Namdeo Dhasal- Man You Should Explode (1972)

Man, You Should Explode
Man, you should explode
Yourself to bits to start with
Jive to a savage drum beat
Smoke hash, smoke ganja
Chew opium, bite lalpari
Guzzle country booze—if too broke,
Down a pint of the cheapest dalda
Stay tipsy day and night, stay tight round the clock
Cuss at one and all; swear by his mom’s twat, his sister’s cunt
Abuse him, slap him in the cheek, and pummel him…
Man, you should keep handy a Rampuri knife
A dagger, an axe, a sword, an iron rod, a hockey stick, a bamboo
You should carry acid bulbs and such things on you
You should be ready to carve out anybody’s innards without batting an eyelid
Commit murders and kill the sleeping ones
Turn humans into slaves; whip their arses with a lash
Cook your beans on their bleeding backsides
Rob your next-door neighbours, bust banks
Fuck the mothers of moneylenders and the stinking rich
Cut the throat of your own kith and kin by conning them; poison them, jinx
them
You should hump anyone’s mother or sister anywhere you can
Engage your dick with every missy you can find, call nobody too old to be
screwed
Call nobody too young, nobody too green to shag, lay them one and all
Perform gang rapes on stage in the public
Make whorehouses grow: live on a pimp’s cut: cut the women’s noses, tits
Make them ride naked on a donkey through the streets to shame them
Man, one should dig up roads, yank off bridges
One should topple down streetlights
Smash up police stations and railway stations
One should hurl grenades; one should drop hydrogen bombs to raze
Literary societies, schools, colleges, hospitals, airports
One should open the manholes of sewers and throw into them
Plato, Einstein, Archimedes, Socrates,
Marx, Ashoka, Hitler, Camus, Sartre, Kafka,
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Hopkins, Goethe,
Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky,
Edison, Madison, Kalidasa, Tukaram, Vyasa, Shakespeare, Jnaneshvar,
And keep them rotting there with all their words

One should hang to death the descendents of Jesus, the Paighamber, the
Buddha, and Vishnu
One should crumble up temples, churches, mosques, sculptures, museums
One should blow with cannonballs all priests
And inscribe epigraphs with cloth soaked in their blood
Man, one should tear off all the pages of all the sacred books in the world
And give them to people for wiping shit off their arses when done
Remove sticks from anybody’s fence and go in there to shit and piss, and
muck it up
Menstruate there, cough out phlegm, sneeze out goo
Choose what offends one’s sense of odour to wind up the show
Raise hell all over the place from up to down and in between
Man, you should drink human blood, eat spit roast human flesh, melt human
fat and drink it
Smash the bones of your critics’ shanks on hard stone blocks to get their
marrow
Wage class wars, caste wars, communal wars, party wars, crusades, world
wars
One should become totally savage, ferocious, and primitive
One should become devil-may-care and create anarchy
Launch a campaign for not growing food, kill people all and sundry by
starving them to death
Kill oneself too, let disease thrive, make all trees leafless
Take care that no bird ever sings, man, one should plan to die groaning and
screaming in pain
Let all this grow into a tumour to fill the universe, balloon up
And burst at a nameless time to shrink
After this all those who survive should stop robbing anyone or making others
their slaves
After this they should stop calling one another names white or black,
Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, or Shudra;
Stop creating political parties, stop building property, stop committing
The crime of not recognising one’s kin, not recognising one’s mother or sister
One should regard the sky as one’s grandpa, the earth as one’s grandma
And coddled by them everybody should bask in mutual love
Man, one should act so bright as to make the Sun and the Moon seem pale
One should share each morsel of food with everyone else, one should compose
a hymn
To humanity itself, man, man should sing only the song of man.

Namdeo an activist poet passed away on Wednesday 15th January 2014 , a man who broke the rules of traditional poetry

a file cabinet on the east bound state road

six drawers of the universe

filled with life he could not leave behind

twenty year commitment gone,

thick neck and morning lit face

parked up station wagon

silver leaf scars rusting

doors with rattling windows,

behind a marriage gone like perspiration,

a third from the sun creature

pushed into the office

low humbled

shoulders shrugged into body,

grasped that file cabinet

dragged it to the door lifting carpet tiles,

tailgate flipped open,

company property someone shouted

another mentioned 911,

all other lives abandoned

this was all he had,

one last look

eyes like roses on granite,

pulled away

smearing rubber traces,

freeway surrounded by suburban houses

urban outcrops to his canyon

that became a void,

cassette music kept the corpses away

those corpses of the past

that seem to claw and linger,

a siren

was it for him,

tailgate flipped lock busted

as file cabinet slid progressively out,

braking hard

it dropped on blacktop

engine stalled

a dead bronze beetle

car horns swarmed about,

grunting stood upright that grey oblong

last piece of life

scuffed and scraped,

small key on his chain unlocked top drawer

took out a warm shaken bottle of whiskey

and the gun he kept here since his wife

became afraid,

sucked in air

climbed on top and sat crosslegged,

heaven had shadows that would not conceal him

as he waited,

bullhorn call on gentle breeze

curved outline of the day a flat surface,

and a smile so human appeared

 

 

 

horizons last echo

april sky so soon

drifting on a serpents tail,

leave things unsaid

as land sloop nods it’s sails

passing by

current winds darkly,

past rises and falls

heart regains soft perfume

and patient curve of dreams,

the dose of milky words is measured

and watch strong veins yield,

fertile nymph swift winged

with gentle reprimand and sweet caress

each phrase an anchor

she is the earth i sought

connect and chains alike rendered

into length across the gulf

range to stars and hand shaped sun,

beam downward facing light

it’s shift as hot  as a hammer strike,

layers heat stripped back

pool of her shine

into a naked dance

witnessed by constellation

who appraised and agreed,

becoming fugitives

beyond a shouting earth

we fled on the arch

of freedoms ray