VERSATILITY

I have the right to write
Good bad or worse
Poetry is foreign to me
I vote for the verse.

I am hardly bothered
Whether it makes sense or not
My task is fulfilled
If it subverts.

Vanity and righteousness
And all such idiot views
By shooting a couplet or two
If I enact a coup.

Words go abegging
For meaning and sense
If I sit them for a drink
Then three cheers for my verse.

Diverse forms of expression
Whatever is left to write
Many may come and many may go
But verse will go on forever.

For when I am alone
And I converse
With who else than myself
It’s but through verse.

[Mon-200801]

TURBIDITY

It used to trouble me that why can’t they
Say it, the essential, in a direct way
Why can’t we read and listen in clear terms
And learn of the things quite plain and simple?

If one employs an economy of words
And harnesses them in a logical order
To express what is barely necessary
Why shouldn’t a fine piece of writing come up?

But then I discovered the blemish myself
By tumbling upon the slippery synonyms
Which allure and entice to seduce us astray
Whenever you embark upon a straightforward journey.

Adjectival adornments athwart all the while
Idioms and phrases and proverbs lurk around
Clichés and catchwords and jargons galore
And you’re an Alice in the wonderland of words.

The work of thought too no play of innocence
It beckons and plays a thorough hide and seek
It exchanges words in the manner of coins
And is always unsure of what would come through.

The last nail is that what we call communication
Is impossible; there is only interpretation
The medium is the message, the reader is king
The icebergs of sub-texts offer no firm ground.

[Thu-120902]

RECTITUDE

Pursuing incessantly the cause radical
Offering realism a critical stance
Hoping to transcend the dialectic triad
Reason was the helper, reason is the bar.

Appearance and Reality, Truth and Method
Process and Reality, Time and Eternity
Being and Nothingness, Being and Time
Visible and Invisible, Time and Narrative.

Experience and Judgement, Sense and Non-sense
Conjectures and Refutations, Freedom and Limit
Difference and Repetition, Critique and Clinic
Humanism and Terror, Discipline and Punish.

Identity and Difference, Ethics and Infinity
Matter and Memory, Totality and Infinity
Eros and Civilization, Ideology and Utopia
Reason and Revolution, Totem and Taboo.

Blindness and Insight, Criticism and Crisis
The Raw and the Cooked, Theory and Praxis
Speech and Phenomena, Models and Metaphors
Holism and Evolution, Toys and Reasons.

Violence and the Sacred, Myth and Terror
Madness and Civilization, Art and Illusion
Motivation and Personality, Love and Will
Realism and Reason, Surrender and Catch.

[Wed-XX01]

GRATITUDE

When Whitehead tells that the whole of philosophy
Is but a footnote to Plato, it's a great tribute
Nietzsche likewise says that it’s Dostoevsky
From whom he really learnt some psychology.

Aristotle is The Philosopher for Dante
Merleau-Ponty has been pedestalled by Blanchot
Bakhtin too is beholden to Dostoevsky
And Heidegger to Holderlin’s poetry.

Kierkegaard adorns a special place for Lukacs
Just as Leibniz enchanted Bertrand Russell
And Spinoza was the noblest of them all
Merleau-Ponty, a true disciple of Husserl.

Virginia Woolf spoke so highly of Proust
All his life Lacan unfolded Freud’s dream
From Althusser to Habermas, Marxists galore
Marx himself was a known Hegelian juggler.

Saussure was inspiration to Levi-Strauss
Nietzsche was a Schopenhauer admirer
Derrida is a sly pursuer of Heidegger
Ricoeur pushes on the project of Gadamer.

Bergson redefined Darwinian evolution
Lukacs reiterated Marx’s reification
Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel inspired many
And the Kantian Critiques have never ceased reigning.

[Sat-131001]

LATITUDE

Once upon a time to write was being exact
But since then much water has flown down the Rhine
To write at present is to be re-written
And seeing the world as ever transfiguring.

The framework of grammar and semantic system
What with dictionaries and poetry and fiction
The fortress of language seemed invincible
But meaning turned out to be the horse Trojan.

A word is a sign and a symbol and still more
A text has its sub-texts located in context
The artist and the work and Art are a circle
Borders of visible and the invisible.

Order and symmetry are a slippery track
Rhythm and rhyming are a feigning drapery
To unveil the fake and to walk straight to the truth
Is to unravel the meaning of the meaning.

The emotions may be same for the human race
But myriad are the languages to express
In addition the spice of interpretation
It is a tower of Babel, of confusion.

Where is the sound of the Word originary
Where to discover that state of pure absence
What is the clue to disinterested pleasure
And the way to unconcealment and disclosure.

[Mon-171001]