Nine lines, and more than half of them are the same word. That is what the eye catches first in Balachandran V's "The Butcher," where "chopping" falls down the page five times, like a blade rising and dropping. But the poem's real force comes from what it holds back until the final line.
It opens with preparation: "Sharpening my knife, / I plunge it / into the flesh of time." We expect a butcher's block and a carcass. The surprise is that the carcass is time itself. Calling it "flesh" gives an abstract thing a body that can be cut, and the verb "plunge" makes the first stroke sudden and decisive. Then the sentence refuses to finish. The five "chopping"s hang in the air, and we assume the knife is still working on time. Only the last line corrects us: "me, in thin, fine slices..." The speaker has been cutting himself all along. Time and self turn out to be one material, so carving up time into hours, appointments and days means carving up one's own life. The poem quietly literalises the phrase "killing time" and shows who the victim is.
The poem also reverses a familiar picture. Time is usually the one holding the blade, the reaper who wears us down. Here the speaker holds the knife, and he sharpens it first, with care. The damage is done by him, deliberately and skilfully. The poem does not say whether this is guilt, resignation or a dry confession of how people spend their days. It shows the act and leaves the judgment to us. The choice of a butcher, a figure of repetitive skilled labour, suggests a life used up in routine, though that is our inference from the imagery, not something the poem states.
The form does a lot of this work. There is no rhyme, and the free-verse lines are short, with almost no punctuation until the end, so the poem moves in quick breaths. The first three lines run like natural speech. Then "chopping" takes over. Its two syllables, stressed on the first, work like a metronome: CHOP-ping, CHOP-ping. Stacking the word vertically turns the poem into a column of blows, and the reader's eye moves down the page the way the knife does. The drama of "plunge" gives way to repetition, and the horror lies in how ordinary the act becomes.
Sound matters here too. The hard "ch" and "p" of "chopping" land with a thud, while "sharpening," "flesh" and "slices" hiss like steel on steel. In the last line the vowels shrink to the short, high sounds of "thin, fine," so the slices are thin in sound as well as in meaning. The line holds the poem's only internal comma, after "me." It reads like a small hesitation, a catch in the throat before the speaker names himself as the victim. The slices are so fine that no single cut would hurt much, which is how a life can be used up without anyone noticing. The closing ellipsis keeps the sentence open. The poem stops, but the knife does not.
The poem carries a place and date, Trivandrum, 13 January 2009, like an entry in a notebook. That suits its private, confessional tone, though the text gives no clue to what prompted it, so it is safest to read the poem on its own terms.
What makes it significant is its economy. In a few dozen words it takes a worry most of us recognise, that our days are slipping away in small pieces, and turns it into a single image that is hard to forget. It also implicates the reader. Everyone who has "spent" or "killed" an afternoon has held that knife. By delaying its twist to the last line, the poem makes us feel the shock of recognition along with the speaker. It also suggests that the worst losses of time may be the quiet ones we perform on ourselves, slice by thin, fine slice.