Verses. Poems. Limericks. Whatever they were, I never liked reading them, studying them at school. But sometime in the 1980s I had this friend called Amit. He wrote his self-indulgent poems and implored me to write too; the contagious habit rubbed on to me for a while. Those were frivolous, pretentious verses. Streams of the subconsciousness. Words flowed as they came out, we did not damn them. They created, ostentatiously, meanings as they crystallised on paper. The papers made their way to the waste bins just as fast. Poems were never meant to be retained.
Then came that mistake when I superciliously scribbled a poem for a friend who was frantic to woo a maiden who had a soft corner for words that steered clear of prose. I ghost-wrote a poem for him, with an air of vaingloriousness. The letter having been mailed, the balloon went burst. The disgusting episode ensured that I just never wrote again for a reader. I shared them with some friends of course once in a blue moon; more perchance than by any design.
All poems on this site would not have seen the light of day either had it not been for Poonam. Someone who was more than a friend and a fan. For months and years she egged me on to publish them. But publishing my poems, and by default make money off them, was an idea that was decidedly revulsive. But I did give in, technically speaking at least, by publishing them on my own site. These are here just for the record. All poem pages on this site are not indexed by any search engine. That's how it shall always be.
I myself never took my poems seriously. They were personal, deeply so. My feelings, sentiments that I had no intention of sharing with the world. Poems could only mean surrealistic verborrhoea, good language scripted in bad grammar. Prosodies and metrics could remain figures of speech for the literate and the discerning. Mine never have had any sense of rhythm. My poetry was merely an extension of my prose. William Wordsworth thought of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility. I could agree with that description. But I can never be like him. Or John Keats. Or anyone else.
Meanwhile, I have browsed through a thousand quotes and one about poems. None would make me feel as if any of the poems on this site could even remotely be called poems. My lines have always been strings of incoherent words and syntactically-wrong nebulous sentences that could make sense only to me.
Today, however, I realise that I have had my fill. In fact, I am filled with revulsion towards poems once again. After I wrote this last one (this morning) called The slow fire of a string unsung, I have been feeling nauseous. I indeed can't stand poems anymore. Least of all mine. Enough is enough.
