Confessions of a dead poet

For the past few years, I am rendered poetically handicapped. This doesn’t mean I cannot write at all or I’ve not been writing…but I don’t seem to be able to write spontaneously or at least to my satisfaction. Why is that??

Sitting in the National museum last week, I was pondering about this precisely. Is that so that Life has drained of all its sweets?? or is it that thoughts have decided to escape my imagination (udte rahte hain titliyon ki tarah, lafz kaagaz pe baithte hi nahin…)?? May be, I have become too structured in thought and imagination…may be I have lost my inspirations( bakaul Ghalib, thee wo ik shakhs ke tasavvur se, ab wo ranaaee-e-khayal kahan), may be that divine flame is burnt to ashes now, or may be I’ve just exhausted my quota of creativity.

Thinking of those good old days, when I used to get up at half past night, at two or three in the morning and start scrapping something in a rough, crumbled paper in the dim light of the night bulb…when even a single word or thought was enough for me to write a good composition…or even, when my friends used to give me situations, and some of them even dared to bet with others on my poetical abilities….. ahhh…Life…or something like that… seems well past me!!

I had written about personal grief but never about happiness, about parting but never reunion, about death but seldom about Life, about losing but about winning in only a passing reference. I am not a pessimist; in fact, As Anand sir used to say – I am a long term optimist. Then why this sad intonation in poetry??

Actually, I love the eternal. I love immortality.
Life is a blink, a momentary existence in between a constant non-existence. And I love turning the things upside down…that’s why I sing for the beauty of Life in my poetry…but then, turning that upside down – craving for the eternal, moving from momentary to the eternal, I denounce the shallowness and hollowness of Life… That’s why I seem a narcissist in my poetry, conquering everyone and everything and then, at the end of it – it’s all hollow. I lose.