the poet and the pretender

 “And so while the king was looking down

                        The jester stole his thorny crown

                        The courtroom was adjourned

                        No verdict was returned….”

The written word has always held a strange but intense fascination for me. Right from the time I was introduced to the magical world of Enid Blyton till now when certain well strung words can move me to tears like nothing else can. As an intensely introvert child my bottled up emotions usually took the form of verse. While writing one often finds oneself a little torn between the heart and the mind.  Sometimes we find that jumbled up words will express emotion like a perfectly well written verse wont. The iambic meter seems to make no sense when it’s your emotions in flow. The well written verse on the other hand is well written, doesn’t have to necessarily carry your emotional baggage and is easy to appreciate. Anyway the point here is that I like every other person who writes, do at times give in to convention and write what is expected. So it was with much trepidation that I shuffled with my two poems to my teacher. Young, unsure and brimming with unasked questions and the usual heartaches. The first poem was of course the one that I had written with absolutely no intention of getting it published. It was a jumble of words, shorn of any adornment. It was just truthful and bare. It was me without my mask.

The second was beautiful. It rhymed at just the right places. It talked of the glories of Mother Nature and the ungratefulness of man to the point of being clichéd. If I had it with me now I would have probably ripped it into tiny pieces and stomped on it for good measure!! I cringe in embarrassment when I think of it . Now it was indeed a shock to me when the second one was chosen to be published. It’s not real I wanted to cry out! I of course didn’t. What I did do apart from receding further into myself was read up a lot on this thing called existential loneliness. The theory proposes that man by the very virtue of his existence is a loner. He may walk awhile with friends but his thoughts are essentially his alone. No one can understand and share his inner most thoughts and fears.

Which of course led me to believe that I could get people to believe in everything but the real me if I wanted to. At fourteen that sort of a realization is life changing if nothing else.  This incident brought the fourteen year old me in direct contact with the till then barely acknowledged realities of the world -that you are two different people for most part of the day. There’s an image that is there for the world to see or rather what the world expects you to be. The other is the person inside- beautiful and flawed. One is a pretender and the other is a poet