Poetry

What Makes a Bad Poetry

What makes a bad poetry

My body is a typewriter

Scribbling words on it without punctuations

So that the world can read it anyways it likes

You see a full stop ends the sentence a way too early

And I am a continuous line without a double quote to emphasize my story

I am that empty post office where nobody sends letters

The flickering bulb thinking if that’s what hope looks like

That torn letter where love was torn and what remained was I and you

But who cares?

Who cares when the world is a cotton candy

And there are poets who make words pink with love

People eat them, feel them melting on their tongues and relish the sweetness

The prerequisite of any friendship

Who cares when every night a child dies in loneliness, as another one is being fed with so much love that it scratches his insides

Knocks on the heart and ask questions such as ,”is this love even true?”

This is a bad poem

Where the words aren’t woven together to form a rosary

Where the chants don’t echo down the hallways of empty hearts

Where gods don’t come down from heavens to bless the sentences and curse the poet with more pain

This is a bad poem

and what I mean is

When today a calf died, the cow cried whole day and nobody consoled her

When the old ox walked slowly on the road, he was beaten till open wound became feast to the flies

When two boys of the same home were murdered, all i could feel was remorse and couldn’t cry

This is a bad poem

Which doesn’t lament for the classmate who committed suicide

Rather laughs along with people as they move on with their lives

Where this bad poet sleeps too early to avoid the feeling of having no friends

Where the mothers sleeps with the twenty one year old daughter because the daughter is afraid of sleep monsters

The ones which attack as loneliness in the mid night

Are adults allowed to cry and call out for help?

This bad poem is a proof

That words written

No matter in what abundance

Can still be ignored like a full stop

Which is to say that I avoid using punctuation in my poem

This poem

For it doesn’t make sense

And nor does any other one

All they simply do is

regret

Scream

Shout

And keep silent

Like the cup of hot coffee

Waited upon for a stranger

Who  would never come

This is a bad poem

And bad poems don’t have a good end

So know this

Tomorrow when you will feel like this is the end of the world

Know that somewhere someone has already believed it

And found our later that it was a lie

But a lie realized too late

This bad poem hosts on hope

Till what remains is a crushed raisin of fistful light

Being bent

A refraction of dreams

And no bad  poems have fulfilled desires

They aren’t even completed

Because  bad poets are drunk poets

Who don’t care who read them

As long as they are being fed with the trance of losing self

This poem lost itself midway..

~ Bharti Bansal

Shimla, India

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