De-layering

Fear of disclosing
Raw disconnection,
Vacuous ambition,
Pretentious notion
Of well-written verse,
Therefore, revision blues.

To add on a Wildean flourish,
Or stick to a domestic strain?

To position oneself as a poet,
Is it conscious a process?
Does it happen naturally?
As you write,
As you learn and laugh to cry?
But I grow older, know no better.

A postcolonial doldrum wannabe,
Or a stifled keatsian drunk on the sea?

To gain brownies of a battered world,
Womens's groups or animal rights,
On whom may I smother my bewildered words?
But, whom am I kidding?
Is this piece itself a cry for consideration,
For praise on subversion?

An attempt to crawl on to global paper,
And be witnessed by the critic's eye?

Else, why yearn to publish,
Long-held private space?
A covert poet
Is no poet at all for the world.
Why the scramble at competitions?
As any other, the poet is no grander.

The need to be acknowledged, be admired,
Runs in every creative vein, deny it howsoever.

It may be a precedence lesser or larger
Than the inspired contentment,
But it exists incontestably all the same.
Just as doing good feels fine,
Why rebuff that we do it
For our own being, as well?

I go all agog over toothless trill,
And digest a whole lot of gobbledygook.

I ruminate over
New-historicism and post-modernism.
I take the trouble,
Because I want to be seen.
I have a simple, short life,
Here today, Gone tomorrow.

I need to leave a mark,
And see what I can do.

And the day I spotted verse,
The moment I felt the urge
To put in to words of untold type,
I knew this is where I was headed.
To see on cover, a name fond to
Me and those who I treasure.

To make them proud,
And beam and buoy, along with me.

To understand what goes on inside,
In my craggy,
Presumptuous mind.
This is not adulatory self-reproach.
The only time I am myself
Is when I write this styled out stuff.

It gives me identity, it gives me self,
I let it take over.

I have no control over the root,
But,twice refined through maze of thought,
It comes out half-born,
Sometimes grim, rock faced,
Or maybe at times,
Grosser still.