Poems by Sanjeev Sethi

AXIOM

Once I recognized your Heiligenschein
from a distance.
Now we are face to face,
and I ask myself: who is this?
Beyond the embellishments
is the experience:
One can’t persist on exaggerated portions.

Verities make lazy returns.
Ferhoodling with the formations
is a flawed recital.
Fluted notes help.
There are advantages to importation
but it’s for the short run.
Only what is stored in us plays its part.


MIRE

In the hamster cage, how does one spawn a sentence
and some more: the dodge of duties summon one’s
stillness? When entry to a lettered at-home is seen as
arrival: one is eye to eye with flintiness of another kind.

In this sketch, the idea of a flat back is faint. Sharing
the privates or rum punch with a sandbagger is rueful:
Low-rent experiences are allotted to most of us. Is
thought in thoughtlessness: deliberate or destined?


CERAUNOPHILIA 

After a row, we are like the waitstaff of the nearby eatery
who look everywhere but at those who depend upon them
to take their order. When solutions can’t repair the rusticles
of our relationship, we let them soak in the sediments of
ceaseless effervescence.

Now and then, you issue your presence, but like a fledgling
idea, I surrender it to my sustenance account. A pervicacious
impulse pushes me away from you: is this how love scripts
its return? If relationships were as effortless as unsubscribing
from a newsletter.