Few poems begin as unglamorously as Balachandran V's "Naught," dated 15 September 2016 and marked Trivandrum. A speaker stares at a computer screen full of folders and feels defeated by them. Within twelve lines, that small domestic irritation has grown into a thought about mortality. The central idea is that the way we accumulate things, without sorting or choosing, makes everything we own fragile, and a life piled up like this is as likely to collapse as a hard disk. The pile is a picture of the self, and piles give way.
The poem's shape carries this meaning. The three stanzas run to five, four and three lines, so the poem narrows as it goes, like something being squeezed toward a point. The first stanza is one long, breathless sentence. Its opening lines ("Staring at the screen... Folders and folders and files and files / Piling up...") contain no main verb until the blunt "I am overwhelmed!" at the end. The reader is made to wade through the clutter before the speaker is allowed to name the feeling. The last stanza works the same way in reverse. It is built from hanging infinitives, "for the hard disks to crash – / The house to crumble – and life to end –", and never settles into a complete statement. The sentence trails off, as though the thought were too large to finish.
The imagery moves steadily outward. The poem starts with the PC, the laptop, the netbook and "even" the external hard disks. That list has a faintly comic, almost confessional air, since the speaker keeps running out of places to put things. Then the scale widens to "my room, my house," and finally "my entire life." The second stanza also changes the kind of thing being piled. "Mountains of files and drawers and memories" slides from digital to physical to intangible, and the last item is the most surprising. Memories are filed alongside folders, as if they too could be misplaced or deleted. The phrase "junk, valuables irretrievably lost" carries the poem's sharpest worry. The problem is not just quantity but that junk and valuables are heaped together, so the precious things cannot be found. "Irretrievably" is also a word with a computing flavour, since retrieval is what we ask of a hard disk. A technical idea is quietly turned into an emotional one.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, which suits a poem about disorder, but the sound is carefully handled. "Folders and folders and files and files" has the doubled, chant-like beat of something multiplying before our eyes, and the f sounds spill into "frighteningly" later on. "Piling up" opens a line in both of the first two stanzas, an echo that makes the pile feel relentless. The dashes at line-ends act as small hesitations. The conversational "Why, even like my entire life –" sounds like a realisation happening as the speaker speaks, and the leap from a screen to a whole life feels more startling because it comes so casually. The tone is also worth noticing. "I grimace" is wry, and "How frighteningly similar" is an oddly flat way to describe such a comparison. The understatement makes the fear more believable than a dramatic outburst would.
The poem's real arrival is its last word. The title "Naught" is an old-fashioned word for nothing, set against a vocabulary of PCs and netbooks, and the poem is built to land on it. The final line, "And everything to come to naught!", turns accumulation into its opposite. After all that piling up, there is nothing. The three crashes are also parallel: hard disks crash, the house crumbles, life ends. They are listed with the same calm rhythm, so a damaged file and a death seem to sit on one scale.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It takes an experience many students will recognise, a full phone or a drive nobody has sorted, and shows it to be a small version of an old subject, the fragility of what we gather. The poem does not offer a solution, and it does not say whether sorting through the clutter would help. It leaves the reader looking at their own screen, a little less comfortable than before.