Poetry is beyond music? Some would have us believe it is so. That wordplay in poetics doesn’t care about anything except to exist. But no, my personal weakness in poetry is the cadence of it, the rhythm, the beat; the ease with which it can be confined to memory is my test of good poetry. You can argue this. But tell me, isn’t it just beautiful when sentiments dance or jog along or walk in brisk pace or slo-mo swagger instead of stumbling and tripping or falling over every few paces like a drunkard? Of course, the drunk may have an aesthetic walk, but it is concerning, almost sick. Poetry, to me, is an intense sentiment expressed in brief clarity.

I could say, “…Are your hands, hands of God? They look so unnaturally clean. If digging up dirt is your need, Isn’t creation of splendour a deed, for those hands? Why don’t you plant pink rhododendrons instead?” (From the poem, ‘Give me your Hands,’ published in the anthology, ‘A Strange Place Other Than Earlobes.’) And the beat of the ‘d’ words here creates the cadence that thumps and thrums in my blood; they feed my need for something to plant my feet on as I fly on my aesthete chariot of words to express something, in this case, my advice to not play God but be a gardener instead. Do you feel it, reader? Do you feel the beat? Or is it only my imagination? Rhyming has been sacrificed many times in poetics, and I can make peace with that, but if the poet uses wordplay like line-breaks and enjambment as tools not to hint at space and pause but as regular requirements to make prose ‘look-like’ poetry instead of ‘sound-like’ poetry, I feel bad and sad that such poetry found voice or got published. “Tell me, what good is a poem If it cannot be buried in pages Yet return to haunt after ages?”