Research Surrogacy
beware of the organ-trafficking of scholarship
Saraswati for sale!
It’s time she compromised
but too sacred and fertile for
the rising traffic of proxies,
we willingly queue for a ghost
to replace our barrenness.
Ethics is replaced
by Economics and
ghost-written with
self-definitions of
scholarly morality.
Words-worths of originality
dead and wordsmiths
of necessity born into
a Brave New World
of mass compromises.
Today you are timed
by career and the self
is pledged to robotic
systems that scalpel
you to size and your
home waits for your love
like those latchkey-children
when you return in the evening
and like a thorn in flesh
tomorrow’s work slowly
creeps and pokes your thoughts
while you nestle in the warm and
pending embraces of your family.
Now bonded and accountable
to the career that closes in,
on the little infertile
room of your own
and as the brain’s too exhausted
to conceive its children amidst
this binding loneliness you’re
pressed to resort to the fertility
and research centres that
have a multi-special faculty
of qualified, trained and
well-paid surrogates, midwives,
and even mid-husbands – the
professional transformers and terminators
to labour, plagiarise, ghost
and conceive a birth for you
double and triple peer-reviewed
under an autonomy of
doctors and doctored ethics
you must reach only “through a
god-fatherly proper channel” –
which ensures will mother,
Guide and supervise, you
to “right” persons who can
help process the tailor-ready
research thesis and papers.
Your compromising voice
then whispers a silent soliloquy:
Once a scholar,
you no longer belong
to your gifted-self so
isn’t dependency
better than pendency
and be too late?
Remember the counter
-ethical- golden-thumb-rule:
being a scholar, cultivate the
art of undergoing the ordeal
of being a tight-lipped dark
horse, patiently tightrope-
walking on the guided ropes
scapegoating your gifted self
at the avaricious altar of a
ghosted subway blindly
giving your formal consents
and promptly offering gifts
and favours, greasing all the
deft hands for smooth movement
in blind obedience till you are
a doctor of ‘cut and paste’ philosophy
lest your ethical defiance will
be considered arrogant trespass
which may delay your course.
The deal is mediated according
to the intensity of your need.
May be a promotion,
or revised pay scale!
The transplanted body
of your ideas is permitted
to have its choicest anatomy
but at the end should stand
only on the Chicago, MLA,
APA or AMA styled crutches.
May be no fruit is forbidden
anymore! Since God is ‘Dog’ged
by our hardened conscience, now
it’s not only an idle man’s brain
that’s a devils workshop but
a busy, infertile brain as well, that
can make a heaven out of hell.
All is fair not only in
war and love but in
becoming a paid co-parent
as well, to a brain child
parenting a co-authorship
with two, three sometimes
even four-more,
mothered by a ghost-writer and
fathered by Artificial intelligence!
The research surrogacy now
ratified by the scientific, and
Scopus-indexed plutocracy.
The modus operandi is
of Socialism but the spirit
belongs to Capitalist dictates.
Feathering the caps with
a legion of phenomenal births,
elsewhere wades of crisp bank notes
golden iPhones, diamonds, laptops
and of course needy women,
shift hands of intellectual lapdogs
in the intercontinental hotels
for an A ++ Grade for a
deemed to be capitalist university
of well-feathered nests
that puts on the Marxist mask
and a Communist voice.
A spirit of compromise
has already been vaccinated
into the sedated veins of
the post-modern society.
The only second nature
you need is, be a roman
when you’re in Rome,
and be true to the
reconstituted amendments
blind your conscience,
convince, re-educate its
out-dated moralities and
then consistently self-rhetorize:
What though the
conscience be lost
All is not lost!
While the plagiarists
are the law-givers and
research moguls of surrogacy
that frigidize your fertility
in this terminal world
of obsolete ethics;
the ghostless writers of
non-artificial intelligence
become mere poetic-onlookers
looking for the stuttering
figures of speech that shy away
from the undressed reality
etherised on the ghost-writer’s
plagiarised table.
And the pen that was once
mightier than the sword
is blunted now gets
sheepishly confined
to a breadless reality
of a cobwebbed future.
PS: Ghost-writing, large scale plagiarism, commercialisation of research and publication, corruption at the hierarchy, have defiled the moral fabric and sanctity of academics and research. All this mass treachery has profaned the emblem of Saraswathi.
Soft-Wearing
How weary stale, flat and unprofitable
seem to me all the uses of this world
– Hamlet
We are chips
chipped off
discs of
transmigrated souls
less in the weight of love.
“What’s up?” asks
my grandmother.
“Whatsapp” i say.
That’s all we live for.
A new learning puts us
at a dangerous ease
crushing the dreams
of life under heavy
digital missions of mind
in the gullies of the
metropolitan trash cans.
Brains drain out
in the confluence
of brain drain.
Miles away the soil
moans with pain
where the womb
of love travels
the road that leads
to the larger rooms
of senility where even
lovemaking is digitalised.
About the Author
Sreekanth Kopuri is an Indian poet from Machilipatnam. He is the Current poetry editor for The AutoEthnographer Journal Florida, Writer in Residence, Athens and a Professor of English. He was a Pushcart Nominee for his poem “Coffeying the Day into the Song of Solomon” for 2023. He physically recited his poetry in Oxford, John Hopkins, Heinrich Heine, Caen, Banja Luka, Gdanski and many universities. His poems appeared in Two Thirds North, Arkansas Review, A Honest Ulsterman, San Antonio Review, Chicago Memory House, Tulsa Review, Digging Press Journal, Expanded Field, South Broadway Journal, Contrapuntos, Untethered Review, A New Ulster, Vayavya, American Diversity Report, Plants & Poetry, Burrow, Rational Creature, Nebraska Writers Guild, Poetry San Jose, Oddball Magazine, to mention a few. His book Poems of the Void was the winner of Golden Book of the year 2022. Kopuri was deeply influenced by Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry.
