Any pre-text will do

DesiPundit has this link to a SMS poetry contest being organised as part of Kala Ghoda. Now, of course, I have no intention of taking part in said contest, partly because I'm not in Bombay and don't have a phone to send SMSes from, but mostly because on general principle I disapprove of poetry contests - the very notion of turning an art form into a competitive sport is one that I'm entirely opposed to (what was it Eliot said "there is no competition - / there is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again."). That said, though, I've always been a sucker for creative challenges, so I figured I would try writing the damn things anyway.

Here they are then. Poems on Love (complete with capital L). 160 characters (with spaces) maximum*. To be sent typed out in an SMS.

i)

A dropped heart.
Falling is flight, but in the end all things break.

Measure desire in breath and dreams in eyelids.
Every love seems unfinished in its own way.

ii)

Writing to you this way
I should be more precise.

But my fingers pick out
A language of missed connections,
And the text knows already
What it has to say to you.

iii)

This is what the heart contracts to,
A love that fits in the palm of my hand.

I try to put a brave face on it,
But my smile is a parenthesis
Closing on itself.

iv)

The signal is fading now.
Soon,
All hope will be out of range.

This is just to say
That I tried to reach you,
And couldn’t get through.

- January 2006

* I've taken the liberty of adding line breaks for the blog version, but without the line breaks (though with the rest of the punctuation) each one of these will fit into a 160 character text message.

Categories: Poetry