Open Road Review

Open Road Review has published my poem "Current Models" in their 10th issue. This is my second publication in India.

On the law

When the law becomes arbitrary,
the lie is revealed.

Unrequited

We underestimate what it would take
to requite love.

The estrangement

We fear what we most require:
the estrangement of alien perspective.

Moment by moment

The future kills the present,
moment by moment.

On writing

Write what you don't know you know.

New poems

+8

Not much

There isn't much worse
than seeing a face go
from open to closed.

Barely

Subtract what we add to people
and we barely know them.

The American Scholar: August Haiku Contest

Well, I didn't win, but one of my entries got a nice comment from David Lehman:

"Michael C. Rush does a beautiful job anthropomorphizing the last full month of summer."

All humanity and human endeavor (Tartt)

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Of history

What we choose to remember of history
condemns us.

Before and After (Harris)

Soon enough, nobody will remember life before the Internet. These are the few days when we can still notice the difference between Before and After.

Michael Harris, The End of Absence

On conflict

Conflict doesn't always imply right and wrong.

In artifice

There is little intimacy in artifice.

On assumption

Nothing is more susceptible
to erosion, to entropy,
than assumption.

Human experience

There being more variety, more flavors, in human experience than in human knowledge, more are drawn to pursue it.

On shrines

Every shrine is eventually defiled and damned by worship.

What we stay alive for

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

John Keating, as played by Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society (1989)

Opposition

Oppose those who treat commerce as an end in itself.

Dishonest

Distrust society's assessments.
They are dishonest.

New poems

+6

All it takes

All it takes to end the world
is enough people looking into their hands
and not at the horizon.

Vice versa

The fool carries the wise man;
the wise man carries the fool.

Better

Strive for better;
never struggle for best.

Which route (Marion)

Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.

Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

Trading

Every trade of one superstition for another is a bad deal.

Ludicrous (Harkaway)

He knew it was absurd, even a little mad, but it felt like the right thing. The world was being ludicrous at him, so he would be a bit ludicrous back, and he would make that small part of it around him a little better.

Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

Spare ribs

Roasted red pepper and green chile pork.

New poems

+8

Beginning

A bad beginning is better than a perfect delay.

On work

There's nothing wrong with work. The problem lies in letting others define it and dictate how you will do it.

Mirrors

We are mirrors
inventing reflections.