TWO POEMS

Rony Nair

CCTV Love

Surveillance Society

Those drones can tell the color of your t-shirt

Before it’s splayed in blood.

Those maps can pick her distinct stride

Before she calls out; at your door.

Dissent can put the non-abled to bed

Before they’re seen or heard.

And cyber cells pick up your love letters,

Even as you burn your bread.

Your pulse is not your own these days

They belong to someone else

Your heart rate can be heard these days

Across an “app” filled cell.

Yet through it all,

In human dreams,

As made for CCTV;

I stay seeped in you,

As you think of me,

In tartuffery.

Can memories be held in rewind buttons?

Can Polaroids capture your ghosts?

Can a selfie stick prod your inhibitions?

Can those social networks map your pores?

Can CCTV feel the way one feels?

Can a CCTV feel your breath on me?

***

Droned

Solitude

The sensibility was paramount she said

Of feeling the pinch;

When your every step is in motion to a drumbeat

That isn’t yours.

When every impulse is to look overhead

And remind oneself,

That to be prim and proper,

Is to be viewed to be so.

Your social posts try real hard

To give off airs

Of contentment.

But big brothers don’t watch anymore she said.

They hover. They create. They Blood.

New innocents who drown;

In calibrated guilt.

Your fate decoded;

In rewind mode!

***

Rony Nair works as an oil and gas Risk Management consultant. He was a columnist with the Indian Express. He is also a professional photographer about to hold his first major exhibition and has previously been published by Sonic Boom, Quail Bell Magazine, YGDRASIL journal, Mindless Muse, Yellow Chair Review, Two Words For, Ogazine, New Asian Writing (NAW), Semaphore, The Cadet, The Economic Times, 1947, The Foliate Oak Magazine, Open Road Magazine, Tipton Review and YES magazine, among others. Rony has also featured in the Economic Times of India.