HIGH AND MY TEA
A cup of Darjeeling
Just brewed, dark, steaming
Sat on the high table
That at first seemed stable
It wasn’t. I’m sullen.
Look! How my tea has fallen!
DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
The author is a scripter who no longer bears
Passions, feelings, impressions
He simply sits on chairs
He hands over the keys to the meaning of his words
To a reader who lacks history
And biography – what a nerd!
Forlorn for want of importance he takes to eating much
Cakes, biscuits and puddings
Custards, pies and fudge
He eats and eats and mopes over the sordidness of writing
And the ingrate world that takes away
One’s claim over one’s citing
His blood sugar shoots up like a star he’d hoped to be
He swears aloud at Roland Barthes
And dies of diabetes
MEN BELONG IN THE WOODSHED
Men belong in the woodshed
Swinging axe, chopping kindling
It’s as sweet mother nature intended
Boys raised well will always tread
The right path – which isn’t writing and reading
For men belong in the woodshed
Buffing brawn is their daily bread
And not knitting or pee sitting
Just as sweet mother nature intended
Let no state be by man led
They would take wars for playthings
As men belong in the woodshed
Men must be to women wed
Who push them to fulfil their calling
Where they belong – in the woodshed
As sweet mother nature intended
LETTING IN THE DRAUGHT
Topple a tipple
We’re lager than life
Never an outsider in cider
But all ale pales
Before pale ale
A draught as smooth as eider
THIRD WORLD LITERATURE AS NATIONAL ALLERGY*
Our pulp fiction is pulped too fine
Rising up it irritates the sine-
-uses, giving headaches and fevers
In Fahrenheit of ninety nine
Every hero in lit prose
Makes the nation preen and pose
Blowing pollen on the west
Giving it a runny nose
Stories of the global south
Of reddened eyes and cottonmouth
Will try to claim postcolonial angst
But in fact they are mouldy growths
Our novels are but spicy stews
With peanuts slipped in for the chews
We try to match the great canon
But all we write is achoo achoo!
*Fredric Jameson’s essay ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ that claims all third world literature is a ‘national allegory’.
Maithreyi Karnoor is the author of the novel Sylvia and the translator of Kannada novels A Handful of Sesame and Tejo Tungabhadra. She is a two-time finalist of The Montreal International Poetry Prize and the recipient of the CWIT fellowship at LAF and UWTSD.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles
Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International
Borderless 