From a Poet Aspirant

To Aspirant Poets

Never cut your poetic milk teeth,
Toying with ideas, to write any piece
Written ere, by past contemporaries,
If your verses, would look similar
To theirs, or even worse, inferior.
Refrain, if you’d make no difference!

An aspiring author and poet,
Must write, such a novel piece,
Neither read nor writ afore.
Or perfect, what a past poet,
Would have dreamt to realise.
A matchless way to figure out
If your poems are any excellent,
Is by contrasting them against
Dead, but accomplished poets.

Contemporary poets, so Unpoetic
Are celebrities created by a critic,
Constantly seeking out for an artistic
Fairy. A carpe diem poet, of the occasion,
A rhymester belching with exaggeration,
Pompously puffed up by pouring praise.
But when these invented fairies
Have departed, they rot in extinction,
Decompose quietly in misty oblivion.

Of all great artists an aspiring poet
Can contest with, as an antecedent,
Are the dead; revered most inimitably.
That way, they are like an athlete
Sure-footed, running a race set
Against the timer. Never merely
Venturing to win the competition,
Simply by defeating every opponent
That trails limply, in the marathon!

If you never run against time,
How would you ever know,
If you’d be aborted, or grow,
To write, an eternal rhyme?
Like master, like gent;
Like—but oh! How different!

©roundsquare.

Unpoetical

Unpoetical

To sweat tirelessly,
And more ambitiously
Than good ol’ Wordsworth.
To squiggle and scribble
Not a topic sentence,
But a simple and single
Line, of a plain sonnet.
And the line, he supposes,
Is the greatest in all earth.
But the line he composes
Alas, is as scantily set;
Deficient of all senses
As his own silly existence.

Why sell artistic skill and all?
Why trade in entirety the soul?
For false fame or prosaic sake,
A penname, immortality to make,
Obsessed by fleeting success.
Forgetting the lasting consequences
That leaves life with nothing less
Mocking than bigotries, theories,
And philosophies of failed artistries,
In the footnotes of poetic histories.

The only poets so appealing,
Unaccomplished and unmarketed,
Yet charming and enchanting,
Are verily the poets so inferior.
For the poets so superior
Dangle high in bubbly air, floated
By winds of fame and so appear
Blown out of proportion, inflated,
Exaggerated, in what they really are.

A gifted poet?
A truly gifted poet
Sadly is the most unpoetical
Of all creative creatures.
But a substandard poet,
With third-rate lines so unlyrical
Is such ‘a distinguished genius;
Ingenious! Grandiose! Gorgeous!’
The dimmer their verses gleam,
The more sensational they seem.

Plenty of petty poets
Publish loads upon volumes
Of such mediocre rhymes,
Puffing up these egoless poets
As pretty much attractive.
Then go round boasting of lyrics
They can never ever connive.
The other composes lyrics
In tunes they daren’t pulsate
Nor are predisposed to resonate,
Lines of poetry they can never live.

©Roundsquare .

*Wordsworth – an aspiring but failed poet in V.S Naipaul’s Miguel Street.

Poetic Faith

Poetic faith

What if poets patch, bandy
Words in the brow-beaten
Style of theologically penned
Liturgies, for you to entwine
In a quagmire of Grundy
Quibbling yet misapprehend
Shreds of truth in lines between.

What if poets rouse auguries
Of words like an aborted poet
Pounded to pulp by lexicographicide
Or like a stillbirth crushed, lost
In a womb of pregnant allegories
And blind metaphoric passages
From whence voices safely hide
Kept mum in a shroud of images.

What if poets tether, knot
Words with rhymes, caught
Amidst a periphrastic elucidation
And a worn-out poetical fashion
Leaving your wits still tussling
In an intolerable wrestling
Against syntax and meaning.

What if a writer shapes, mimics
Words, creating an impression
To Thomas and his sceptics,
That our parables are an all—
Sophisticated scheme, so subtle
Of saying something simple,
Yet, our words, are a distraction
Which we obscure semantics
Under an arsenal of polemics.

At this, suppose we impose
A short-term curfew with
A disbelief that might expose
Your pedestrian loyalty. And
In a twinkle of an eye, suspend
Your poetic faith…

Aha! Attempt to master as a learner
To use words, and our every trial
To manipulate a language rule
Is a totally new reconstruction,
A different type of frustration.
Since we never learn to outsmart
Words for what we no longer
Have to say, or in manner
In which we are no longer
Disposed or inclined to assert.

©roundsquare.

Revered Servant of the Sword

Admiral Brutus Street isn’t what you would call an admirable street—well, there are tired-looking buildings parading in unclean pavements and smelly sewages. There are haggard-looking shops, bars tickling with glasses, and have never closed its doors for the last half century and counting, lodges creaking with beds, that lie awake from indecent lives within them, weather-beaten iron-roofs that clatter-clang and gaze at one another with black collected countenances. There are also reprobates who monitor everything that happens in that street, as if they possess it, or perhaps possessed by it.

The pot-holed tarmac, an occasional sparkling fuel-guzzler arrogant with road monstrosity, loud-mouthed hawkers, weighed down by huge hoarded goodies, competing here with impatient hooting, and there with street preachers, old tilted taxis, and stranded passengers, pedestrians, drug peddlers, idlers, and the playful scatter of street urchins make the street a visual and an oscillating concerto of confusion.

This chaos climaxes every Sabbath Day, when spirited lips chew chants and sing sacred songs while the revivalist irritates every open space with verbal diarrhoea. The street pays no attention, for an anthem of hullabaloo from the madding crowd, hustles noisily upon its ear, and drenches the whole hallowed hum. Even when the ‘brother’ proclaims like the prophets from his Ararat podium, eloquent as Luther King but boiling with braggadocio, and, his hand on the open Bible, of the ‘revered realities of our religion’, and of angel-like lives and vicarious sacrifice, and of endless bliss or indescribable gnashing of teeth, its eyes darkens with restless dust, agitated, in case the heavens up yonder should rumble and smite those speckled lips busy spewing forth sacrilege.

An old dark man, old as the sea, with the most depressing looks and a face that reminds one of Rufus, but on second thoughts, of Hannibal dusts the windshield of his London cab for an umpteenth time. He has the most curious raincoat that has its rightful place in the war memorial museums. It covers his spurs, barely concealing his shining army boots and had once been a confederate grey in colour. But rain and sun and age has so speckled it that Caesar’s rabbit-fur coat, beside it, would have discoloured to a pallid monochrome. A despondent descendant of kings is this old man.

The old man stands majestically by his dark cab that is so old that Lot himself might have asked for a ride in it after he fled Sodom with his two daughters and wife blindfolded in the boot, lest she should be tempted to look back. Although the street itself is already worried by the ominous  presence of this old man of the hills by his evil looks, the old man touts for would-be passengers, and as they approach, he draws the fly whisk, waves without using, and proclaims like Noah, in deep, rumbling tones: ‘Zion Train express! Get on board sire, spotless—no dust, jus’ back from di funeral, suh.’

An Undertaker’s hat conceals his white wig but still reveals a wee-bit of his parched face and also shows some secret forces of despair and shame that pull it earthwards. He assumes the most revered expression to match his outrageous overstatement of the weight his burly figure carries. His sharp eyes join the other million-dollar Zimbabwean eyes curiously detained by a revival meeting that is just starting, conducted by three sisters in black, and a brother.

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chicken crossing

At the inception of the chicken century, the sons of men pounced on the farms with obstinate wills and sincere and unyielding ambition. The earth fed greedily on their energies and nourished in ecstasy. They inflated her abdomen until it ruptured and gave birth to a thousand hamlets and wheat fields, a thousand paved roads and muddy paths, a thousand granaries and barnyards and abattoirs and butcheries.

The farms nurtured. They bore fruits and extended to each man an affiliation limited only by his talent, his dexterity, and his enthusiasm and aptitude for labour. For Smokie Joe and his kin, a yearning had been roused and conquered. But for us animals and our kith, life proposed no such promise or connection. We came from the wrong places, the forests, the wilderness; we came strapping, fervent, penetrating and unrefined.

The farms declined our offers and we took refuge back into the woodlands, along water points and underground abodes. We re-organised and cut deals with sons of men. We traded the use of our brute force and our sinewy muscles for food and security. We tilled farms and dragged carriages, we laid eggs and produced milk, and in hushed harassment and aggrieved arrogance, we desired, and endured in quest for our own dream; that we could live in liberty, finally, and rise to welcome life with might and majesty or suchlike simplicity, life could accord.

And there were hard battles and so were sweet victories, fortifying the communal might of the Animal Revolution. We fought and tasted triumphs, tackling a new dream that consumed equality and allegiance as its energy. We were kings, and life was promising, bursting, and blooming. The calves, lambs and chicks of change that would make our generation a cringing, cowering, subdued, and pacific generation had not yet been conceived.

Well, that’s gone with the wind now. It’s an animal dream crushed, and just half a chicken century after the glorious Animal Revolution. Neighbouring farms, earlier on liberated, have been lost back to the descendants of Smokie Joe, who now dominate the landscape with might and power. Ask Dog—never has he felt so servile in his life than to Smokie Joe. He only has to see his pipe on his desk to feel undersized. He has only to smell his cigar and he gets timid like a mare—even now when he looks at his boots, stepping on that the gas pedal, taking us for a ride, so flexible and springy, he feels his heart sinking, as they say, into his paws.

Mine too, that’s why I sometimes plant my chicken shit right inside those boots, accidentally of course, as poetic justice. I guess, it’s those old, biased ‘accepted wisdom’ fed into us as young pups and chicks. Dog has sleepless nights (for our sake) thinking up ways to ruin Smokie Joe without being found out. Perhaps cut the brake cables of his truck, but then, we almost always ride in it and that would spell doom for all of us.

His three boys toil too, on the farm, and the two girls hide in the kitchen, perfecting skills, as plain Janes do (sad but true), being useful only in culinary arts and in housekeeping for what they lack in looks. Smokie Joe has to look at himself in the mirror to know where they got their deficient looks—and perhaps their dexterity. And as the boys hanker after bean-stalk cutes in short-skirts that can’t boil tea, they rust on the shelf. Sometimes at night around the kitchen table, they help the servants shell French beans; their wages, after powder for their dull faces, can’t even keep me in shoelaces, assuming I have shoes. Poor girls! Poor servants! They are just like the rest of us animals.

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