It is my job to turn feelings
 Or things into words.
To ignore basements, false ceilings,
 Skeletons interred
In cubbyholes, bricked up cellars,
 Secret passageways,
Haunts of orphaned, dew-eyed Cinderellas,
 Hunchback in a maze...

       All of these are fodder, well, for a novel,
       But here we seek no princess in a hovel,
       We seek truth, and occasionally, duty,
       The best words in the best order—
              i.e.beauty.

Why should this be so difficult?
 And why should we care?
Logic is not a catapult
 Aimed from here to there...
But we are self-aware—unlike,
 Say, the common cat,
Who deals daily in death, and who will strike
 With intent to slay...

       But without knowledge of its own mortality,
       With no terror of death’s finality,
       Whose fear is real but limited to keening
       In death’s presence, while we’re paralysed
       with ‘meaning’.

This is the poet’s conundrum—
 Our inspirations
And craft: ti-tum, ti-tum-dum-dum,
 And ministrations
Are, quite frankly, excess wrapping
 Around the parcel
With ‘meaning’ satellite-mapping
 Moat and castle...

       This insistence on extracting implications,
       On stripping verse until it lies there senseless
       Folds assonant to rhyme til I lose patience—
       You cannot ‘feel’ until you stand
               defenceless.