POETRY PRIMER

“I wandered lonely as a cloud…”
Hmmm…one squirms a bit,
though perhaps kosher for its time.
And that “crowd”
(line three), while we’re still at it
makes for rather awkward rhyme.

The oded nightingale and autumn
fare slightly better, though not
much. “My heart aches, and a drowsy…”
Well, so does ours: they’re tiresome,
laboured, overwrought.
One stops short of lousy.

The romantic died hard in fact.
Shelley unbeknownst, leapt
an age when he met
his traveller from that antique tract:
cool, Olympian, adept,
as spare as you could get.

Still, far removed from sweeping
winds, the sear of green to brown,
and arid acres that would kill
or mute the song of hearts leaping –
lovers woken up to drown,
and the distant lilac-breeding April.

***

A FUCKING ABSENCE OF

I
Words.
Too many words, too many,
This is an addiction,
To spill the wrong words
Cupped in your hand
And let it baptize sinners
When all they needed
Was a fucking bath.

II
Drugs and alcohol.
Never too much, too little maybe,
All in the wrong veins
Like the legs and hands
Leaving blank pages
And empty roads
When all you wanted
Was to give your mind a break.

III
You.
Never enough, or too much
In my head and body,
Always flitting about
In these sanitized words,
Wine and substances, ingested
And rejected and now inflicted
On the general population who need a laugh.

LESSON

And then there is death. Always.
Some of you have contemplated
It, in the active or the abstract.
On some the fear of it preys
Like a worm, unstated.
The flutter of the final act.

Unnecessary really, its terror
Made more of than it deserves:
The dark needs but light
To expose the error
Which ignorance serves –
Dawn to the louring dread of night.

One could be pragmatic about it:
See perhaps in its inner
Vacuity the blown up myth,
And with cold reason rout it.
As routine a chore as dinner:
Something to be got over with.

***

QUICKSILVER NIRVANA

Quicksilver nirvana

I've come to a place
That's green and misty
Where joy is a pimple-ripe fruit
In a garden
That's taller than me.
Where purple fish fly peacefully
Across a yellow moon

That disrobes its light
Into an enchanted pool
Where I see a bright green lizard.
Its eyes bigger than the fingernail moon
Its smile cleaving its arrow face,
And beckoning me to step in.

I refuse.

I am in place
Where joy drizzles like salt crystals
In slow motion
Or perhaps snowflakes through a microscope
I can't really say.

Still smiling, the lizard
Comes undone, fading deep into
The starry blue pond
Leaving strains of a hopeful melody.

And for just an instant
In the circular echo of the pool
I see all I want from life
Written in picture-script
A little like Chinese.

A quick breath
And they disappear slower than they came
As the fading lizard drags away with it
All that I think I ought to know
In this life and others.

Sandhya
September 07

OH WELL...

“Does it mean nothing to you?? Fame
I mean, accolades…adoring women…stature
Of a god, you know…Does all of that
Leave you cold? Why, it is in the nature
Of poets to hunger for a pretty pat
Or two, the heady wine of acclaim!”

The incredulous tones of a fellow-poet
Who’s known and seen it all, now dismayed
By my cheerful obscurity. Who knew,
Such indifference argued a shade
Of something other perhaps… A hue
Of conceit for those who’d know it.

But sloth – for such it is – has no lines
To read between, and inertia’s bland
Of meaning: both enough to keep me grounded
In my unfamous state. Hard to understand
No doubt, but reasons well-founded.
Poets? I suppose it takes all kinds…

***