Soliloquy of a Soul
Fabiyas M V
I feel I’m everywhere,
free and wispy.
I find love and loss in the wet eyes.
How long will I linger in your hearts?
Strange were my dreams
in the final earthly phase;
the unknown lands
and the divine vibes.
How fast the body bloats!
But my beauty will never be disfigured
in your minds.
The funeral rite is a reverence for me.
Each generation has its own foolish
but virtuous beliefs.
I lost my pleasures
in the man-made complications.
I had to live with hypocrisies.
Even my hyena-eyed enemy is
among the mourners.
But I’m behind a silence.
I realize the insignificance
of the body that carried me.
It’s still and stinky
in my absence.
I will soon return to the old void
to reappear somewhere
as fresh as a banana shoot.
About the Author
Fabiyas M V is a writer, poet and teacher from Orumanayur village in Kerala, India. He has been widely published at home and internationally and has won many awards including the Merseyside at War Poetry Award from Liverpool University. His work is regularly featured in The Literary Hatchet and Poetry Nook, and has been broadcast on All India Radio. He was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart Prize by Poetry Nook.
You can find Stringless Lives, a full-length collection of short stories published by Fabiyas M V in 2020 with Budding Light Press, in our catalogue here.
Writing and Waiting
Fabiyas M V
My brain is in full bloom
in the loneliness of the lockdown.
The pandemic-shaped flowers are dark.
My thought-tooth pierces my mind-shell;
poetry hatches out.
It’s a downy truth
likely to grow in the reader’s mind.
The crumpled papers lie like empty shells.
My past bin is full.
I recycle the experience.
The new product delights at least me.
There are born-poems like blooms and birds
and made-poems like plastic primroses.
I enjoy flying beyond the borders.
My verses cross the sea,
land in the heart of a foreigner.
Can my characters,
who wear dhotis and saris,
take the boiled rice and the sardine curry,
smoke beedi and drink toddy,
fight fanatically for foolish causes,
and cremate the dead,
live in the faraway Florida, London, Queensland…?
Will the native English editor fumble
in the corridors of my Indian English?
Can he see the nature and the culture of my land
in the light of his reading lamp?
Yet expectancy energizes my waiting.
About the Author
Fabiyas M V is a writer, poet and teacher from Orumanayur village in Kerala, India.
You can find Stringless Lives, his collection of short stories, here.
Creative Resemblance and Plagiarism
Fabiyas M V
The prehistoric poets were fortunate.
Ideas to be chosen were unbounded.
Everything was fresh as the tender coconut water.
Plagiarism was unmapped.
Their poetry lived in souls.
In the nineteenth century,
Solitude formed in Wilcox’s womb,
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you:
Weep, and you weep alone.”
The same lines were echoed later in a Malayalam lyric,
“Chirikkumbol koode chirikkan ayiram per varum
Karayumbol koode karayan nin nizhal mathram varum.”
The similarity was coincidental,
a literary surprise.
Though plagiarists are plenty,
creative resemblance is a truth:
a truth I’m afraid of.
Now I need to MRI scan my poem
before it flies to live in the journal.
Who makes me more vigilant is the plagiarism-fisher
voyaging through my verse with a hook.
Yet I’m thankful to him.
About the Author
Fabiyas M V is a writer, poet and teacher from Orumanayur village in Kerala, India.
You can find Stringless Lives, his collection of short stories, here.