Skip to main content
By Ravi Shankar

Honest self-scrutiny too easily mutinies,
    mutates into false memories
Which find language a receptive host,
Boosted by boastful embellishments.


Self-esteem is raised on wobbly beams,
    seeming seen as stuff enough
To fund the hedge of personality,
Though personally, I cannot forget


Whom I have met and somehow wronged,
    wrung for a jot of fugitive juice,
Trading some ruse for a blot or two,
Labored to braid from transparent diction


Fiction, quick fix, quixotic fixation.
    As the pulse of impulses
Drained through my veins, I tried to live
Twenty lives at once. Now one is plenty.   
 


Ravi Shankar, "Contraction" from Instrumentality. Copyright © 2005 by Ravi Shankar.  Reprinted by permission of the author.

Source: Instrumentality (Cherry Grove Collections, 2005)

  • Living

Poet Bio

Ravi Shankar
Shankar grew up in Virginia; he received a BA from the University of Virginia and a MFA from Columbia University. He is founding editor of the online journal of the arts Drunken Boat. Shankar teaches at Central Connecticut State College where he is poet-in-residence. He is also a faculty member at the Stonecoast Writers Conference and the MFA program at City University of Hong Kong. See More By This Poet

More Poems about Living

Browse poems about Living Get a random poem