My dear Clown:

There's a certain kind of detachment in the narrator's voice that allows this to work as a sort of Moebius strip of a metaphysical fantasy, a recursive loop of consciousness envisioned over and over as victim and offender, offender and victim, merge identities in a sort of amor fou. I like it, with certain reservations. I want more descriptors like spongy, less pointing to the cyclical nature. That is to say, more Jodorowsky, less Robbe-Grillet. It works, but it could be better if the sensorium splashed the blood a bit on the reader.

Of course you know I tell you this, Clown, because I respect you absolutely and have the highest expectations for you imaginable on Gather. Otherwise I would just remark impressed about its feindishly clever contraption as a short short and not try to ask you to embed a single slight variation in the tessellation pattern that could lead not to a way out, but a way into the motivation behind the story. I want to know more about the sort of trap of consciousness (ennui, or too much passion, or both? ) that would tie them together in a bardo realm of the absurd, forever.

I like the shift in the conventional metaphor from the golden cage (of the imprisoned sparrow) to the ' golden web.' You are updating the symbolism for the 21st century, Kushal.

I also very much like the grandeur of space in the second poem, that has an almost cosmic feel to its dreaming.

A couple of suggestions:  Lazing across the Carribean,

blue water, columns of sun.

Also,

Dreams have witnessed the ruins

of lost cities; Atlantis' buried pieces.

Dreams have touched the bleached bones

of a father, the fisherman who sank.

The boy wakes up and runs on bare feet

toward the shore where dreams recede.

Thank you Bhawana for the story and the story nested inside the story. This is what I love about so much of oriental storytelling, from the 1001 nights to different versions of the Monkey King epic,which of course has as many stories in it as it has variants of storytelling. You are vying to become Gather's Sheherezade, my dear friend.

Is the illustration you posted from an Indian film based on these stories? Just curious.

Which reminds me of a bullfight poster I saw last week, which got me to go to the plaza de toros here in Granada and see the great torero Fandi fight two bulls. This bullfight poster showed him wearing a silver sequined ' traje de luces'  (suit of dazzling light) but when he fought he wore a gold matador's outfit. I do believe a beautiful flamenco dancer named Pilar bewitched him into changing from his customary 'traje', no doubt telling him that her gypsy mother had told him this would bring good luck. What was interesting is that in the picture on the box of cereal where he appears, he is wearing yet another colored traje de luces or suit of light, this one a radiant purple. But in the mirror behind him on the cereal box you can plainly see his flamenco lover Pilar beside him in a bigger frame, and if you hold a magnifying glass to her image you can see she is holding a matchbook on which is yet another image of the bullfighter Fandi, on which he is wearing the silver bullfighting garb, just as in the poster. But then if you look into the reflection inside the reflection of the mirror the image of Fandi and Pilar shifts, and he is now wearing the golden trage de luces. Did I mention that her polka dotted flamenco dancer costume is a different color every time? How odd: I'm sure there is a different story of their love behind every single piece of clothing they are wearing.

Wonderful holistic aim presented in this poem of an evening stroll and its purpose. I like the vigorous sentence that sweeps the cosmos together into this one central conscious moment,  Richard. Well done.

I did laugh. And for a minute you brought back Barbara Eden's voice instead of Robin William's. It's funny, but I do believe Jeannie was my first role model for a sex symbol. I must've been between six and eight when I watched that show on our RCA black and white TV set.

Haven't made a foray into Leprechaunia for awhile (let alone Bogmania) but it was clearly worth it for the quantity of laughter generated, Magi, especially with phrases like " instantly turn Big Luigi into a eunuch of no fixed address, "  or " fiercely resentful blessing" to color the story of the slut, the Papist and the blunderbuss-toting, gas-inhaling blunderer of a father Hamish. Thanks for this magnificent entertainment as always, Magi. Your work is so consistent it works like an onion to bring tears of laughter.

I was reminded of the terrifying innocence of Denis Johnson´s Fiskadoro, how the young teen narrator deals with a post-apocalyptic irradiated world with a sort of cunning naiveté. Your use of the fire metaphor that in a sense stands in for all thought, crazy or sane, as well as the mysterious bio-energetic worlds that the poet can see (like auras seen by psychics) builds in a snowballing way that works as a sort of magical realism. There is a cleanness to the vision here that is really exceptional. You have a remarkable gift for stripping language down to its essential meaning and then reconstituting it in strange ways,  Clown, and here share you endow the reader  generously with your lucid vision of the madness of all consensual reality.

Did you mean in the last line, ¨Their rooms were replicas of the asylum?¨

This piece is tight, very tight, and works on a deep satirical level with the reader, triggering both concern and outrage like a good civic poem with Swiftian implications should. To begin with, the equating of kids with planes is a keen metaphor. Resonates with the same force as, for example, Pink Floyd´s Another Brick In The Wall has for a couple of generations. The reader in this post-apocalyptic, oh so civilized metaphorical society is hounded for being a child lover. He realizes that his thinking is just  a ´denominational school of thought´ in an endless cycle, where abstraction and displacement replace real feelings for family, real education of children, with product results, the child converted literally into a launched commodity.

A very interesting meditative piece, that reads again like a performance monologue to be acted out on stage with an actor miming actions with the hand and the imaginary ant colony. while a disembodied speaker does the voice-over. You have a natural theatrical sensibility, my dear Clown. Again, full of dark apocalyptic hints of future hive mind--¨the ants will live inside us¨--and a strange surreal logic of a hand that pulls itself up by its double thumb, leaving the speaker down below. Your central themes of split mind, dualistic conflict, end of the world reflections are all here in abundance, but put in a new softer philosophical framework. I almost wish I had the stage directions to the monologue (though I´ve already thought of how to direct it) as I felt when I read Circus and Sewers.