This is an image of a young man skateboarding. I've used it because my humorous science fiction post is about being forever young.

Yes, I found the small potent potion
of youth, hidden in a cave named,
‘Transcendence,’ and drank it in one
gulp, oh now, don’t complain, I hunted
for it, and did the hard labor, and so it was all
mine, all mine, I tell you! And it was just a
little green elixir, and so, why share?
Well, I thought that way, years ago,
and for a while it soothed, relieved,
took away stress and grief, and I grew a
beard for a year, and then a Mohawk
the next, and the women drifted in and
out like thoughts in the consciousness,
alluring, attractive, brilliant, bright,
exotic, winsome,
because I journeyed from land
to land, savoring the Boza of Turkey,
the Butter Chicken Masala of India,
and hell, even the Balut of Philippines
which only takes a little getting used
to just like Kopi Luwak,
I went skydiving, swam the
Pacific, attended fashionable parties
on Yachts, and slowly and delicately
feasted on molecular gastronomy
served in three Michelin Star restaurants,
I worked every job from sales clerk
to CEO for the hell of experience,
and boy, those were the days! But soon
television became virtual reality and then
holographic virtual reality and finally
modulated telepathy, signals given from
movie post-brains sitting in post-Hollywood,
and post-minds taking whatever they want to
with the option of cutting and editing
bits, and changing the soundtrack with a flick
of the post-consciousness,
using another signal from
the post-Music Industry, and all this
was too much for me, because the potion
only gave me youth and not evolution,
and so, they threatened me, labeling me
an oddity, and since they couldn’t kill me,
they exiled me to another cave called,
‘Depravity,’ the very word an anathema
to the post-human, and they gave me
my old gadgets which they’d reconstructed
using post-science, way too complicated and
intricate for me to comprehend, and they
called it ‘mercy’, even though they hate the
spoken word and language now rests in
a collective super-consciousness, and so I type,
hoping somebody will hear me, but
nobody does, and I guess I’ll just keep typing
and typing with existential questions
haunting me, and the angst of my mistakes
clawing at my heart, tearing it uncannily,
and  I know now that the word ‘youth’ doesn’t
just mean young, but also connotes
a forever quarter-life crisis,
a forever pain of existing, outside time,
figuratively and literally! And a forever
madness of the millennial even though
three thousand years have passed,
and the Gregorian calendar is now as
redundant as me!

© Nitin Lalit Murali (2019)

An old friend


An old friend or one who says he’s one,
tells me he despises ‘high’ metaphor –
as if metaphor were the Tower of Babel,
which one climbs and climbs, until
everything disintegrates into talking in
tongues – but he writes with such verbosity,
that I need a Thesaurus to only figure out that
what’s going on is going on.

And that’s not the point of poetry is it?
Ask me to talk of loneliness, and I’ll
give you a demonic room with crumbling wallpaper,
torn chintz grey curtains, and threadbare couches
with rusty nails sticking out, the dust asphyxiating
you while the television’s grainy screened, but people
around you are paradoxically dancing and reveling in
the same grimy place, smoking their joints, carousing,
cuddling and kissing, perhaps even fucking, oblivious
to glances from dilated pupils.

Ask him to talk of loneliness and he’ll say,
“It’s a cacophonous Tophet where rumination
deliquesces and the recherché panache becomes
quotidian utilitarianism,” which basically means
that it’s a shit hole that deprives you of thought.

his lexicon, and we don’t need to talk about Autumn
or the Riemann hypothesis to figure that out.

I’ll smoke my cigarettes and drink my coffee
and he can sip his sherry while he’s eating caviar.

© Nitin Lalit Murali (2019)


This is an image of Humpty Dumpty. I've used it because my story is a darkly humorous retelling of the nursery rhyme.

Humpty sat in the refrigerator pondering and pondering, which is pretty much what eggs did. They were deep existential thinkers contemplating on the nature of good and evil, the nature of man and man’s relationship to them. He pondered on metaphysical things like the nature of the eternal yolk, the finitude of the shell and predestination. Why do some eggs hatch and become chickens when the rest are refrigerated? Why am I here? What is the meaning of all this? What does tomorrow bring? He thought. He never quite understood man. He very carefully and gently caressed eggs and placed them in the refrigerator with utmost care, but he’d seen another side. Another vicious side that another poor egg who was now either in heaven, hell, purgatory or the void experienced. Man, just picked him up and smashed him over a woman’s head in rage. He watched in horror as shell broke and yolk spilt. How could man who’s capable of such tenderness do something so vicious? Did man have two yolks, one good and another bad? Or did he only mask his depravity? Humpty thought and wished he could express these feelings, but he had no outlet and he felt uneasy and discomforted when the refrigerator door opened, and a child looked at him before picking him up. Humpty remained mute but his yolk froze. Terror gripped him. It was time to finally experience things and face truth or judgement and he didn’t know what lay before him. He couldn’t express his sheer agony and inner torture. A whirlwind of emotion gripped his yolk. Help! Save! Redeem! He desperately thought when the child suddenly brought Humpty out of the house and he saw the light. The sun. Now, he had some innate knowledge of it but had never truly seen it. He felt warm, comforted and consoled when he was placed on a wall. He was ecstatic. He had inner peace. So, it’s redemption after all, he thought and lost himself to the moment when he felt a slight nudge. He suddenly found himself losing consciousness and experienced severe nausea, and he felt the urge to vomit but couldn’t. He was falling. ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,’ he heard the child sing. The agony was excruciating. And then he crashed against the cobbles and felt his shell cracking: a small crack before a split and his yolk oozed out. What did I ever do to you? Why do you hurt me? Aaargh! It stings! It burns! I can’t handle it! The pain! Please make it stop! He thought, still unable to express himself. And then he saw the murderous child wearing a crown and carrying a toy horse. He crushed Humpty some more with the horse. Oh God! No! Please! Don’t! He thought. The child then squashed Humpty into pulp, letting the yolk run on his hands. Make it stop! Make this murderous bastard quit! Humpty thought and then he heard a voice of a demon when the child shrieked with glee, saying, ‘All the King’s horses and the King’s men. Couldn’t put Humpty together again.’ And everything faded to black just after Humpty realized that existence is meaningless and embraced nihilism.

© Nitin Lalit Murali (2019)

Well, if you’re really into unrequited love (Part 3)

This is a picture of a city in ruin because of a flood. It captures the end of the idealism of the protagonist in my series whose love for a woman is not reciprocated.

So you’ve gone ahead and done it my angel of rapturous delight! You have married a man with no taste, no elegance and no divine passion: an ardor unmitigated that only I who licked the flames of purgatory, while I longed for that beautiful union of our souls, that only I who licked the dust of the floor like a mongrel hungry for the absolute perfection that is you, that only I who suffered sleepless nights, bed-wetting and waking up in the agony of my own discharge, my clothes stinking, my integrity castrated could have given you. But you still prostituted yourself to a hedonistic bridegroom with elephantine gonads and a serpent that stings with white venom. Oh, my precious! Oh, my beloved! How could you possibly make your caravanserai a whorehouse! Oh, my sweet delight! My bones show, but there is doubt that sinks in. Were you really the goddess of muses or just a Lorelei: a harlot in disguise? Yes, though my heart is pierced with a three-pronged spear, and I never doubted your sublime divinity that transcends the boundaries of space and time, I do now. Oh did I spend all these years, in the stench of my excrement, rolling in penance, seeking your enlightenment, only to realize that you’re a Cleopatra: a woman of unmitigated lust, and an insatiable hunger for white blood! Perhaps you never wanted the crimson I’d have given you each time I trailed, when you walked with him to movie theaters, and sat in the back row with tears as he planted kisses and coarse bites on your neck. Perhaps you never longed for the tour de force I’d have written you, or the Oval Portrait I’d have painted while you sat in an alluring white gown, your seraphic beauty engulfing my soul. Perhaps you were a raven who now pecks at a worm, and that disgusts me. I have renounced you! I tried my best when I interrupted your wedding and screamed, “No!” But you had the security guards drag me without concern for my splintered heart. They treated me like a vagabond and threw me on the streets, when I came with love, while his shaft bulged out of his pants, and you walked down the aisle in a skimpy costume. Oh! How could you have degraded yourself so much! The truth is never ‘kinky’ or whatever they call it in this semen-ridden world. But I will rise, because for each Helen of Troy there is an antithesis: A beautiful woman of innocence with rosy cheeks and lips elegant, and a soul that touches the stars, and I will find her, and even if she asks me to emasculate myself for her, I will.

The end.

© Nitin Lalit Murali (2019)

Part 1
Part 2

Well, if you’re really into unrequited love (Part 2)

This is an image of a prisoner. I've used it because my satirical post talks about unrequited love.

I would skin off a car tire for you, and eat it however you wish: Raw, medium or well done. He calls you, “Bae,” and you blush, but I call you my sweetest fragrance that exhilarates the scent of the morning dew to astronomical proportions and you don’t even smile. I have died twice. My first death, when you said that flat, “No,” and the second when you ‘friend zoned’ me. The second is the lake of fire, and here I am spiraling in a vortex of flames; my anguish you’ll never know, because it makes me a corpse on fire, though I still walk with my head bowed, and eyes averting the light of the moon. Oh, wash away this angst with the sparkling showers of your tender honeyed love! Oh, pull me out of this pit of maggots and soothe me with the balm of your essence! Oh, don’t you see, my sweet? Oh, don’t you fathom, my Blue Jay? Oh, don’t you hear, my everlasting sonnet? You’ve throttled me with rejection, while he throttles his shaft: First gear, second, third, fourth and fifth. That is all he’ll give you: white droplets on a dusty floor, while I’ll give you the deepest red. I’ll cut my heart out and serve it on a platter if you’d devour it. Oh, my divine! Oh, my definition! Will you forever leave me with the miasma of eventide forming a noose around my neck? I’ve fasted for your delight, and now emaciated and with soiled pants, I lie in my disgust, while my hands still caress a pen and write you odes. You say, “I might marry him,” and if that materializes, my skin will fade, and the bones will show! Oh, songbird of the celestial! Oh, my muse! Oh, my heart! Must I writhe forever in this lowest rung of hell, while your hands wear the ring of a man who is not aesthetically inclined? An architect who can only draw squares, while I can personify the placid blue and make her the goddess that you are. Oh, I long for you like a caravanserai! Will you not permit me that rapture, even if I’m old? Oh, this is Love in the Time of Cholera indeed, but unlike that pervert, and other secret Lotharios who preach morality and abstinence, only because they’re sexually frustrated, I have kept myself pure for you! Oh, I would abstain even if I had you, because it is your love I seek, my princess! Know, my sweetest carnation that there is no fire in my loins, but I only have the purest soul, rid of all worldliness and lust, which wishes to hear your sublime song, calming me. So please, my jaggery of the sweetest cane, reciprocate, before I die withered and forgotten, outside the gates of your kingdom, a beggar without a cause.

© Nitin Lalit Murali (2019)

Part 1

Well, if you’re really into unrequited love

This is an image of a person trying to escape confinement. My post is a darkly humorous satirical one about unrequited love and hence the image.

His writing possesses no soul, is neither incandescent or luminescent; it is not a fiery stream of emotion that radicalizes you, that makes inspiration within burn brightly like quark-gluon soup, melting away that writer’s block, and filling you with an enraged muse, a thermal weapon of ideas, rhyme and scalding imagery, nor is it cold radiation that makes you introspect, connects you with all metaphysical verse, and slowly and steadily helps you construct that tour de force, that poetic igloo of frosty beauty. You still idolize it though, and that wounds me. I’ve given you everything: made you my muse, poured out my love for you in the form of sonnets, quatrains, or just pure uninhibited free verse. My affection for you borders on manic delusion, and yet it remains unrequited. I said, “I love you,” the other day, and you responded with an “I know,” and I still haven’t managed to decipher whether this is some sort of trial you’re putting me through, some darkness before light that will finally lead to catharsis in the form of grazes, caresses and kisses. Post tenebras lux is my motto now. I hope and wait and drool like some starved mongrel hoping for a morsel, a piece of meat. I meditate upon Gibran’s words of love, but even then, my thoughts only focus on the wounding, the shattering of dreams and the crucifying he talked about, and not on the crowning, the caressing of my tenderest branches, and the ecstasy. The pursuit of happiness, the bettering of self: both spiritually and physically—these things I’ve rendered useless in my struggle to woo you. Why him? I often ask, and ask even now while I write this. He lives his life in a closet: that same wardrobe of mainstreamness that society confines itself too. He hasn’t experienced the ache of being a pariah, an outcast like Gregor Samsa (after his metamorphosis). He has no apple embedded in his back while he scuttles around, and has not reached towards anything outside of a so-called ‘identity’: the same traditional waltz that most people embody. I have lived outside the gates of ‘paradise’—like a beggar—and yet have seen the light of the sun. It blinded me, but in my pain I learnt how to feel, love and carry burdens. How long? How long will you torment me this way? Your affection for him—as beautiful as it might look—is not lucid. I can see that, and that gives me hope, but your indecisiveness, your teetering between us only creates a darkened psalm in my soul: 88 that ends on that tragic, atonal, anticlimactic note. Perhaps I’ve willingly gone and blinded myself; gouged out my eyes so that I may not perceive reality: a cruel one in which you’re a monster who loves this game. Perhaps I’m just a pawn, and I’m about to be sacrificed because your thoughts and ambitions are of some other fabric I’ve never felt. If that is true, and you’re about to play a gambit, let me know; save me the misery of longing, of hoping for a beautiful union of our souls.

© Nitin Lalit Murali (2019)

Binky the Clown

This is an cartoon image of a clown. I've chosen it because my story is a darkly humorous tale of a clown. In this picture the clown is happy but in the story he's ironically not. I've done this because I feel the contrast will add to the humor.

So, you’ve returned. Ha! I knew Binky the Clown would come back to us. You had such grandiose dreams! Pfft! Becoming a CEO, was it? A Michelin Star Chef? I remember when you walked out on us. You acted like you ran things here. ‘It’s my life, and I’m sick of the circus,’ you said. ‘Just you wait and see. I’ll be someone,’ you said. Look at you now. Begging for a job. Why should I offer you one? Give me one good reason Binky? Sure, you’re short on cash, but aren’t we all? The trapeze artist works at a male strip club when he’s not hanging mid-air. Hell, he puts both his life and his dignity at risk. And here you are looking all miserable, begging for another chance. The tightrope walker is a part-time hooker. So, why come here, thinking you’ll get enough? We can’t even buy good meat for the Lions and the mime’s smoking crack. The elephant is unwashed, and he’s temperamental as hell these days. Hell, the front tooth missing janitor no longer whistles with the spit coating his jaw. But maybe, just maybe I have a job for you Binky. So, there’s a market you see. There are these bunch of sick freaks into clown fetish. It’s called Coulrophilia. They’re usually thick-mustached, lipstick wearing, bespectacled men who keep pictures of Ted Bundy with hearts drawn all over them in their wallets. Dinky won’t do it because he’s handling the Balloons and Jinky won’t do it because he’s covered in his puke most of the time. But I’ll pay you enough if you do it. They’ll want you dressed up, complete with makeup and wearing a pink thong. So what do you say? You up for it? It’ll probably be challenging at first, but you’ll get used to it. Some of them will snort cocaine off your party nose, while others will coat your red, blue or green hair (depending on their preferences) white. You know what I mean. See, you must realize that you brought this on yourself Binky. Now we were a family, and we were doing fine. But you and the knife thrower and the star gymnast just had to leave, didn’t you? You had potential Binky. I saw a tragic-comic sensation in the making. But you just had to go, didn’t you? Well, comedy and tragedy can still meet. And I know you’ll take the job. Your wife’s left you. You can’t stop shooting crap into your arm. Hell, you can’t even talk without a slur. So, sign here and there and remember to wear a pink thong. It’s something they’ve got going on in their circle. You’ll find out why soon enough, I’m sure. I don’t want to know.

© Nitin Lalit Murali (2019)

On the WWE

This is a cartoon image of a wrestler. I've chosen it because my post is about wrestling.

If there’s one family that gives Vince McMahon sadistic pleasure, it’s the Rhodes family. Dusty Rhodes was the ‘American Dream’ in Mid-Atlantic wrestling in 1985. He delivered the famous ‘Hard Times’ promo and was probably one of the greatest promo-workers of all time. He then moved to the WWE in 1989 and Vince made him wear a yellow polka-dotted dress and dance by waving his hands around like a shmuck.

Then came Dustin, Dusty’s son. Vince made him a bizarre freak called Goldust with a ridiculous signature move called ‘shattered dreams’ which involved tying a wrestler to the corner post, making an obscene gesture, complete with sighs and weird noises and kicking him in the nuts. Goldust is still the same. It doesn’t matter if he’s a good or a bad guy, Vince makes sure the freak lives on.

And finally, we have Cody Rhodes. Vince made him ‘the Dashing Cody Rhodes,’ who was a looking-in-the-mirror, vain, metrosexual weirdo. His gimmick was comparatively better than his brother’s or his father’s, but it all changed when he became a red Goldust called Stardust. Vince teamed them up together and gave us not one, but two absolutely ridiculous, clownish freaks.

So, here’s my solution. I think the WWE should go out of business. All they do is repackage the same crap and we, being the sheeple we are, watch. In the eighties, we had a muscular freak, who went, ‘Brother! Brother!’ And in the nineties, we had a skinny ‘showstopper’ who almost put the company out of business, and then a ‘badass’ who went around chugging beers and hitting his finisher on everyone possible, and then another modernized better looking, Samoan version of Dusty Rhodes who replaced the hard times promo with something about smelling cooking and then ‘monsters’ and ‘beasts’ and ‘animals.’ And lest I forget, a modernized version of the muscular freak – until a few years ago – who wore similar clothing and kept beating everyone in his path, even though the audience booed him. Why didn’t they boo the Hulk in the eighties? Don’t ask me. Maybe people then thought wrestling was real, or maybe his patriotism towards the end of the Cold War and on the brink of the Gulf War made them go gaga. I don’t know.

But it’s the same thing in the end. Now, people even know it’s the same thing and keep watching it. Of course, the woman’s division with ‘The Man’ is a breath of fresh air, but how long before that runs out of steam and we’re left with repackaged garbage again. The Man herself is a repackaged version of the beer guzzler, but she possesses a strange charm and allure today.

Moving on, let’s talk about backstage politics. In the nineties, there was the clique who got their way doing whatever they pleased, including screwing a wrestler by using the dirtiest act ever seen on national television. Google Montreal Screwjob. Today, backstage politics are in the limelight. The wrestlers and even the owner is open about it, and we still watch the WWE! Some people think that just because Shawn Michaels mentions God, he’s a Christian. The truth is the guy was a junkie who gave up drugs, but never changed his ways. He’s still a master manipulator. Ask the Hurricane.

Finally, I present to you the ultimate solution that will end our addiction to the WWE. It’s really like heroin. A person keeps using even though it’s making him dumber and he wants out. So, here’s the deal. Now Seth Rollins is up for a match against Brock Lesnar at this year’s Wrestlemania. Now, the very thought of Brock Lesnar irritates me because all he does is come, beat people up and have a manager say the same things over and again eloquently for him because he can’t cut a promo. Anyhow, I digress. So, let’s have Goldust injure Seth Rollins on the road to Wrestlemania. Let him drive a fancy pink tow truck over him for all I care. Then let Goldust challenge Lesnar, and when Lesnar smirks, beat the living hell out of him, leaving the ‘Beast’ shocked. And let this trend continue with Goldust beating Lesnar week after week and let him cut a ‘weird times’ promo, complete with theatrics and sighs. And finally, at Wrestlemania, let Goldust beat Lesnar in under a minute, beat up Heyman, arrive the next day on Raw with the WWE Championship and say, ‘Shattered Dreams!’ before the screen becomes black like the ending of The Sopranos. And then no more WWE, no more merchandise, no more video games and not a word from the executives and producers and the chairman, leaving the fans shocked, until they’re relieved and move on with their lives!

© Nitin Lalit Murali (2019)

Half a sonnet by a goldfish in a bowl who’s too lazy to complete the poem

This is an image of a goldfish in a bowl. I've used it because my poem is a humorous piece written from the perspective of a goldfish.

Each day entails mere turning and spinning
Clockwise, anti-clockwise, O what must I do!
There’s a world out there, so beautiful and true!
Which sadly isn’t mine for the winning

I want more than the angst of rotating
Like a schmuck. I wish to see the sky, so blue!
But I only see pink walls that make me rue!
And days pass with the earth revolving…

© Nitin Lalit Murali (2019)