It's just poetry, it won't bite

Poem


09.05.19 Posted in today's words by

Bharti Bansal lives and writes in Shimla, India.

Poem
By Bharti Bansal

What makes a bad poem
My body is a typewriter
Scribbling words on it without punctuations
So that the world can read it any way it likes
You see a full stop ends the sentence a way too early
And i am a continuous line without a double quote to emphasize my story
I am that empty post office where nobody sends letters
The flickering bulb thinking if that’s what hope looks like
That torn letter where love was torn and what remained was I and you
But who cares?
Who cares when the world is a cotton candy
And there are poets who make words pink with love
People eat them, feel them melting on their tongues and relish the sweetness
The prerequisite of any friendship
Who cares when every night a child dies in loneliness, as another one is being fed with so much love that it scratches his insides
Knocks on the heart and ask questions such as, “Is this love even true?”
This is a bad poem
Where the words aren’t woven together to form a rosary
Where the chants don’t echo down the hallways of empty hearts
Where gods don’t come down from heavens to bless the sentences and curse the poet with more pain
This is a bad poem
and what i mean is
When today a calf died, the cow cried whole day and nobody consoled her
When the old ox walked slowly on the road, he was beaten till the open wound became feast to the flies
When two boys of the same home were murdered, all i could feel was remorse and couldn’t cry
This is a bad poem
Which doesn’t lament for the classmate who committed suicide
Rather laughs along with people as they move on with their lives
Where this bad poet sleeps too early to avoid the feeling of having no friends
Where the mothers sleeps with the twenty one year old daughter because the daughter is afraid of sleep monsters
The ones which attack as loneliness in the mid night
Are adults allowed to cry and call out for help?
This bad poem is a proof
That words written
No matter in what abundance
Can still be ignored like a full stop
Which is to say that I avoid using punctuations in my poem
This poem
For it doesn’t make sense
And nor does any other one
All they simply do is
regret
Scream
Shout
And keep silent
Like the cup of hot coffee
Waited upon for a stranger
Who  would never come
This is a bad poem
And bad poems don’t have a good end
So know this
Tomorrow when you will feel like this is the end of the world
Know that somewhere someone has already believed it
And found our later that it was a lie
But a lie realized too late
This bad poem hosts on hope
Till what remains is a crushed raisin of fistful light
Being bent
A refraction of dreams
And no bad poems have fulfilled desires
They aren’t even completed
Because bad poets are drunk poets
Who don’t care who read them
As long as they are being fed with the trance of losing self
This poem lost itself midway.


3 Responses to “Poem”

  1. Ed Zahniser says:

    Love such poems as this that have the modus operandi of Zenshi Philip Whalen’s idea of the poem as a graph of the mind’s movement.

    Tomorrow when you will feel like this is the end of the world
    Know that somewhere someone has already believed it
    And found ou[t] later that it was a lie
    But a lie realized too late

  2. Carol Brendsel says:

    Bad poem lent itself good, thank you Bharti.

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