Gangesh B. Vadakkeyil
A Reflex Infectious
The contraction of five and ten facial
muscles --laughter.
Live to laugh and then die doing it.
Spreading the lips, the act universally
bespeaks pleasure and is
great when involuntary,
accompanied by noises irrepressible.
Personal indeed is the
reaction.
Varied are the noises that shadow laughter.
The more sincere the action, the louder the noise.
At times it leaves one clutching one's belly,
gasping for breath helplessly.
Thus mine is more a guffaw than a simper.
Revolting is to suppress it, to do it silently.
The trick is to freely indulge in it in all climes.
Nothing like this response positive,
with puckering lips and cheeks inflated.
Most faces look the best when decked
with a laughter full-hearted, sans restraints.
The best way to lend colour to this sphere
without fiddling at all with the palette.
Misery, the Vital Tonic
It has universally a bad
press,
dear to no soul whatsoever.
It reeks of shame as a routine.
It is never a loner, and all tangled in its maze
find its web insufferably intriguing.
Few choose it, but none can ever
remain immune to its bitter taste.
The unwitty,
the unwary usher it in,
levity, blind-spots, and the like solicit this villain,
while the prudent guard against its miasma.
Invited once, it visits most with varying repercussions.
The sadist alone wishes it for her adversary.
Shunned by all, it is often born an orphan,
unlike its antithesis which always has claimants aplenty.
Can be a sign of
personal incompetence,
signifying but a humiliating want of merit;
condemned often as unproductive, worthless,
a parasite on draining resources, is the one
who sinks to this abysmal plight.
Few court it of their
own volition,
so abominably repulsive is its hide.
To founder repeatedly can dent
one’s spirit, wreck one’s identity,
and the weakling may never flee its grasp.
The uncharitable brand it as
synonymous with dysfunctionality.
Few, very few actually
may have escaped
the gloom of its cold touch.
Defeat is a steady drizzle that drenches all
some time or other --- such is its persistence,
and pervasiveness. The best resist it,
the imbecile yield to it easily.
The diligent scorn it, learning the vital
lessons, and acting upon them to forestall its recurrence.
Yet......
Adversity is never without its sweetness;
to misfire is seldom all gloom and doom.
Doubly delightful is success when
it immediately follows a debacle.
The greatest triumphs are those
that follow the greatest lows.
The true hero knows and surmounts
misfortune, before riding the
gilded escalator to glory.
Some are fazed by
defeat, others irate;
some remain fallen ever, yet some others resolute.
Stung by its heavy blows, some fight the most,
a breakdown brings out the best in a few.
An opportunity, a challenge it is
to test one’s mettle, the stuff one is made of.
One’s bearings can yet be regained,
for the next surge --- that’s what matters.
Thus, the very desideratum in life is this
unmixed blessing called failure.
My Lucubrations
My routine verbal
compositions
have become for me explorations endless,
a strenuous quest for de-stressing myself,
exerting my seemingly supine gray cells
to make sense of my densest thoughts.
To grasp the
labyrinthine complexity
of my neural circuitry, as it were.
Nothing but sheer linguistic experiments,
they are constantly refined and fine-tuned
to be compatible with my thoughts.
I seek to raise my
expressions from
mere piles of repeated platitudes to
a few chiselled pearls of profundity---
more in hope than with any certainty.
From a cliche-bloated
tongue, dripping with homilies,
I strive to lift my lucubrations to
elegant phrases for me to treasure,
to be recalled at my scanty leisure:
Excuse my narcissist hedonism.
Manifold benefits accrue
when the lines are
slashed by half to give a different appearance;
compactness is sought first;
my laconic locution is easy on eyes,
I can be less finicky with grammar and punctuation
[I am yet to conquer these ogresses]. This format
feeds my pathological passion for ceaseless indirection
[I am zealous about periphrasis, and
its impact has flattered me no end].
This much, and no further, for my impositions
on your patience, about the perils and pleasures
of penning my perfunctory preoccupations....
Author profile:
An Assistant
Professor at a Govt College in Kerala, Gangesh B. Vadakkeyil has
published his verses in the Indian Poetry Review and in
the International Poetry Fellowship.