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K K Srivastava
05-12-2010, 03:57 AM
Roads, long and narrow, blood-bathed roads
and their stifling skins yield chaos, dusty,
shaming the strayed sunshine and creating an
inspiring misgivings about others.
They treasure the mess, the happenings give
birth to, asking for more and more such mess,
and longing to intrigue against the slackened
inclinations of love and affiliation.
Irrelevancies cry about the relevancies,
that have decided to move in suffocating silence
promising to return back as memories come back
to normalcy after the burial of the dead.
Dimmed eye’s refusal to retrieve lost tears
grew stern, lighting, half-heartedly, the hopes
lying so low underneath the corpses, forgotton for
long, as they have no takers.
The passions that ruled last weak are dead now,
the emotions that splashed last week are dismayed now,
the blood that boiled till recently is icy cool now.
Floating, floating and floating are our senseless
voices, languid and wearisomely agile voices.

The young lady looking outrageously old,
fragile and thoughtful,
walks slowly,
stops,
searches,
moves.

Disheveled,
amnesic,
dammed,


folding unmindfully,
scudding against herself,
the young lady swiftly clusters herself.

Who is this lady ?
Sybil hell bent on writing a new chapter of history.
“Who would remember the history you people
wrote last week ? Would you or you or you or who else?”
mutters that lady,
her inhibitions, standing shy, nearby.

Nightmares soften their stand now,
they don’t choke now,
for they adore the light of the day now.
Their very symbols savagely mourn
the brutish supremacy of strangulating encroachments
over what couldn’t be revived now,
never.

Reddish traces linger on
and that young fragile looking lady,
lost in her remembrance,
like an unnoticeable cog
in the gargantuan past called
precious history,
and suddenly asks:
“That’s vile-should we a parent’s faults adore,
And err, because our fathers err’d before?” ( Charles Churchill in Rosciad.)

Their tones become menacing,
wrong reasons wiping out right ones,
antiquated philosophers usurp their
forgotton inertia as if
the young lady would soon lose her fragility

tailor STATELY
05-14-2010, 01:48 AM
Wow.

So much imagery.

I read through a few times to sample the richness captured in your piece.

I'm going to have to print this out to give it proper attention.

MorpheusSandman
05-14-2010, 10:05 PM
Hmmm, it's an interesting piece but I don't really get a sense of coherency from it. While it has some really vivid language it doesn't really seem to produce any kind of remotely solid image, and some of the lines almost seem surrealistic. What is "the brutish supremacy of strangulating encroachments"? I told this to Alex a bit back, but sometimes you have to watch out and not over-saturate a piece with ornate language. I know that poetry is more aptly suited to this kind of "purple prose" style than prose is, but I'd still recommend not overdoing it.

tailor STATELY
05-15-2010, 06:27 AM
I wasn't familiar with Charles Churchill (horrors!) and his 'Rosciad' and found that a little research helped me, a little, with some understanding of what's occurring.

(synopsis, as I gather from wikipedia: 'Rosciad' - A satire describing the faults of the actors and actresses on the London stage, full of vigor and raciness, written in the mid-1700's)

A few tidies: (hoping I counted the lines properly ;)

L3/L4 "an inspiring misgivings" - syntax (drop the "an" ?)

L13 "grew" to "grow" ?

L17 "last weak" perhaps "last week"

L19 "icy cool" seems rather odd to me; 'icy cold' not so odd

L30 "dammed" - a niggling at best; perhaps 'damned'

L42/L45 - redundant 'now's

L53 "and suddenly asks" - the 'and' seems unnecessary

Yes, a bit surreal, with a dollop of treacle. Perhaps more (or less) surrealism, and less treacle might be appropriate.

As an aside, when I printed the poem my printer formatted the work as one large paragraph. With a bit of work, formatting into multiple paragraphs, your poem makes for a nice short essay perhaps instead of a poem ?