When you asked me if
my poetry made any sense
all those years ago, you
destroyed my Negative Capability
and made me want to justify
everything I wrote
because you stand,
mocking and accusing
me like the people of Sodom
criticised Lot every time my finger
presses a key on the computer.
Say, I listen to some
moody post-rock
and a simile comes to mind,
one saying I’m broken, but not as
much as the
dingy lament of hollowed out
skulls I’m listening to,
I have to pause
and arm-wrestle
with that figure of speech,
wonder if it’s too abstruse.
Once I defended my art,
saying it is
what it is,
esoteric like something
discussed in a secret society at Yale
(if that’s what they really do),
but your words echoed in my mind,
souring the juice of creation,
addling me and leaving me unable
to perceive in weird dimensions,
to find meaning beyond the 4/4,
to compose something haunting,
ethereal and yet mysterious,
atmospheric and delirious,
a rush of images juxtaposed like
the old, filthy city of Hyderabad
with its smelly alleys and hawkers
with its newer, hi-tech counterpart,
making a discordant
but beautiful whole.
I could let it all out,
purge something
purely figurative,
vaguely metaphysical
and pseudo-philosophical,
a fragmented, patchwork narrative,
strewn together
with threads of lunacy,
call it a haiku
(because you loved those)
even though it’s
pop-postmodern prose,
but I’ll see you standing before the
guillotine, flashing that malicious grin
and I’ll delete, rewrite and give
everything structure, common time,
dum, dum, dum, dum.
This perennial search for meaning
and truth that must be quantified,
counted on fingers as if it was
a list of things to do
has me in a box, and beauty isn’t
truth and all I need to know,
and even if it was, it buzzes off like
a bee and makes me question
why it did so.
Ordinary Person 
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