∨™⏎§♬λ Ğ ę ¥ ₠ ⅞

I sit before the computer screen,
My mind as blank as this page
Struggling to write some poetry
For it will give me an intellectual air.

I can't rhyme for nuts, or bolts.
(Though I can crack a bad joke, or two.)
So, poems with strict meter are out
And so is flowing, recitable verse.

I decide that the best scam to pull
The one that's the intellectualest
Is modern society's greatest invention:
Verse that's blank, free or simply random.

The trick to this, my research reveals,
Is to use language to weave webs.
Weld words into winding verse
To paint half-formed thoughts.

For if the thoughts are complete,
You tend to express them with clarity.
And even an amateur will tell you
A poem's success lies in ambiguity.

And so I wrote pages and pages
With
single-
word
lines,

And single-line stanzas


And that bizarre line, usually at the end of a stanza, that is much longer than the rest of the lines simply because it must be so.

I made patterns
               with tab stops
To give the poem
               a certain brokenness.

Then I thought,
why not take this a step further.

Why     should  the   space   between   two         words be           fixed?
Why should stanzas be separated by one line-break?



Words don't need to be completed
for you to comprehen?
You are intellig, aren yu?
Sentences can be left adhoora
(random Hindi words can be ghusaoed)

Ooh, I must make delibrate typoes,
Whee, this is sch funn!
And use RANDOM CAPITALISATION
and not capitalise when i use 'i'
or invert capitals when one talks of tHOMAS tHANGADURAI

Why should stanzas have words at all, when mere alphabets will do?
h
f
rr
j

But even alphabets can be superfluous sometimes:





(ah, that was my favourite stanza)

There must be the occasional profound thought, of course:
the banality of domesticity is pregnant.
it has a strange sort of poignancy.
pause. think.

And an out-of-the-blue reference to sex:
He liked behinds that were as crisp as a vada.

Before we get back to the madness.
Make up words bahustalically
Resort to utter gibberish like asfjherulism.
Write in code
aggtuk fhrein o polsrff!!
Go completely wild. The world is a free place!


Somewhere, when it gets shittier and shittier,
A barrier is breached
And it becomes art again:

∨™⏎§♬λ Ğ ę ¥ ₠ ⅞