Eight short lines, no commas, no full stop, and not a single "I". In "A New Lie," Ram Krishna Singh describes a loneliness so complete that the lonely person has vanished from the grammar. The poem opens with "Living in isolation," and that phrase becomes the subject of five verbs in a row: it builds, looks, revives, closes, weaves. Isolation does everything, like a creature with habits of its own, while the human being is nowhere to be seen. Judging by this, the poem is less interested in one person's story than in how loneliness behaves.
Its central idea is that isolation does not simply separate people; it produces fictions to keep itself going. The title says the lie is "new," which implies earlier ones, and the indefinite "a" makes this one more in a series. The poem traces a progression in the verbs. First comes a physical act, building. Then watching, then hoping, then a refusal to look, and finally invention. The speaker moves from seeing the situation to making up a version of it.
Water runs through the whole poem. The first line plants it quietly, because "isolation" comes from the Latin word for island, so "builds islands" unpacks the word's own ancestry. Notice "builds," too. Nobody is shipwrecked here; the islands are made. The next image, "melding shadows / in water," offers closeness only as reflection: two shadows merging on a surface, with nothing solid to hold. The poem doesn't say whose shadows they are, and they could belong to the lost companions or to the speaker. "When stars fall" ties reunion to a wish made on a falling star, a rare event that no one controls, and "fall" carries a hint of loss as well. Then comes "closes eyes to the tide." The tide moves, rises and wears away, and the imagery suggests it threatens the island. The islander's response is to shut their eyes.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the lines are carefully shaped. Long lines of about seven syllables ("Living in isolation," "revives hopes of reunion") alternate with tiny three-syllable ones ("in water," "when stars fall"). Those small lines hang beneath the longer ones like reflections under objects, and each adds a detail to the line above it. The missing punctuation lets every line pour into the next, and the verbs are strung together without "and," like a list of daily habits. Because nothing ends with a full stop, the final line feels unfinished, as though the weaving goes on after the poem stops.
The sound patterns are subtler. The long "i" keeps returning: isolation, islands, eyes, tide, lie. Said aloud, that is the sound of "I" and "eye," so the missing self seems to hide in the vowels. The last word, "lie," lands on the same sound as "eyes" two lines earlier and links the two ideas. Closing your eyes and telling a lie become one gesture. Elsewhere the language is soft: the m, l and d of "melding," the sh of "shadows," the v of "revives" and "weaves." Nothing is harsh, and the tone is gentle rather than accusing.
That gentleness shows in the last verb. "Builds" suggests earth and stone; "weaves" suggests thread, cloth, something patient and almost tender. The lie is made with the same labour as the island, and perhaps for the same purpose: it is somewhere to live. The poem seems to understand this lie more than it condemns it.
The poem is worth reading for how much it compresses into so little. It leaves one question open, too. "A new lie" might be the hope of reunion revived two lines earlier, or the story that the isolation is bearable, or both. The poem won't say, which leaves the reader in the same position as the speaker, unable to see where the comforting story ends and the truth begins.