Tomic Riter

Tag: blog

  • I am not.

    I am not a poet. I know nothing of rhythm or rhyme or imagination. I am like Henry Miller. I am a talker and I talk through words. I hate my voice, those repulsive vibrations of my vocal cords. I would rather not speak. Ever. I would rather decay in my plastic chair on some evening sitting by the window. The sky is holding nothing much. My plate is empty. My grandfather hangs on the wall in front on me, and next to him, my grandmother. He was a real son-of-a-bitch. His mother was a labrador and his father a pug. Imagine the union! He was a real scumbag, a real man of God, a real hand of the Devil. He destroyed everything and hence, nothing fruitful will grow for the next hundred years. He was a real pain in the ass and I remember watching him on his deathbed, his soul was barely hanging by a leg bone. I wish I strangulated him long before that, but that privilege I couldn’t have. Which leads me to think, why the hell am I talking about my asshole grandfather? No idea.

    I am not a poet. I cannot produce much except a lot of semen and a lot of sweat and a lot of shit. The last time I looked at my blood, it was bright red, all sealed in a thin glass bottle. It took those fuckers five days to test my blood. FIVE DAYS! All the virus could give me was vitamin deficiency. If I could miniaturize myself and enter the quantum world, I would catch the virus by its neck and smash its head in some cupboard.

    I am not a poet and the year is 2021 and I have come quite far. I have come so far, I cannot see shit. I have stepped beyond the horizon in my green shoes and brown hat. My hands are melting down and my cup is overflowing with the most bitter coffee. I need a buffalo ride to the supermarket. I need the infection. Again. I am lifting you up and putting you down. I am walking and dreaming and talking and walking and drinking. I am scratching my drooping mustache and staring at my cock. ENOUGH OF POP MUSIC. ENOUGH! This night requires jazz and a global catastrophe. I am playing some whiskey jazz now, and waiting for this insidious plague to butcher us all.

    If anything bad happens, please do not pay attention to it. This is my little playground. My devil’s triangle. My home from where moon and sun and the stars and all that has vanished. I am standing at the edge. I am opening my mouth to a cruel storm. I am igniting the burner of life in me. I am alive and well in this conspiring desert as I talk to the dead on some nights.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • From an afternoon bed.

    Something from last night has my stomach crying. Must be the alcohol. Must be the bad food. Could be anything. Even the wind here can give me headache. I try to leave the bed but I keep failing. What’s the joy in lying down. What’s the joy in getting up. Hunger keeps a man going. Nothing else. I am just not hungry. A mild headache does make want to get up. I am having one such headache right now. The fridge is running fine, only I got nothing to keep inside it. I can feel the fierce summer returning. My lips are dry and skin smooth as a sandpaper. I sit for a while and allow my head to fall in its place. It takes another twenty minutes for that.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • Moonrising.

    idly rotating along with everything

    how beautiful – moon rising

    nobody else watching

    nights like these won’t be coming

    from deep red to orange

    to the final golden

    the sound of water dripping from a pipe

    cool breeze accompanying

    I imagine your body over mine,

    crawling.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • That evening or whatever that was.

    Not even an hour passed since I fell in bed. Unbelievable! I woke up too early. But it was evening outside. It won’t be less a couple of hours before I started feeling the need to leave my home and go out to somewhere; to where, I couldn’t know. That would have killed the fun. In fact, why know anything beforehand? No fun in knowing. Let there be an accident or something at some random time. Let me break down at some odd hour. I would have understood that easily, I would have even laughed at it but knowing something beforehand would instantly turn me off. I never believed in fate. I didn’t believe in anything. That was me, trying to kill choices. That evening or whatever that was, I got up from bed, took a leak, and remembered the time when I was smoking cigarettes. That is not to say that I had given up smoking. I give up nothing. Only I didn’t feel the need to smoke. But that evening, while taking a leak, I must have felt the need of something terrible happening, otherwise the thought of smoking a cigarette wouldn’t have crossed my mind. I walked back to my bed, opened the window, looked at my garden. How beautiful it was, how dry, deteriorating. I was wearing nothing, didn’t feel the need to wear anything, and I was typing words after words and that felt good.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • Without choice.

    a bicycle came with its bells ringing

    I heard it having no choice

    the birds chirping before sunlight even started falling

    I heard it having no choice

    the motor running since yesterday night

    lifting water up over my head

    I heard it having no choice

    I played some jazz

    none of that could carry away whatever

    was haunting me from inside

    and so I remained like that,

    hearing without choice

    as I waited for the night.

    Copyright © Tomic Riter. All rights reserved.

  • The clock chimes no more.

    Day 5 or day 39 or day 42 or whatever day. Who cares. We kill our own times. Life is too long or too short to keep track of anything. Sooner than you realize, you go back to being the same shithead that you decided innumerable times to never be again.

    It’s going to be a half-moon night with no stars dancing. There’s no quarantine in my line of work. I am meant to die in the field while talking to some brainless jerk. I am meant to eat cannon balls. ‘Go ahead. Eat it. Eat that as well. Eat all of that. Come on! Eat fast. It’s for the good of your own people. ‘ Well, you got to eat all of that even if you got no people of your own. Frankly, in my line of work, you got no life of your own. You live with a false sense of satisfaction. You have got the love of people, even their claps and kisses but what in the hell, where I am about to go, will I do of all the claps and kisses? What will I do with all of that if I cannot have, in these trying times, even simple things that I actually, really want like meat and beer? People. People. People. They hardly understand your side of things. Their lives, inside their little heads, is far too important than anything else. They drown in their own piss of emotions without even knowing when did the drowning begin. They cannot even watch themselves for just a second. Like simply watch. ‘What’s there to watch in oneself?’ they would say. Well, if nothing is there then why so much fuss.

    I am watching the burnt rice from yesterday night, burnt at the bottom of the vessel. Things can go to hell in no time. A little here and there and it’s done. Your life is done. You are no more. You cease to exist here and go back to hell for some time. And in hell, it’s just your soul in the frying pan, smiling in pain all the time. As of now, I have put the burnt rice in the garbage bin, and I now wait to throw it out once its smell becomes unbearable.

    The virus is spreading faster now. It has started liking the people here. It is everywhere now, breathing our air, sleeping on our sofas, taking a summer swim in our glasses of water, kissing our toilet seats, chewing our brain nerves, inhaling our farts, dying in our abdominal acid. It is fucking everywhere, and its message is clearer than that of any God.

    — TOMIC RITER