Shloka Shankar

Marbling
(shaving foam and acrylic on handmade paper)

Observations

Status Quo

From the labyrinth beyond
time and space, my pensive ghost
wakes to all the grieves I left behind.

I have forgot myself to stone.
Within that close disguise,
thought meets thought in a
death-like silence.

The world forgetting
by the world forgot, I repent
old pleasures and solicit new.

Trying to outrun my humiliation, I think.
With such disdain, you know?
...this mess of sadness and phobias.
I lose the sin, yet keep the sense;
nature holds out half my heart.

[I'm exactly where I want to be.]

Can you hear me?
You had the whole human race pegged.
I'm a concept; don't assign me yours.

Waiting for Godot

Penny World

Unstiching poetry into
the basin of the – mind –
never more than half deciphered
like the moon's silences,

images mummy-dead
in a penny world the
fragrance of ignorance;

my steps return to whirl
upon a compass-point –
a dull head among windy spaces.

Water Marbling
(spray paint on water, marbled onto paper)

To the Literalists of the Imagination

You are so full of words.
Unintelligible, in quest
of poetry in all its rawness;

a flaw in the romantic imagination,
an antidote for the emptiness
of existence in a cold, violent,
meaningless universe.

You will always be a mystery to me –
wonderful, but forgettable.
It's cognitive dissonance.

Asemic Diary Entry


Shloka Shankar is a freelance writer from Bangalore, India. She loves experimenting with all forms of the written word, and has happily found her niche in Japanese short-forms, and found/remixed poetry alike. Her works have recently appeared in Silver Birch Press, shufPoetry, The Syzygy Poetry Journal, Of/with, The Other Bunny, experiential-experimental-literature, and so on. She is also the founding editor of the literary & arts journal, Sonic Boom.

Sources for the pieces above:

Status Quo: Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope, The Creative Act by Marcel Duchamp, and quotes from the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Waiting for Godot: Lucky's Speech from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.
Penny World: Poetry by Marianne Moore, and quotes from the movie Midnight in Paris.
To the Literalists of the Imagination: Works by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Nissim Ezekial, Ranjit Hoskote, and Pablo Neruda.
 
 
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