Recycling

Tonnes of paper,
Blank, written on, scratched out,
Leaves of some literary autumn,
Letters of business and love,
Notes passed in class,
Pages torn from a diary,
Ripped from a pirated novel,
Shredded ribbons of flawed numbers,
A riot of colours spilling over margins,
Folded and cut and pasted,
Enfolding warm telebhaja.

Regurgitation

Macabre clash of sword and skin,
Rose-petal fragility of carved marble,
Swirl of ethereal, beautiful chemical loccha,
Eternal perfection of a “Eureka” moment,
Blood and sweat and a life spent
Hunched over a microscope,
Chasing a dream,
Building a civilisation,
Piping with Pan
And singing with Apollo,
Drawing life into art
More human than life,
Watching blood stain the sands
At a soft-spoken word,
Millennia of effort on hundreds of pages.
“Julius Caesar invaded India in 344 B.C.”,
“Akbar built the Red Fort”,
“Leonardo di Caprio painted the Mona Lisa”,
43/100 on a History test.

Reflection

Gilt-edged mirrors
And broken shards,
A hundred lives
In inky words.
If the mirror pleases
And the shards wound,
Must they be swept away
Into stinking garbage bins,
And half-a-hundred lives forgotten?

Reinvention

I. Reinvention

Uneven, weaving lines
Of hastily-scribbled letters—
Large and overly small;
Disconnected ‘e’s, ‘g’s with dangling tails;
An ink-blot drowning half-a-word;
The paper torn by the violent scratching out
Of some unsatisfactory phrase;
Faces in the margins,
Bulging eyes and bee-stung lips;
Flourishing signature at the bottom of the page.
Taken, read and typed out—
Neat and orderly,
So many soldiers marching together;
Coolly impersonal,
Artistry strangled for the sake of art.