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Might Frank-Thoughtless have not been Frank-Performer, living, perchance, on the edge of Wealth in a dilapidated apartment, a favorite of the children, a Frank who accommodates all their love and more, as he accumulates small devotions, as sharp as the rocks that bounce harmlessly off of police barricades?

Indeed he might have been.

Frank-Thoughtless have been Phranque-Night-Dreamer? Might not that engorged harvest moon have gripped him by his very veins? Was he not charging topless through the windy night, clinging to himself by his reins, drinking the darkness, to encounter a creative force where there was none? Was he not drawn forth, his book, half-read then, fledgling in his awareness, burning a hole in his purse, his pen bulging in his pocket, hollow drums unfilling his trunk, his guitar, exhausted from the day’s abuse, crying for him at home?

Would not this Phranque be breaking the law and all laws of reason and sense with every waking breath? Would not this Phranque be pure of mind but engorged of body, drowning in his own figs, caring for a sickly earth with a sickly body?

He might be, indeed.

And might he not have been Phranque-on-Fire? As a Fire was the destination he sought, nothing more than those selfsame fires that had warmed his ancestors’ harmless loins during ancient similar nights, but now a grave transgression against the city he had left behind, not to mention the love he had left behind.

And might be this Phranque dancing? Flying in a quivering orbit around the raging sun of a pagan fire, grinding his ellipses ever wider to include the whole silent selfish crowd, flailing on high, beating the hard mud on which he walked, simply circling, slowly circling, some meaning he refuses to see in himself.

Indeed, and indeed!

And would he not be as Phranque-In-Truth-of-Paranoia? And would this Phranque lay awake awaiting a Revolution he would never himself generate, heartbreakingly, and not for lack of effort, but simple historical circumstance, uncontrollable, even by an elite and malevolent few, for would not this Phranque have seen a Masonic face where there was only the schizoid fragmentation and paranoid impulses of a manufactured population, having manufactured themselves to refuse his own image alongside all those who would be his brothers.

He might! He might!

And might this Frank-Thoughtless also have been Phranque-Desiring? Too much in love and too little in beard? Satisfied eternally, yet constantly hungry for No-One-Knows.

Would the bonfire Phranque-Desiring had built burn all night, burning as he might fly around it in ecstatic orbit alone among a small multitude of inward selves, inward himself, in a paralysis of inwardness, turning planetward as the ground turned beneath him, reaching out to the mindless selves staring at the flames, forcing them to interact and acknowledge him, and yet he going home into the silent night unsatisfied back into his apartment outside Wealth?

But might this Phranque actually be our own Frank, solitary and unknown?

In the end, you are right, ash is ash.

I just took down a post…I’m revising that piece, but I’m also thinking that since I would like to place that piece in a publication, I probably ought not to publish it first on my blog.  Some places dislike that.  So, here’s something to tide us over.  I was supposed to write a thing that was influenced by my recent reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov, so I wrote a gloss on a poem I wrote on my typewriter in Kolkata:

Where my self did take myself         1

a thought to lie in rot

rebirth to take or not

what ought to have been lost

was lost.                                                5

I only seek to submit

to myself the only place

to deposit what once was ash

I follow myself

neither that will yield

what shall forever be veiled

the opposite now unknown

till time definite

ends my now.                                  15

The weeks cycle on

each day blends in

to the now remains in

reclusion and rhythm;

kaidas code seconds selfish        20

until leaving, that fierce

inevitable rupture,

the step that will close this chapter

of finger speed thru kaidas faster

devour selves in dha                     25

thirikita dha ge na

dha ge thin na ki na

drown lusts in ink.

Line 1: Where my self did take myself

Namely, the Lake Gardens neighborhood of Calcutta, West Bengal, India, where the poet found I, a massive Smith-Corona manual typewriter with the painted inscription “Property of the State Bank of India” upon my cover waiting for him. He immediately removed the cover so he could see my hammers strike. Five months of listless production and countless episodes of solitary insanity later, in February of 2009, as he stared down another six months before returning to his homeland, his caress upon my carapace produced this, an unremarkable poem among several.

Line 2: a thought lie in rot

Desire, savagely unfulfilled; he used to look at my rollers longingly, as if I could replace his being-alone.

5-6: Lost

We can only speculate as to what the poet had lost; certainly he did not leave my side often enough to have lost anything material.

8: ash

The sight of riverside pyres burning flesh become an obsession of any visitor to my country. The poet smoked copious quantities of cheap marijuana from bidis while staring at the blank page in my rollers; he seemed to lack an adequate ashtray, because he exclusively spread his waste upon my keyboard.

10: shackled to empty nights

Though my city sleeps deeply, it does so in the streets, making it difficult to imagine a literal interpretation of empty nights. The only reading left open to me is the emptiness of a stranger submitting to large amounts of time spent being a stranger.

12: veiled

Clearly, an incursion of the Musselman upon an otherwise Hindu sensibility. Perhaps this can be explained by the prominence of the romantic ideal in the Sufi faith, an ideal that has little place in the daily morality of the modern Hindu.

19: Reclusion and rhythm

He would pass his days hitting Tabla drums vigorously, improving perhaps his speed but not his rhythm. Perhaps because of this deficit, he exclusively played in private (though he must have, of course, played in the presence of his Banarsi gurdwallah Guruji, whom he visited weekly, taking his sheaf of Tabla notes.)

20: Kaidas

Kaidas are a set of rhythms laid out in patters of sixteen beats. The life of a student of Tabla is one of memorization; each kiada begins with a simple outline and then expands upon itself in variations that ought to be played in order daily by the student. For the poet, daily practice sessions lasted from one to three hours, often preceded in later months by an hour of meditation. I often found myself staring longingly at his fingers caressing the skin of his drums, wishing they were upon my keys, producing something with meaning.

21-22: Leaving…rupture

Written in February; the poet had six more months left in my country. However, he would daily fantasize about his departure, a moment he referred to as his “reward.”

25-27: Dha therikita dha ge na dha ge thin na ki na

The beginning sixteen beats of a kaida he played obsessively towards the end of his stay with me, ignoring my silent keys.