Drivel

There is a poet who cannot stop writing even though nothing he writes makes sense anymore. Drivel is that condition made visible. The entire surface is covered in Urdu script — written not to be read, but written because the act of writing could not be stopped. This is language past its own usefulness, past communication, past meaning. It has become something else: compulsion, texture, noise.

The text is written upside down. This is not a formal gesture but a genuine provocation — why does meaning only travel in one direction? Poetry has its conventions: rhyme, metre, the correct way a line should fall on a page. But what if those conventions are not rules, only habits? What if the poem means something different when you stop reading it the way you were taught to? To invert the text is to ask whether the reader’s orientation is part of the meaning, or simply an assumption that was never questioned.

Drivel | Ink on wasli paper | 36 x 48 inches | 2018