Even if you were my Arabian princess
I wouldn’t have enough stories to build
you a proper sized palace. I’d hunt
down golden lamps for a chance to ask

for as many hands as a Hindu god shaped
like an elephant to accurately manipulate
the extra dimension geometry required
for a suitable monument to your beauty.

I’d open my arms against a wave of crusades
like a wall Ali Baba forgot the lyrics to

and spill the 5 Pillars of Islam for scrap piety
to keep your 7 veils of innocence as sacrosanct.
I’d use the smoke and mirrors of metered verse
and a second hand knowledge of

Near Eastern cultures and a command
of mathematics that oddly resembles mysticism
and a non-terminating non-repeating vocabulary
to convince you I want more than your body – but I don’t.
Civility is a mask I wear like how

corporate employers pretend to…

Antibiotics are over used. Period. End of sentence.

My pharmacy is getting ready to install a robotic dispensing system. It takes your pharmacy’s top 200 or so drugs and automatically counts them for you, saving the pharmacist time. To determine those 200 drugs we ran reports based off of 12 months of previous medications dispensed. The number 1 drug dispensed was Zithromax, a what was once a powerful antibiotic is now used to treat the common cold and mild respiratory infections. Among those 200 drugs are an additional 27 antibiotics. This is just at my pharmacy. I’m sure this is the trend throughout the United States and into Europe. This is scary. Before penicillin existed people died from infections. Penicillin was discovered and helped save hundreds if not thousands of lives in World War II. More antibiotics were developed in response to bacterial resistance to penicillin. Medicine advanced because of…

In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt’s (and Dubner’s) best seller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) The title of the chapter, “Why drug dealers still live with their moms”, was based on the finding that the income distribution within gangs was extremely skewed in favor  of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities, let’s say at McDonald’s. They calculated 3.30 dollars as the hourly rate, that is, well below a living wage (that’s why they still live with their moms). [2]

If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or…

Of the many things that I do not like to do in life (and you’d be surprised at how long a list that’ll end up being), writing comes at the very top of the list. When I say writing, I mean, of course, the act of taking a pen in hand and actually scribbling out the words. Stringing words together in order to form sentences is rather a pleasing task, particularly when performed on my own laptop (remind me to tell you more about this in about 400 words or so).

But when the stringing of words is to be done with a pen or pencil, my enthusiasm for said task is lower than the chances of Narendra Modi contesting the Lok Sabha elections on a Congress ticket. I’ve never been an enthusiastic exponent of the art, and I’m not about to begin now.

Frankly, and I say this to…

This is a haiku
I am almost twenty-one
I’m high as fuck, dude

Aaaahhh…

One note.

No variance or variety.

Just sustained refrains sounding out a long sigh

Dense with words missing their mark,

Losing their meaning.

Imagery read robotically.

Aaaahhh…

Looking for music and muses,

Instead I found only muzak

In coffee house lobbies

Premium blending into a background

of awkward silences

and forced conversations,

Sometimes at speed, but

One note at 4/4 or 8/8

Is still

One note.

Aaaahhh AAAHHH…

Two notes.

A chord.

Musical accompaniment.

Zests of Jazz infuse your words.

Percussive beats sound out.

Rests… get equal time… with notes.

The audience awakens.

Your eyes meet their eyes instead of ink.

Suddenly simile is heard like it’s supposed to be,

And your poem becomes a metaphor of meaning.

When the heart sings, those who hear it

can’t help but feel it.

Genuine emotion suspends them

on a event horizon

to your gravity well of words.

And now, we’ve all…