Who’d Have Thought?

… that Anurag Mathur, the fabricator of chuck-lit (what would you call the male equivalent of chick-lit?!) like The Inscrutable Americans (which I thought was trash) and Making The Minister Smile (even more trash according to Amazon!) would then come out with a book of verse!

What caught my attention was the title - A Life Lived Later. And a rapid flip through showed up some rather interesting work. I’m absolutely unqualified to critique anything let alone poetry, so you may want to take what I write here with a pinch of salt. Namely, that while a lot of the work could definitely be polished to a sharper and brighter luster, there are others that seem to come from someplace deep within - they have texture!

Here’s one for instance:

Her Shadow

Pursued by the shadow of a memory
I fled into a house with lights
and laughed and talked and took
a paintbrush and a can of light
all dripping, and with my new friends
I painted out the shadow.
And as my new friends
held the old one down,
I slit the throat of the shadow,
rejoicing in the blood
patiently dying.

Dead, I said, exulting,
dead, at last, thank god, and fled
into the garden where the hyacinths
blossomed like flowers of light
and held a girl’s hand moistly
and gave her a milky way of daisies
to wear around her neck and laughed
too loudly and murmured too softly
and went home worried about oil prices.

As i dozed that night
the curtains parted
and it stood there - the shadow,
holding hands with your whiteness
its throat still slashed red
and the look in its eyes -
I last saw when we parted -
of a child being murdered
by its mother.

Reproduced without permission from A Life Lived Later, by Anurag Mathur