Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Godawful Poem#2

Thanks to Peter and his 'Godawful Poetry Fortnight' , I'm here again with my sickly second offering.


I wandered lonely as a status update
I surfed, I liked, I borrowed.
In Twitter, I found a rowdy crowd,
In blogs I drowned my sorrow.

Before I knew what hit my soul,
I surfed, I read, I borrowed.
RSS feeds told me all I need,
Now I can’t tell today from tomorrow.

So oft upon my couch I lie,
I surf, I chat, drink Bordeaux.
I melt into my glowing screen,
The real world turns to shadows.

Our digital selves are quite complete,
We post, we like, we follow.
We haven’t met and yet we’re friends,
You should know by now I'm shallow.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Terribly bad, truly awful poem

It's Godawful Poetry Fortnight and this below is my contribution!

This poem wrote itself on the bus to work,

And then on the train back home.

It wrote itself while I was working hard

at something else.

This poem skipped breakfast and lunch,

It drank three cups of coffee with sugar,

Followed by a slice of terribly sweet cake.

And it wouldn’t stop at that.

This poem had a drink.

Or two. In fact, it might’ve mixed it all up.

Wine after beer, have no fear.

This poem has no respect

for sonnets, ballads and neat little rhymes.

Police arrested this poem for insulting a couple of haikus.

This poem is lost because it prefers losing.

This poem wants to learn old languages

and ignore emerging markets.

This poem has made no investments.

It doesn’t want your money,

Or your praise. This poem is so stupid.

It thinks it will survive in the real world.



Saturday, February 27, 2010

Inventing places

I read The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh and wanted to preserve this bit: " I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more not less true, only very far apart. It was not her fault that she could not understand, for as Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all"

Sunday, January 17, 2010

On writing - Elizabeth Lowry in Granta 103

From an excerpt in my favourite literary magazine:

"There’s a sense in which writing is simply scar tissue, the attempt to create a meaningful self out of a compromised one, and in my case this damage was caused by the constant move from country to country, which made for radical instability. J.M. Coetzee once characterized South African literature in the era of apartheid as ‘a less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power’."