Amreeka!

(So) how are we to free our selves from what the Pa rents said?
(The) Pa rents rule our lives when li ving; ev en when they're dead!
(A) me ri cans can talk to shrinks, and hosts of break fast shows;
(In) In di a we live with what we get un til it grows
(Un) bear a ble to des per a tion, and we mis con clude
(Ki) "Am ree ka hi theek hai, boss, this coun try is toh screwed!"



* * *



This was written on the spur of the moment, but these days I'm less and less inclined to believe that poetry (to misquote the greatest Romantic poet) is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, and more and more that it is recollected (in tranquility, or not!).
Anyway, I wanted to play around with meter and rhythm, and was curious to see what happens to the scansion of the lines, especially the Hindi words, when they're exaggeratedly highlighted.

I remembered the book I was reading this summer, hunting for inspiration or direction while composing Wind, Sand and Stars:
Music Composition for Dummies. Yes, there such a book. The book mentioned natural speech rhythms, and I found it really fascinating: another thing I have always been interested in is mapping the frequencies of speech, not just "nervous=shrill", but a Speech Pattern Graph.

This little stanza is an attempt to capture the natural cadence of what is, I suppose, urban Indian speech.

The emphasis, in decreasing order, is:
bold italics > bold > regular > (parenthesised)