Poem – Crusader’s Tomb (By Rony Nair)

you didn’t give a f**k for anything’ except love’ and art. it was the precipice that kept it sane’ kept it afloat even as you slid further and further away in real life and newly rediscovered sanctimony.

even as we lay side by side and the workers could glimpse us as they worked the neighboring flat.

It sits like a verified ECG minus the company that it once stood far.

Afloat. Apart. It’ll end up like us. Dead wood beside the struts of the I told you so hypocrites who breed like dogs in secret yet know how to appear to play by the rules they create and set.

For the rest of us.

For you and me.

Bio:

Rony Nair slogs as an oil and gas Risk Management “expert/ director/ Vice President/consultant”-up on the greasy pole! He’s been 20 years in the industry since starting off as an Industrial engineer a long time ago. Extensively traveled. Dangers fronted often. But that’s his day job. The one that pays for bread and bills.

He’s been a worshipper at the altar of prose and poetry for almost as long as he could think. They have been the shadows of his life. (They’ve been) the bedsit at the end of a long day; the repository that does the sound of silence inimitably well. Not unlike a pet; but with one core difference- the books do suggest, educate and weave a texture that marginally provides streams of thought that are new. And one of the biggest pleasures of his life, is certainly holding a treasured edition in one’s hands. Physically.

Rony’s been writing poetry since 1985 and was a published columnist with the Indian Express in the early 1990’s. He is also a published photographer about to hold his first major exhibition and currently writes a regular column for two online journals; one of them widely read over South India. Rony has been profiled by the Economic Times of Delhi and has also written for them. He cites V.S Naipaul, A.J Cronin, Patrick Hamilton, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine and Nevil Shute in addition to FS Fitzgerald as influences on his life; and Philip Larkin, Dom Moraes and Ted Hughes as his personal poetry idols. Larkin’s’ collected poems would be the one book he would like to die with. When the poems perish. As do the thoughts!