bad poetry is therapeutic…

Something about jumbling up words  

In ways that makes sense but also doesn’t 

in ways that says something but means something 

completely different.

In ways that you have thought of something 

in the way that you have thought about it.

Although writing is a vessel in more than one way to convey feelings or thoughts, poetry happens to be the most effective way to do it. There is something effective in how language shaped in a way we are not accustomed to hits us and effects us harder. Like one of my favourite literary character says: “Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it." In my not-so-humble opinion, poetry happens to be the most effective words.

lights

poem for a little boy

Poetry well written is not strictly reserved to poets. It does show up in unexpected places. That unexpected space is not my Instagram page.

I don’t remember a time when I have not written poems. There’s mother’s day cards, anniversary cards, birthday cards and more that have been carefully protected by plastic folders in my mother’s closet. If I read them out, I would be rather embarrassed by my 10-year self. Nevertheless, I have always found poetry to be my thing somehow.

If I am happy, I have written a poem. If i’m not so happy, a sonnet is not far away. The emotional release of a poem has enabled me to translate a lot of my tribulations and confusions in poems. It is like a tap that I let flow. The flow brings out my lamentation in limericks and my happiness in haikus. The result of this flow may not be the highest form of literature but it does the job. I feel better. All my emotional baggage is laid down in words. It might not be Frost’s ‘Road not taken’ but it is a road that improves upon whatever my state of mind was in. Bad poetry is therapeutic for me.

#cracks ... a poem for 2021.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CLHjloCMhn6/