom I dance.

the peacock wails in the woods,
i see the kaaba in a friend
who wounds, but does not turn to ask
what makes me dance so…

bulleh shah brings me to inayat’s door
dresses me up in green and red
and where I struck with my heel, I met him–
He, who makes me dance.

Now, the green flaking from the wood,
strange doors bulge outward towards the bazaar.

“Love me,” sang the Prophet smoking newports outside Ms. Loose-C’s Cornerstore.
Smiling, then he drifts through the middle way,                                                                                                                                                                              guarding his skirts through the mud,
bangles, clinking at slim wrists,
anklets cool against hennaed feet,
earrings gleaming through the perfume of his hair.
Dionysos… He will put our bawd-houses to order.

Stepping onto the sidewalk                                                                                                                                                                                                               shaking the mud off his sandles, 
fingers through the dark hair
Reveal the curled, sharp-tipped ram’s horns.

The crowd parts, muttering at the fringes of the street,
and the refuse thickens and heaves, stopping the drains.
“Love me!”
Smiling, he arrives at Adrastus’ silver steps.

How shall we announce you?
“Arjuna,” he leers, “Death.”

A monkey, chained to a column on the balcony,
coughs and juggles his banana-peels.

Oh bring back the whores of babel
For now when they are gone
The water laps and drenches into the bayou’s lip
And the marketplace is dry like a crocodile’s tearduct.

As the nurse walks into the room, she quickly glances at her wrist for the time. She’s wearing an old watch with a green leather wrist-band. Her arm is bronzed and dark, except for the short gold bristles at her elbows. She’s thinking of the girl with fish-arms and lips so tight they shrivel as she draws them together to speak. She is probably still in bed at her apartment. Her cheeks blossom into roses, red, and she thinks of the dark green Mohawk with silver-tipped spikes that reek of rainy days and earthworms.

She opens the door to one of the closets and taps the bald man aggressively on his back. He looks back at her and smiles. He has been tying his shoe-laces. Calmly, still crouching, the bald man puts a hand in his front coat-pocket and pulls out a slip of paper with a number on it.

“Please. You must wait outside, please, in the waiting-room.”

The old woman at the other end of the room coughs and puts her pipe in her purse. She glances at the window behind her. A boy is standing on the pavement outside with his hands his pockets. His ears are red in the cold, red as a stop-sign, and he is whistling with his face towards the wind.

He used to call himself an aesthete. That was while he was still going to school. He would spend hours reducing the roundest piece of ass to angles with the severest degrees. He would write these down in his notebook and submit them to his logic professor as homework. The professor had ample lips that swelled like buttocks when she spoke. She graded her students’ homework assiduously with her eyeliner and tried to return it to them by the end of the week. Her boyfriend was a Frenchman with a student visa that had expired years ago but it really didn’t matter since he didn’t drive and left barely noticeable footmarks in the lawn early in the morning after the dew had settled. He spent his days translating her grocery lists into French and submitting them to her in sultry whispers every evening as she settled with him on their favorite couch. She would grade these grudgingly, often commenting on the impossible grammar. He would often nibble at her eyeliner when she wasn’t watching and giggle furtively into his armpits, making them aghast with his blackened mouth.

They rarely go out together, which is understandable, because the mermaid tends towards mood-swings, long showers, and other antisocial behavior that often leaves a bad taste in the nurse’s mouth. The mermaid doesn’t notice this, even when they are kissing (which is quite often these days), and she probably doesn’t care. She is thinking of hiring a permanent maid, if only to persuade the mermaid out of her bath-tub.

“Please. You must wait inside, please. In the waiting-room.”

He looks at her and smiles. Besides, it was getting to be very cold. The stop-sign gleams in anticipation. It has already caused three accidents this week and is probably going to cause a few more by Monday when it has been scheduled for removal. It is a distinctly unhelpful stop sign, arbitrarily planted there for the sake of amusement by a pathologically vicious pregnant woman. At least she was told that she was pregnant. And she had stolen and replanted the sign a week ago, purely out of spite, before she had gone to the clinic to be informed of her pregnancy by her gynecologist.

Her dad owns estates in Southern Italy—or it may be in Sicily. Their suspected links to the Italian communists are compelling but, as yet, unconfirmed. On the other hand, her dad’s association with the mafia is solid. They had met at a meeting of the college socialists where he was denounced as an anarchist maoist and she was dismissed as a baby-eating chauvinist—she has softened up since. Their impression of one another was colored with lust in the most superficial sense. Oblivious of his failing grades, of her formal expulsion from campus PRIDE, they did nothing the next two weeks but fuck in the most unsafe manner possible. At the end of the second week, he received a note from his Logic professor (most scrupulously handwritten in aquamarine eyeliner) accusing him of plagiarizing extensively from her grocery-list.

He sent her a reply at once, illustrating the precise nature of his guilt in cogent triangles dripping with the most lurid description of the Frenchman’s monthly schedule. He took care to inform her that his stock of prescription drugs had continued to diminish, despite the Frenchman’s seemingly unaccountable absence. On the other hand he was running dangerously low on weed, so, if she would please drop by to smoke a joint—that is to say in celebration, after they had closed the deal.

He sent another missive to the Dean of the College, declaring his withdrawal from the Undergraduate Program and disclosing as the reason for his withdrawal, the Dean’s eldest daughter, a junior in the College, who, having only recently broken up with her boyfriend of five years, was in immediate need of fucking. She has a dark green Mohawk with silver-tipped spikes that reek of rainy days and earthworms. Except, he finds, that it isn’t a Mohawk after all, but only a wig that she wears occasionally—her actually hair-color is a muttish blonde reminiscent of the lemon-flavored drinks she has. Her breasts are small and round under the sleek and smelly leather. She takes her weekly bath on Wednesdays with her ex-boyfriend before they both get drunk on lemon-flavored alcohol.

Apart from that, she spends hours in bed and also takes quick showers in the nurse’s apartment with its green wallpaper and gruff blue carpet littered with cat-fur. The vacuum-cleaner lies sparkling in the bathroom and shares its address with the subjugator of Mecca with whom she corresponds in fat bubbly tears and by banging her muzzles at least three times a day against the surliest closets in the apartment often frightening out timid little men, heavy with doctor’s appointments and with loss.

“Please. You will have to get out of here now.” She turns to the boy, adding, “I have to deal with this sort of thing every day at home.”

“Husband?” He rubs the man’s bald scalp gently with his finger.

She glares at this presumptuous little boy. She usually knows how to deal with these things. She doesn’t mind, though. Her shift ends in five more minutes. She can go home to her mermaid and then and they can read a comic book together that they had swiped, among some dyke-paraphernalia, from the lesbian bookstore down at the corner of Little Five.

The room is silent as an uncovered fruit-cake and the gummy-flies run their moist mittened feet over it and smile. The corners are awkwardly shaped today and full of color. Nothing could fill them up completely. There would always be spaces left. And they can be approached from several angles. This makes him feel very uneasy.

A pregnant woman walks past them. Rather, a woman who has just been told that she is pregnant. She doesn’t feel pregnant at all. She’s been told it will be weeks until she begins to feel it. The room is filled with silly old women marked with life and death. They look at her with living eyes and pass their tongues over their canines. It makes her feel weak so she lies down on the sand and tells the boy to give her a massage.

He thinks he may have given massages before. They involved squeezing a piece of skin between his hands and running his fingers lightly down the pale wet ghost of a spine. He stops rubbing the bald man’s head and shuts the closet door.

And then he gets a call from her. He hears sharp gusts of breath at the other end as he picks up the receiver. He waits.

“You shit! Why don’t you ever pick up the phone?”

He is speechless. That it could really be her voice. He hasn’t ever spoken to her on the phone before.

He tries to buy some time “Yes, I am being drafted…” he mutters, sort of irrelevantly. He figures it’s nice to start with something irrelevant. Silence. And then, click.

Then he goes back to his eating and shitting for the rest of the day. He is beginning to suspect his bowels to be paper-thin by now. He intends to bring it up if she calls again.

“You don’t have structure, etc. That’s why I like you.”

“What an odd concept!” he wonders, digging his fingers viciously into the back of her neck expecting to hear a snap anytime now. Then he can watch her heard roll down the railroad tracks, veer sharply into the bushes sloping upward from the wet sand. He asks how she’s feeling.

“I’m ok. How are you?”

“I’ve been eating a lot.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. And when I eat a lot, I poop a lot.”

“I see.”

“You didn’t tell me what your gynecologist said.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“Well?”

“I’m pregnant. And…”

“Thank God… And?” he suddenly grew breathless here.

“And they think I’ve got cervical cancer.” Click.

silence– an emptiness
hint-like pounces
between the very pores of the rain–

Baaa daaaa
riya-bara SEY–
clouds black, hulking–

a deathly drawing in amid a jhanjhaar–
a hauntedness: of anklets trailing against the stone
rain gripping, leaping against cold, gray wood
of flood

Baaa dari
AAbara–sey
sound without form or name
held within darkness and rain.

Beyond touch: be there
held against famished air
like sunset:

poised, waiting thing
native to foreignesses
lackings, to whisperings of undead
lingers among the rain and the rain

barasey
barasey
barasey
Ghumad ghan ghumad barsat
barkha rut Aayi.
rut aayi, rut aayi, rut aayi… ghumad ghan…

even as He draws near to strike
even if he is silent
touch does not cease,
Rama, Rama, O Rama!

“the touch, look it touches!”
the cry surges from the crowd
pointing, unpitying…
but the touch does not cease.
What know they of touching
who have not yet been pierced through and through?
O, let it wane, then, Rama, Rama,
let His interest wane.

Now the touch, touches on
even as the interest ceases.

in your absence
this presence

in the
reeling,
the cascading of your presence
along the desolation then
i am outward
much as
the censure of your present flesh draws me…
much as I,
with the pretext of wandering through your streets,
draw outward, walk
beyond the swaggering line of the roadsides
spoiling, threading at the top
like the slashed cord of a nail

ii. current
much as your stay with me
is absence of you
and before you the desolation stretches,
baying the method of yout current
closer still then the absence begins– achingly–
to scab over itself–
healing inspite of itself
even as there is no form left
of woman or depth
just the plugged current-
a drunken cord blessed
with the flushed hectic
of an only name

iii. only name
blank
as the shots of absence lifts,
bulging beneath the scabs of these nights together
then we start to ooze– red
only separately– red
only from the corners
only from the distance of our present rooms
and the windows loom above us
gaping
and farther still above us rests
like a howl
the withered claw of the wind.

ankles twisted in pain

tugs my sleeve when she thought i drifted

wants my arm touching hers

(long before these lines become

beautiful again,

she spreads my ashes in her hair

ecstatic against the flame

even as i burn)

i wish the road were even

so my foot woudn’t arch so

(ugly, ugly, the way the bridges curve over our canal-

a place bereft of flexibility)

II. just today while it rains

(even the earthworms reek of smoke)

how beautiful we r together

how faint i feel after all the weak tea

and nothing but a piece of chocolate cake all day…