If I sit at this desk, like so,
Will I write a poem?
Probably.
If I press this pen down, like so,
Will ideas flow out of it?
Probably.
If I squiggle questions in lines, like so,
Will the answers be straight?
Probably.
If I make that a dialogue, like so,
Will that be poetry?
Probably.
If I send it to people, like so,
Will they think it poetry?
Pfft.
My hands got used to pen and page
And find it hard to type with grace
Upon the QWERTY on the Mac
Which used to be the only place
I wrote my lines in for my verse
And wrote my lies in for my work.
Though now my thumbs can swipe a screen,
The other fingers feel a jerk
As I attempt to type on Mac
The type of things that make me doubt
If this is what I studied for,
If this is what my life’s about.
I have become addicted to
The gait of words on trotting feet:
da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM
And so it goes in every line.
The sound obeys the tides of tongues
And rolls before you notice how
You have a music in your mouth
Without a sign of rhyme or break.
And yet it carries on its back
The ebb and flow of reasoned thought:
And now clement, and now intense,
And all the while at steady pace.
It needs no one to know its name.
It lives and works for readers’ joy.
I know the name they write in books:
The iambic tetrameter.
I don’t think I’m someone to miss,
But you should meet my little sis,
Who leaves behind her sheltered teens
Today to wear her lady jeans.
At twenty, she produces art
That grabs the viewer by the heart
And paints a smile upon their face
That brightens up their gloomy days.
In person, she becomes her art
And cheers you from the very start.
The secret to these feats above:
She gives her all with all her love.
So, she is all that I was not.
(Or maybe she was never caught!
And that you have to figure out)
You’ll get along without a doubt.
Go, help her paint her wildest dreams.
Go, help her find her flowing streams
Of consciousness that shape a soul.
And where she lacks, go, make her whole.
Adieu, adieu, my failed decade.
Adieu and thanks for lessons all.
You cut my crutches with your blade,
But chiseled legs for standing tall.
You found an angry, pampered boy
And tried to make a tempered man.
You tried your every trick and ploy,
And still I threw you off your plan.
But worry not, you managed well.
You did inject maturity.
I know at times it’s hard to tell,
But now I have some clarity.
You taught me where to put my time,
And who to give my faith and trust,
And how to push beyond my prime,
And when to parry, when to thrust.
You drilled in me a discipline
To do the things I love to do,
To draw my art from deep within,
To learn again a skill or two.
Again I thank you for the years
Of wanderings through luck and loss,
For now I see my smiles and tears
As heads and tails of equal toss.
The mirror shone on tyrant thrones
And tore into their tired tones,
Which held the whole hierarchic hold
On guilty gentry and their gold.
The mirror shone on constant minds
Inconstant turned by constant grinds
Of treasured trustee’s treachery
In forms of fawning flattery.
The mirror shone on racist views
Towards the Moors and moored-up Jews
With proclamations prejudiced:
At once, “Reward!” At once, “Resist!”
The mirror shone on sexist tongues
Who launched pollutions from their lungs
For females frequenting outdoors,
To frame them frequently as whores.
The mirror shone on private fears,
Soliloquies of sullied seers,
For who’s he has his hand on heart
And airs not any aches of art?
I do the things that writers do
Except the thing that matters most.
I stay compulsive, stay alone
Inside my head for hours and hours.
I make routines, and stick to them,
Until I don’t, and start over.
I read a lot, reread a lot.
I take some notes, forget I did,
Convince myself I never will
Amount to much by way of work.
Depression, check. Anxiety, check.
Distempered notoriety, check.
I sleep in fear of waking up.
I wake in fear of losing sleep.
I feed my self a lunch of doubt
And vomit out my swallowed pride.
I throw a tantrum when I’m scared
A thing will never get resolved.
I play the victim, play accursed:
I blame the people in my life
For giving me no space no time
To write the lines I’m meant to write
But never really seem to do.
Get off, get off the writing desk,
Where hours pass in seconds’ blinks.
At once, at once to running fields!
Compose in motion static lines
That keep the beat of landing feet
And do so at the speed of time,
For runners running breast to breast
Do not outrun or run out of
The other one so easily.
‘They’ say the Way to Everlife
Is paved with words we write in strife.
Then, how can my obsession be
The pencil that erases me?
‘They’ say the remedy to gloom
Is having one’s own writing room.
Then, how can this prescription be
The pencil that erases me?
‘They’ say that Doubt is but a voice,
Which can be silenced by our Choice.
Are ‘They’ who sharpen for a fee
The pencil that erases me?
Are You who pays these artful ‘They’?
Are You who bricks and walls my Way?
Then, lend me for Your final glee
The pencil that erases me.
I wake up with the windiness
Of blanket clouds inside my head.
I breathe to meditate in zen.
I sit to meditate in zen.
I walk to meditate in zen.
I think I meditate in zen.
I hardly feel I am in zen.
I feel I am in denial.
I feel I am about to smash
To little pieces every thing
Imposing on my senses five.
The roshi smiles and gently asks
To make my mind as open sky.
I would agree, except it takes
Atlassian efforts to uphold
The sky of my cast-over mind,
With grumbling thunders shocking me
At every rise and fall of air.
Minakhi Misra 