Balachandran V opens with a confession that is also a joke: "Some people admire my signature. / I too do." The second line is only three words long, and its deadpan honesty sets the tone. The speaker is not pretending to modesty. He is pleased with his own handwriting and says so, and the poem's comedy and its insight both grow from that admission.
The first stretch inflates a few pen strokes into a naval battle. The "V" becomes "the prow of a racing snake boat," and the rightward slant is "aerodynamic." Then the signature turns into a galleon "about to ram into the midriff of an enemy ship." The imagery is vivid and funny because it is so out of scale. Judging by the details, the speaker may be drawing on the boats of his own region, since the poem is headed Trivandrum, though that is an inference. The "Roman galleon" is a slightly muddled phrase, because galleons and Roman ships belong to different eras. That looseness suits a man borrowing grandeur from wherever he can find it.
The poem then deflates itself. Where does this warship actually sail? On "bits of paper, in office vouchers / In letters to the editor and beg to submits." The last phrase, a fragment of formal Indian-English letter-writing, is a perfect anticlimax. The galleon ends up as a clerk's mark at the bottom of a form. The gap between the heroic comparison and the dull reality is the poem's main source of humour, and the speaker seems to know it.
In the middle section the signature becomes a kind of mood chart. The list "Angry, tense, happy, sleepy, sad, content / Confident, shaky, casual, sharp" runs on without a full stop, so the feelings pile up and the reader is carried along as if the pen never lifts. The sound of the next line, "The swirls and whorls, the strokes and strikes," is almost playful, with its paired *s* sounds and its matching rhythm. Then comes "Wax and wane in the tides of my mind." The word "tides" returns us to the sea of the opening, so the nautical imagery has quietly changed from a weapon into a rhythm. The signature is no longer attacking anyone. It simply rises and falls with the speaker's feelings.
The poem turns on its bluntest line: "Every signature screams – look at me, look at me." The repetition sounds like a child tugging at a sleeve, and "screams" is a surprisingly harsh verb for handwriting. The speaker names the flaw himself: "Vanity, trying to impress in vain." The near-echo of "vanity" and "vain" makes the judgment sound final, and the title's word "Smug" now reads as self-diagnosis rather than boast.
The ending is the cleverest part. The signature has "wax[ed] and wane[d]" with every mood, yet "Not much changed in the nearly forty years / Since its inception." The grand word "inception" makes the signature's beginning sound like the founding of an institution, which is another small joke. Then the speaker turns the observation on himself: "Neither have I, much." The moods were only surface weather. Underneath, the same person has been signing the same name, with the same wish to be noticed, for decades. By the poem's own dateline of 2009, that stretch reaches back to around 1970, though the poem never says so directly.
The last three lines shrink to fragments: "Not much / In a signature." They can be read in several ways. A signature changes little over time. A signature holds little of a person's real depth. Or perhaps a person is not much more than his signature. The lines get shorter and quieter, like a flourish trailing off at the end of a stroke.
The poem is written in free verse, with no rhyme scheme and plain, conversational phrasing. This lets the humour land without fuss. Its significance lies in how much self-knowledge it finds in so small an object. The speaker never lectures about vanity or ageing. He simply looks closely at the one piece of writing that is entirely his own and is honest about what he sees.