If You Don’t —-

How do I move foreword

If you don’t tell me

Show me how to start

How do I do something better

If you don’t light on

How do I step right or left

If you sound less

How do I brood over

If you don’t hang me in blessed

How do I snap the glory of nature

If you don’t  accompany me

How do I laugh from heart

If you don’t open your eyes to me

Soft and see the blush

How do I think the world

If you don’t hug

All the things will run away behind

If you don’t respond

All the things are in dust

If you don’t come to me with the face of love.

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Ethics of Space Exploration

So I finally learned the ethics and politics

of space exploration.

Try to find life at the far corners

of unforgiving solitude. Shoot the kids

in Yemen and Afghanistan.

Go bonkers about the discovery of habitable

planets. Bomb the shit out of Aleppo

to make it  look like poor people’s Mars.

Hope the aliens from space are nice

and friendly. Kill the brothers from another country

if they drink beer in your bar.

So the space moralists told me,

“Nobody owns the moon”.

Damn fucking right!

I told them nobody owns Earth either.

Sudeep Adhikari is a structural engineer/Lecturer  from Kathmandu, Nepal.   His recent publications were with   Red Fez , Kyoto  , Your One Phone Call, Jawline Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Yellow Mama, Fauna Quarterly, Beatnik Cowboys, After The Pause, Poetry Pacific, Silver Birch Press and  Vox Poetica.

Convenience stores

Convenience stores must be easy, out there alone, late;

around here two or three get held up each week, as if

there were a quota on them. It’s easy to picture, the lone

clerk dozing a bit by the register when the guy comes in,

the only person in the store, brandishes a weapon, they

always say brandish for these guys, either a gun or knife

or what looks like a weapon, and the minimum wage night

clerk always turns over the cash, an undetermined amount

they always say, and then he’s gone back out into the night,

so often around here the bandit leaves the scene on foot, as

if familiar with his or her surroundings, some local talent

perhaps; then on the evening news they will show pictures of

the thief, caught on the convenience store’s security camera

and we are told to call the police if we recognize this person,

a person who someone will know, a person who, more often

than not is caught. It’s as if convenience stores have become

the stage, the backdrop for this predictable play, this tired story

about our world, a dark lonely place where it seems as if we

either tend the till or come in from the night brandishing or

pretending to brandish a weapon, then leave with a hard to

determine amount of money, leaving behind each time just

enough of ourselves that we get our picture on TV and finally

someone recognizes for what we are and calls it in.

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