My best poems—written standing on the shoulder of giants.

Collected works from 2021 - 2024

Originality is overrated: most of us do not have the experience needed to produce something that is both original and competent. It takes years—a lifetime, even—of practise and learning to create unique products that are also truly great; and one way to effectively practise and learn your craft is to stand on the shoulder of giants. Take the French-house duo, Daft Punk, for example. They only have one studio album—Random Access Memories (2013)—whose contents were produced entirely from scratch. The duo, in fact, owe their fame to intelligent sampling: taking parts of different songs and mixing them to create new sound; and since the two of them had an amazing taste in music, they were able to produce timeless, intellectual, and reverberant albums through this method.

I too have dabbled in sampling while writing poetry, and of all the poems that I had written over the years, the ones that I still like are those that took heavy inspiration from great poems written by great poets.

I wanted to use this space to share these poems of mine. I will refrain from mentioning the works and writers that inspired my pieces—that is for you to figure out, if you like to.

Without further ado, here they are. To experience the intended formatting of the poems, please read on landscape if on phone or on a desktop :

1. Declension of Faith

I am. I am not. I am. I am not.
In my head. In your head. In my head. In your head.

You are not.

Old man with three grainy slashes between his eyes.
Your faith. I am Not in yours.
If not in yours. Where Am I?
I am. In mine. My—non—faith.
If I am you, I am not.

Old man with three grainy slashes between his eyes.
You are not.
I am. Not you.
Caste mark
that cracks the skin around the begging woman’s eyes.
I am not in your head.
If not in your head
In whose head am I?
Mine.

If not in yours
In whose
In whose faith

Am I?
I am. I am not yours.
I am not. I am yours.
I am. I am. I am.
I am mine.

2. Rot

I saw a body burst into blood-stained butterflies;
they fluttered onto her daughter’s shoulder,
and covered her with a blood-black blanket.
Claw as she might, she could not unweave
the fabric of wings bound to antennae,
bound to legs, bound to her very tissue.
A moth, trapped in a red-hue, pulsating room,
has flashing lights pulling at him from everywhere;
his skeleton cracked as his body split into two
and painted the pounding walls red.
He looked so pale that night.
Now I know why.

Such things have made me wonder
if beauty could ever blossom from rot.

I saw a broken man morph inside a cocoon once:
his head shrunk; his eyes blackened; his nose fell off.
His long fingers, so accustomed to a typewriter,
attached themselves to his sides
—makeshift legs that he crept around with.
These legs also wove stories, however,
of cold rain dousing out a flaming car,
of Death gently guiding a fallen couple
across the River Styx and onto Elysium,
and of daffodils and snowdrops blooming on graves
—of the new and beautiful coming out of the old.
And many people paid in gold to come admire them.

When rot comes for me,
I want a million butterflies to drill into my spine
and give me saffron-red wings. As the evening comes,
and before the starlit sky circles into sight,
I shall fly into the sun
and become a bleeding crater on its surface:
a watchful eye that sees civilisations fall
with a phantom smile.

3. I Fit into You

I fit into you
like an arrow through an eye:

a peacock-feather fletched arrow;
a pale-blue eye.

4. Server

We are dependent
on

a data server
with

the monolithic
presence

beside the brown
technician.

5. Forest for the Trees

I heard whimpering of a broken string,
saw broken straws of a battered broom stick,
and bangs, like a scalp massage, seemed to bring
a smile—or was that my mind playing tricks?

Solved myself by drowning in deep waters,
drove a buggy up two dunes and then down,
rolled ‘round the pink rink like a pro-skater,
and took rest in the shadow of a mound.

The trees make sense, but the forest does not:
the sky looked clear and the lake, still as ice,
so how am I doused in rain, acid hot?

I stare at a clockwork toy, worth the price.

***

Helen Hindpere, the writer of Disco Elysium, once said, "no one wants to hear your dreams and no one wants to read your poems." If you took the time to read all five of mine, you have my thanks. If you found the poems good, know that they owe their quality to literary giants—all long dead but still listening to the pitter-patter of their cultural great-grandchildren from beyond the grave.