Most poems about desire let us glimpse the person who is desired. In Balachandran V's "The Stalker," dated 2005, the "you" is never described at all. We know only that this person walks, sings and shakes hair across a face, while a voice keeps track of every move. The poem's central idea is that obsession is menacing and pitiable at once. The watcher's apparent power over another person turns out to be a way of living inside his own emptiness.
The form suits that voice. There is no regular metre and no rhyme scheme, only short lines broken by dashes and hyphens, so the speaker seems to whisper and stop, then start again. The opening, "You don't know- / But I am still around," sets up an unnerving irony: he tells the very person who supposedly cannot know. The refrain "But – listen!" appears twice, which is a strange demand from someone hiding. A stalker who begs to be heard is already half-confessing that he wants to be found. The imperatives "Walk on," "Sing on," "Whirl around" make it worse, because he talks as if the other person were moving through a script he has written.
The poem works through the senses, one after another. There is sound in the "footfalls / Crushing the fallen leaves" and the voice "Rising over the winds." There is smell in the flowers "carrying / My sweat pungent," and touch in "breathing down your neck." Then comes the poem's most disturbing pivot: "I breathe in the fragrance that you are." The verb flips from threat to consumption, and a person becomes a scent. His own body is a stain on the breeze, while the other's is something to inhale. That reduction of a human being to a sensation is how this kind of obsession thinks.
The repeated "behind" (curtains, doors, the Banyan tree, "the multitude") widens the circle from room to garden to crowd, so nowhere is safe. The small adjectives "fluttering" and "creaking" give these hiding places an eerie domestic texture. Even the line "The shadow at your heels – / Look close – it needn't be you" is deliberately unsettling. We can't tell whether the shadow is his, or whether the speaker has somehow taken the place of the other person's own shadow.
Then the poem turns against its own boasting. "Unseen, unheard, unfelt" contradicts the earlier footfalls, voice and sweat. The next three lines, "Not even a fleeting glimpse / Not even a faded footprint / Not even a forgotten song," soften into repeated *f* sounds as if the presence were evaporating. Judging by the imagery, the pursuit may live more in the speaker's mind than on any real path. The "little shell" that follows suggests both protection and confinement. Inside it, the only "light" is "bright memories," the only "sight" is "yellowed images," and the only "sound" is "silenced waves." Light and sight form the poem's one clear rhyme, as though the world has shrunk to a closed, self-echoing room. The word "light" has also changed. Earlier it was the "blinding light" of the other person's open world, and now it is a faint glow from the past.
The last line, "I watch – and wait," is quiet and unresolved, and it stays in the present tense. We never learn what he is waiting for, or whether anything will ever happen.
The poem is significant because it gives voice to the figure we usually only fear, without excusing him. Its second-person address pulls the reader into the position of the watched, so the menace is felt directly. Yet the fading images in the final lines reveal a speaker who has nothing left except looking. The poem lets us hold both responses together, which is why it stays disturbing after we finish reading.