Two Poems
Esther
I don’t
I saw
I felt
I felt
I spent
I thought
I didn’t
I was
I had
I sat
I tried
I were
I wished
I had
I would
I would
We do
I dabbled
I wiped
I folded
I put
I thought
I had
I saw
I had
I wrote
I wrote
I bicycled
I would
I had
I saw
I thought
I told
I knew
I learned
I had
We came
I imagine
I found
I hate
I could
I began
I looked
I felt
I didn’t
I had
I am
I whispered
I said
I feel
I, I’ll
We slipped
I stepped
I could
I couldn’t
We stepped
We fell
We reached
I had
We were
We didn’t
I guess
We were
We didn’t
I guess
We were
We pulled
We didn’t
We stuffed
I held
I was
We hugged
I had
I felt
I felt
I just
I struggled
I could
I hurried
I thought
I would
I sat
I thought
I was
I would
I don’t
I kept
I let
I was
I felt
I stretched
I could
I had
I thought
I had
I thought
I dimly
I said
I pulled
I knew
I looked
I fixed
I had
I kept
I saw
I was
I didn’t
I thought
I listened
I had
I think
I figured
I think
I will
I heard
We will
I felt
We came
I asked
I am
I never
I asked
I drifted
I shook
I contemplated
I said
I raised
I couldn’t
I felt
I bent
I thought
I took
I felt
I noticed
I guess
I had
I saw
I saw
I thought
I echoed
I began
I wouldn’t
I felt
I am
I am
I brought
I have
I could
I suppose
I fished
I looked
We both
I stuffed
We were
I couldn’t
I said
I am
The Representational Artist
What he actually said, I have forgotten;
Pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures.
“The nearest approach to this”, I said,
“Would be to which mankind perpetually aspires.
Yes, a Vermeer.
Vermeer is undoubtedly congenitally equipped,
To see all the time.
He never asked his girls to look like hills.”
“The sum of evil”, Pascal remarked,
“Is nonrepresentational art.”
He represented human beings.
He was always waiting to cross Sunset Boulevard.
The doors of his perception,
In spite of the peculiar hideousness of the architecture,
Became almost perfectly transparent.
In these circumstances, he could see blank,
But unforgettably beautiful,
Empty revelations dawning.
“The divine source of existence,
Does not have to stay in his room.”
Esther (2014)
All words accompanying ‘I’ and ‘We’ from the fifth chapter of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963), in the order in which they appear within the original text.
The Representational Artist (2014)
A poem composed of lines derived from vertically cutting up a copy of The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954) in half, rearranging the order of the cut pages, and reading across the resulting spreads.
Nihaal Faizal is an artist based in Bangalore, India. His writings have previously appeared in BOMB, MARCH, Temporary Art Review, HOAX, Poetry Wales, IDEAS Journal, Rhizome, Tariff Mag, and Photo South Asia. His first book, an annotated version of Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, was published by Display Distribute in 2021.
