[Skip Navigation]

Poetry Archives

A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

Prayer To Shiva

S. K. Kelen

Like smack freak dried out on Jesus
& real estate agent found happiness
in Khalil Gibran so Helmut the Teutonic
computer engineer with five years Fortran
under his belt asked Shiva destroy me
burn the logic in me absolve
my calculus in your flames
O BomShiva negate six years of Latin
give me Sex plus God take me to
your temples let me love your beggars
and the most grotesque are awarded rupees
take the arrogance and
swallow my hippy pride
I want to be Indian
know God lives in temples
looks like an elephant
or a stone prick
O Shiva BomShiva make me a morphine addict
let sleaze edge out the blueness,
my eyes, my Prussian eyes.
Award me a rupee absolve my calculus
in your flames tell my wife in Berlin
I will be home in six months
© S. K. Kelen. All rights reserved.
From Atomic Ballet | Hale & Iremonger, 1991
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Add Keyword Tags

Separate each tag with a space. You may add as many tags as you'd like to each poem.

What are tags?
Tags, sometimes called “folksonomies,” are words that describe or categorize a poem, like “20th century modernism” or “Italian sonnet”. Tags can help you find poems that have something in common, based on how other people classify them.

More Info

This site will work and look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any Internet device.