Anyone who has ever lost a shred of meat between two teeth will recognise the situation Balachandran V begins with in "Morsel in the Mouth". For nearly the whole poem he describes that small, absurd struggle: the tongue prodding, the hunt for a toothpick, the private triumph of dislodging the culprit. Only in the last two lines do we learn what it was all for: "Love, I believe, is sometimes / Like a morsel of memory in your mind!" The poem is a long, comic build-up to a single simile, and the simile is the point. Love, like the stuck scrap, is a small thing left over after the feast, one the mind can't stop probing, and it hurts and delights at once.
The opening sets up the logic the ending borrows. "The more you feel it / The deeper it delves" is neat cause and effect, and the repeated d-sounds of "deeper", "delves" and "crevasses" make the morsel seem to burrow as we read. Notice the scale of the vocabulary. "Crevasses" belongs to glaciers and mountains, and "entrenched" to war. The mouth becomes a landscape and a scrap of food becomes an occupying army. That mock-heroic inflation is a main source of the humour. There is also a quiet joke in "part / Of your molars or wisdom". The line break lets the morsel become part of your wisdom, and since wisdom teeth sit at the back of the mouth, the pun hints that whatever lodges there is something kept and lived with.
The form does its best work in the middle. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only free verse held together by short lines, dashes and breath. The "surreptitious search" is sneaky even in sound, hissing with s's as if the speaker is checking that nobody is watching. Then comes the stack: "to poke / to probe / to dig / to dislodge / to divest". Each verb gets its own line, and each line is a jab. The p's give way to d's, the actions grow more determined, and the eye has to stop and start the way the toothpick does. "Divest" is the funniest of them, a stiff, formal word applied to a crumb of meat, and "finally" arrives after it like a sigh of relief.
Then the poem winks. "That little bit of cashew - / or ground - haven't you gone - / nuts -" is broken up by dashes, as though the speaker keeps interrupting himself, and the pun gets a line to itself. The rhetorical question draws the reader in. "You" has been in the poem since its first line, and now you are made complicit. The vocabulary swells to "sheer ecstasy" and "the purest bliss", which is absurdly grand for a crumb. This bathos is affectionate rather than mocking, because the pleasure is real. The most human gesture comes last: "hiding behind your palm / relishing it". Manners demand that we conceal the enjoyment, so it becomes a secret, and "relishing" works as both taste and savouring.
That is why the final simile lands so well. The m-sounds of "morsel", "memory" and "mind" echo the title's "Morsel" and "Mouth" and carry the poem up from the mouth to the mind. The tongue's probing becomes the mind's returning to a memory, and the same rule applies: the more you feel it, the deeper it delves. The hidden relish becomes the private nostalgia we don't announce to anyone. The tentative "I believe" and "sometimes" keep the claim modest, while the exclamation mark seems to smile at its own cheek.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to treat love grandly. Instead of roses or stars, it picks an experience that is faintly embarrassing, universal and oddly delicious, and lets it carry an emotional truth. The memories that stay with us are often fragments, lodged somewhere awkward, irritating and sweet in equal measure. The poem is dated Trivandrum, 14-11-2010, but it needs no outside context. The mouth is all the setting it requires.