Shloka Shankar

from Walt Whitman's As I Ponder'd in Silence

from Allen Ginsberg's Howl

Spider’s Web

repetitive patterns define me,
confine me in their
circumlocutory fashion

creative juices dry up
in a well that was never mine

parasite-like, new sensations
are vicariously spewed

in jest, I put two and two
together to pass off as
a work of art,
unsure of what I’ve done
or worse,
too sure of myself…

a recycled collage,
time ill-spent in excavating
clichés and conceits,
antiques heralding the mediocre,
threadbare in my final draft.



Shloka Shankar is a freelance writer residing in India. Her work appears in two dozen anthologies including Chronicles of Urban Nomads, The Dance of the Peacock, Emanations IV, The Living Haiku Anthology, Family Matters, The Traversal of Lines, and Eastern Voices among others. Her poems, erasures, haiku, tanka, and haibun, have appeared in numerous print and online journals. Link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Shloka-Shankar-a-rasikas-musings/745965042120215?ref=bookmarks
 
 
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