Poetry: Snehal Khandekar

1. How To Ruin Poetry In Ten Lines- Snehal

Two lines diverged onto a blank page

I took the one godforsaken

And tried to make a sexual pun, but I blew it

You want to know what else I suck at?

Alliterating, like Alan sucks at alimony

And here comes to

Ode to line

Breaks

And hey, roses are red, violets are blue, 

Forget the rhyme, I love you

***

2. The Ignorant Millennial’s Senryū

F*c* revolution

Lick Netflix and chips, someone

Will deliver peace

***

3. This is My Pandemic Poem

This is my pandemic poem

It has been pending since 1918

It could or could not be state-sponsored*

Its spaces are deeply in love

With either a girl

Or with the view of other windows from its window

It hopes for more than 10 hearts on Instagram

It has a screen addiction problem

A smoking problem

A problem where it wants to die

In its sleep tonight

But sleeping is also a problem

Each alphabet of this poem

Is more exhausted than it looks

Wears fancy ink to fool itself

Stress-eats to feed itself

Drinks smuggled alcohol to survive itself

But it makes efforts

To cross its t’s and dot its i’s

To get up and stretch its thighs

To rewrite itself every night

To dress up as romance on most days

Revolution on some

Haiku on the rare good ones

It has never tested positive

For anything really

It is an emo kid from the 80s

Without the drugs

But it is slowly decaying

It is also bad at ending things

And?

***

4. A eulogy

Like an almond nut

You were treasured

Inside my body

You sang my eyelids lullabies

Made them stop flapping at last

Like a pair of lover cats

We used to curl up warm

You’d extract the day 

From my mouth

And press it beneath the pillow

You’d stretch my lips

To feed my moon morsels

Oh, sweet, sweet sleep

Now that you’ve left me

I can’t even dream of you

***

5. Recipe For A Poem

Read a popular poet

Shakespeare, Frost, Rumi, Faiz

Borrow key ingredients

Only the ones you comprehend

That leaves you with

Summer, roses, woods, 

The love of revolution and revolution for love

And a faraway field beyond your intellect

Pick words from a medium sized packet of thesaurus

All your favorite colors and shapes

Mix well and add the essentials

Verbs to make things happen

And conjugations to start lines

Some prepositions to end with

Knead with some ink and blood

Added as per desired relatability

Break into uneven, 

Illogical

Lines

Bake them in the oven

For as long as your patience permits

Take them out and serve

With a generous garnishing of stardust

And tobacco

A side of healthy black coffee

Or whiskey if you swing that way

Your modern poem is ready

***

Bio: Snehal Khandekar a poet from Bombay. Her poetry has been published in Verse of Silence. She has been a regular part of spoken word events in Bombay. Her poetry follows no preference of genre or form, she is yet a very very small student of the greats. But she strives to get poetry down from the pedestal of elitism. She will forever dream of a world where happiness is not a pursuit, and art is not a privilege.

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Setu, May 2021