Four stanzas of pure appetite, and then the doctor walks in. Balachandran V's "Guillotine", dated Trivandrum, 20 October 2008, begins as a celebration of small, ordinary indulgences: fried chicken, a cigarette, a glass of whisky, an idle moment on a park bench. It ends with a question about why enjoying them should feel like breaking a rule. Its central idea is that pleasure and guilt have become so tangled that the guilt now arrives before the pleasure has been tasted.
The first half works almost like a list, and the construction does the persuading. Each stanza opens with an infinitive, "To bite", "To light", "To fondle", "To stretch", so the pleasures float free of any particular person, like habits or daydreams. Each stanza closes with an ellipsis, which lets the moment trail off rather than finish. The imagery is slow and sensory: the messy "gravy dribbling down the chin", the sound of ice clinking, smoke rings "reluctantly vanishing". The verbs drift downward and outward, with dribbling, rolling, fading and waltzing. The last three stanzas all end on the word "by": clouds rolling by, the breeze waltzing by, a girl passing by. Without saying so, the repetition tells us these pleasures are passing even as they are enjoyed. The personification is gentle too. The breeze waltzes and the smoke rings are reluctant, as if the whole world were in a leisurely mood. Even "ruminate", in "ruminate on nothing", may carry a faint echo of chewing, so that thinking becomes one more kind of tasting. The stanza closes in on three calm words, "Content, still, fulfilled", which read almost like a sigh.
Then comes "Then-", and the dash hangs in the air like a held breath. The poem turns into a series of accusations, each with the same pattern: a person, a verb of disapproval, a dash, a reason. The woman glares, the doctor preaches, the friend patronizes. The vocabulary also changes completely. "Cholesterol", "Hypertension", "Cirrhosis", "prognosis" and "geriatrics" are clinical words, and the capital letters make two of them look like official stamps. One word links the halves. The cigarette "plume" was "rising" as a small pleasure, and now the "cholesterol is rising" as a threat. A word that once suggested ease now suggests danger. "Bounding" adds to this, since it makes illness sound energetic, as though it were running the speaker down.
The most interesting accuser is the last. "And your mind – please don't!" is the only moment when the speaker pleads, because the policing has moved inside his own head. Here the title begins to make sense. A guillotine is a blade that drops suddenly and cannot be recalled, and in this poem the blade falls before any real harm has been done. The mind imagines old age, "Playing tricks of geriatrics", and the pleasure is cut off in advance. The title also looks and sounds a little like "guilt" (an inference, but a tempting one), a word the poem spells out in its closing lines.
Those lines are the only place where the free verse tightens into deliberate sound-play: "Gilt in guilt". The pun on the two homophones is neat. Gilt is a thin layer of gold over a plainer surface, so guilt is imagined as a coating on the pleasure. That coating could make the pleasure glitter, more precious because it is forbidden. It could also be a shiny cover over something that was perfectly innocent. The poem does not choose, and it ends on a question, not a verdict.
That openness is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not argue for smoking, whisky or fried chicken, and it does not lecture against them. It sympathizes with the speaker's appetite and with the worry of the people around him, and a wry humour keeps it from self-pity. The pleasures it names are modest, which makes the central question sharper. The poem asks how much of the present we lose by fearing the future, and that question applies to any reader who has ever enjoyed something and felt a small pang straight afterwards.