No one reads poetry
on Friday night
or at all—even poets
prefer pub quizzes and a pint
to poring over Shelley.
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The question
I like romcoms
with Hollywood grannies—
when they still fit into the twenties bracket—
not yet afflicted by that ordeal
of the imagination called ‘growing older’,
where there’s no gruesome impudence
but the question: How old are you?
I guess it’s easier with the discreet
Quel âge as-tu?
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The involuntary solipsist
Call me a heathen, but since time immemorial,
people of my ilk have always had the feeling
that we would rather hear Cage’s Four Thirty-Three at dawn
than listen to the seagullian chorales and rhetoric classes
in magpieese on the accidental agora of our windowsill.
And when I toss and turn furiously in bed at five in the morning,
I can’t help but wonder what third-rate college produced
this intelligent designer.
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Mocking birds
My humble neighbours have recently started exercising
their vocal cords, only I’ve never ordered Wordsworth’s The Daffodils
to be recited in magpieese on my bedroom windowsill
at five in the morning.
However, it did get me thinking: what if the answer really is forty-two—
although I’m still not a cricket fan—but it was ordered by magpies, not mice,
and I’m stuck amongst shadows, alone, in this panopticon
full of sophisticated probability engines?
But why do I feel
like one ancient Greek is mocking another again?
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The wittellectual
When the mind needs a change of scenery,
all you need is a camera obscura
and a list of rice cultivars,
or you can always expand your collection
of smooth utterances
like, ‘I recognise that nature is unforgiving,
but I would say that a butcher is a necessity,
while a zoo, a circus and a fishbowl are the harbingers
of the true cruelty’—after all, it requires impeccable table manners to swallow
your every l’esprit de l’escalier
without choking.
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The bibliophile’s sin
Books have been at the centre of my life since I was ten and recognised the library as my temple, but it was only as an adult that I realised that my bibliotheca had become a well-curated dichotomy between what I buy and what I read—Japanese call it tsundoku.
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Facts
I came into possession of a book on why truth matters and was astonished to read that ‘[t]here are true (sic!) facts’. What on earth are true facts? In the past, we simply had facts and fiction. Why does the former require such a qualifier now? Call me old-fashioned, but such pleonasm is not just a sign of bad style; it’s an indication of the undergoing putrefaction of language—that fundamental instrument for shaping thoughts, expressing emotions, and maintaining social connections, a mirror of values, beliefs, and experiences, that can even influence how people perceive the world. So, I’d rather stick to facts.
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Rajan syndrome
Have you ever seen an elephant
swimming in the ocean, and to Beethoven at that?
Beautiful, isn’t it? Perhaps,
but before you ceremoniously place that coup de foudre
in your Altoids tin, next to all the treasures
you’ve been collecting forever, think
about whether you really saw Rajan smiling
or if it was just the telly acting as a mirror.
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A love affair
A dumbbell in my ribcage, like a dead weight
on a chopping board, pulverised—
a change of air might do it good—
and yet still carrying on
with its tedious staccato,
as if nothing ever happened.
Would it shock the ladies?
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hidden pilcrow 