All those renowned writers
Have beaten language black and blue
Exploiting every word, linguistic register and experience,
Till we are left with nothing, just nothing!
Even simple things as a gurgling brook,
Daffodils, gray sea, darkling plain,
Frog jumping in a pond,
Or a last ride together,
Have the telltale mark of a Hunt,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, Arnold, Basho or Browning.
We can't even talk of man or woman with enthusiasm
Without Whitman stroking his beard;
We can't have sympathy for the lost forlorn child,
Dickens enters the door
With his retinue of Victorian orphans.
Well, let's leave the Romantics and the Victorians
And come to experiencing urban life itself.
Allen Ginsberg comes out of the shadows, high on herb;
You experiment with the lower case and
Cummings plays hide and seek with the fonts.
Touch a leaf or a tree bark and
Milton, Frost, Emerson, Thoreau and Pound spin a forest.
Every experience has the telltale stamp
Of others on our consciousness,
How can we think otherwise?
The language is contaminated by the sentiments,
Experiences, experiments and ideologies of the past,
Images contaminate our experiences
We do not know anymore if we are
Capturing a bona fide experience or not.
But still we write with a sardonic smile
To occupy our moments and
Not be overwhelmed by memories;
We write to unlock the birds of paradise
To release the heaviness of the night;
We use conceits to change the chimera of future
Into recognizable shadows;
We write to understand the details of a tiny life,
We write to change ourselves,
And in the process change the world.
