Long stems of bubbly
do the rounds
on the pompous yacht
where waxen faces
and red mouths declare,
“This is so much fun.”
You rejected that life,
and had the dregs
of last night’s lager
cloudy on the kitchen top,
with your friends;
fiends, like you,
scraping fungal clouds
from last week’s leftovers.
You spent the little
left in your purse
to visit a friendly
mountainside, its silhouette
undulating like the disease
that begins and
ends your life.
You trekked with
trampling boots
to the pass,
and rolled a cheroot
to greener the grass,
and from the pines
you heard a cry,
of the jujurana
with a gleaming mane.
The old straitened tides
took you back home,
to the city where
the debt sweet
arrived from a cousin,
who never would
see you again
who had thought,
an investment prospect,
was the plumes of
smoke you blew.
The sour crystalline shard,
that meal of Chicken Francese
that you couldn’t swallow
for your throat was
downing that bag of snow,
at your little daughter’s
birthday party.
And in a moment
of delirious aplomb,
you emptied the bag
to the wind before
running down the lawn,
armed with a sieve,
you sought to,
rescue the remnants.
In that panicked pursuit,
you saw, the lawn’s end,
from above the leafy treetops
and birdsong,
the sun emerging
like a dream,
from the depths of doom.
Shantanu Singh writes while daylighting as a student at Law Faculty, Delhi University.
Featured image credit: Med Ahabchane/Pixabay