COFFEE CASE WORSENED

The aroma eases through, unlocks doors

That lead to memory’s unending source.

For the first time I close my eyes.

I look inside me and I am lax of words.

Alone in a group of people? Not nice!

Unending time, if nothing, really hurts.

Living up to my lessons, sad to say I am astray.

Mother-learnt values all lost hues.

I sometime wonder what she will think

If she saw me here, if she was near.

And then with a flinch I brush it aside.

Curse me, I say, for carrying insane pride.

Pride that I dwell amongst proofs of alienation,

Pride that is hitting me hard; no realization.

Morn come, things won’t be any the same,

I’ll be back looking at things that seem now sane.

For now, it’s me and my penetrating coffee,

Hot, sweet, bitter. Alive. Stirring within, without me.

Coffee Cases

Bidding adieu to the last dregs of my over-priced coffee,

I sink to the taste of my purple days of unabashed reverie.

From those still-fresh figurines I pick bygone ghosts that haunt.

How they make my coffee more bitter, a persistent gaunt.

Even after I leave the coffee shop, the coffee mug still hot,

The aroma tugs along. The pebbles I kick down the road

Tumble along a shivery path, as shaky as my deeds.

Akin to a sinful soul that’s accustomed to passionate feed.

The rivulets of greed and guilt that ran down the same plains,

Now extinct, dry path, signatures of past like dried rains.

How pitiful, even the most intimate caresses go uncared.

Numbness overrides humanness, chastity not spared.

I burn them all down with the last dregs of my coffee.

I sink to the taste of my purple days of unabashed reverie.

29.10.11

After much seeking I found

What is indeed worse than loneliness.

It’s not quite different, but pretty abhorrent-

Alienation, being an outcaste in a culture.

Worse so, if it is your identity de-cultured

(Or so they say) by ages of separation

From the roots. Severed into perdition.

Now an incomplete adult revisiting.

Need to learn much, cease to be as such.

Know when you turn, you are the issue.

Your dress, your speech, your friends,

All too base, so far removed from norm

That it is immoral, needless pretence.

You can try pleasing, but please, it’s useless.

You eat when they ask, drink when they say,

Sleep when they want. Dream whenever you may

Seek sanity. You get sanity in dreams alone.

And when you have dreamt enough,

Come back. It’s time for another meal.

That’s all there is. If not with sense,

Stuff yourself with food so that you live.

Evening entertainment gossips of congeniality.

Be sure, the moment you leave, you become

The new subject, target showing impropriety.

And some day, from some distant cousin

You will hear of a promiscuous mad woman,

Then you realize, it is you being spoken.

Trapped

In a sweating hillside villa

Hot and humid entourage

Peeping into the folds of the river

Fed by every evening shower

I am trapped, I am trapped.

Willing submission, not the rapt.

Stuck in a bricked room,

Windows so heavily clouded.

Lost my roots, lost my shoot,

Holding on to ward off the haunted.

I am trapped, I am trapped.

Anxious anticipation, ripped into half.

It’s killing, agonizingly slow

The river would not flow.

Jamming into a tiny orifice

Made tinier by them, I miss.

I am trapped, I am trapped.

Sluggish slumber, not vigilant act.

Forced companies, fake freedoms,

Treacherous talks and idle gossips

Weaving around lamer topics.

Should I laugh, cry or just nod?

I am trapped, I am trapped.

Second-hand speech, carefully matched.

Neither here, nor there, nowhere.

My mind hangs in between conversations.

Neither interest, nor relevance to anything sane

And they expect a courteous, eligible dame.

I am trapped, I am trapped.

Painfully poised, waiting a lapse.