Ra Sh writes

Butcher Girl  2 – A remix

Like a slab of putrefying text, I

lie supine on a frozen sheet, waiting

for the Butcher Girl, the semantic queen, the

universal grammar girl, the pedagogue, the

lexical abecedary.

In diabolic fear, I hear her laugh like a

vicarious storm, a volcanic fusillade, see

her word-slurping lips, her chomping

teeth designed for the bony allusions,

her forked syntactic tongue.

She, the queen of the semiotic world,

her nakedness riveted with grammatical

morphemes,idioms, allegories,

oxymorons, syllables,

metaphors, alliterations

and dreaded punctuation.

She grimaces at my dying text and lets

out a shriek of ecstasy and begins the war

with the quickness of a spider.

In her multi-limbs, she brandishes the

weapons of my text’s undoing –

roland barthes flay knives umberto eco bone tongs

jürgen habermas backsaws jean baudrillard bone-crunchers  

jacques derrida sharp cutters gilles deleuze rippers

jacques lacan extractors judith butler grinders and  

michel foucault machetes and hammers.

Setting a frenetic pace of dismantlement,

dismemberment, demolition, deconstruction.

Till, on that cold slab of death, nothing

remains, but she and my text

on palm leaves cut in rectangular strips

on which are scrawled some runes

in my language that signify my life and ruin.  

(From the anthology ' A Strange Place Other than Earlobes' by five Indian poets. shankeran@gmail.com  )