These Days...
I
These days
I find everything staged:
the words of comfort you plant,
the concern that I fake,
the platitudes that we toss,
twirl, throw into each other’s face.
How brittle is our truth
that we wrap it with pretexts
believing love holds good
only in certain contexts.
II
The other day
at Carter Road,
when the Sun was
a speck of orange in your eye
and the world
a soot covered portrait,
I felt I had a poem for you
but then, these days, I don’t write poems.
I look for words instead,
words that string into freshly minted idioms;
idioms that burrow into the silences
you puncture our conversations with.
III
In the quietness of the night
the simmering underbelly
of this ever-changing city
explodes into a shrill scream
unheard from the glistening
living rooms of Malabar Hill
draped with Bach's Symphony.
But I strain to hear your voice
in this mutinous noise…
© Dan Husain
March 25, 2006
These days
I find everything staged:
the words of comfort you plant,
the concern that I fake,
the platitudes that we toss,
twirl, throw into each other’s face.
How brittle is our truth
that we wrap it with pretexts
believing love holds good
only in certain contexts.
II
The other day
at Carter Road,
when the Sun was
a speck of orange in your eye
and the world
a soot covered portrait,
I felt I had a poem for you
but then, these days, I don’t write poems.
I look for words instead,
words that string into freshly minted idioms;
idioms that burrow into the silences
you puncture our conversations with.
III
In the quietness of the night
the simmering underbelly
of this ever-changing city
explodes into a shrill scream
unheard from the glistening
living rooms of Malabar Hill
draped with Bach's Symphony.
But I strain to hear your voice
in this mutinous noise…
© Dan Husain
March 25, 2006
Labels: poetry
Selected by Innocent Bullet |
01:58 |
6 Comments:
Dan,
Reads even better now.
J
A friend of mine referred me to this post...
What amazes me is how this poem captures the multitude of emotions I've been through in the past few days so perfectly...
Brilliant stuff.
something kept me from visiting caferati all these days. but now after reading this i hate myself for that.
loved the way you potrayed the difference between a poem and a string of words.
hats off.
simply loved it!
simply brilliant - the staged actions, the orange sun and the portrait of soot, goes very well. it is only that the last stanza, somehow fails to connect for me - the shift from visual imagery to sound had started the previous stanza, and it should fit, but something bothers.
I think it is just the sheer superlativeness of the first two stanzas that the third fails to live up to.
Hey Everyone,
Thank you. I didn't expect such a response for this poem.
Khuto, I am highly dissatisfied with the last stanza. I feel I rushed through it to finish the poem. May be I'll revise the poem. Let the epiphanic moment strike again! :-)
Cheers
Dan
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