Friday, July 6, 2007

Urban Delusion

Swept away in hyperbole,
I by-passed a much needed reality-check.
The only memories of our earlier life
Are in department store gift wrapping
That I save and savour
In deliberate sorrow,
paper shells in which
I hand out recycled feelings to you, unnoticed.


Love, a popular one-word-fits-all euphemism,
An endocrine surge.
It sells, maims, kills and resuscitates too.
I know you are no Keats who loved
An ambiguous Fanny till his gnawing consumptive death,
Nor a Yeats who wooed his Maud to perfection
All I ask for is to feel alive,
In your life, mind and being.

I grow dizzy on the outer vortex
Of the teeming whirlpool that is your life.
Languishing on the periphery
Of your perceptive field,
Yet, most jarred.
Our realities are
Just personal constructs,
One for me and another for you.

Your dire sorrow makes not
My lack of joy
Any less poignant.
Your black and my white
Makes a common
Mid-way pallid gray,
Where cheer has not a chance,
Nor cathartic grief any scope.

What’s that you say?
You couldn’t keep your sacred vow?
No matter, darling,
Just toss it along
On our common scrap-heap of promises,
The only thing we share,
Except of course
For a bed and bathroom slippers.

Why argue over my Spanish lessons?
I need them to stay ahead
And make sure that
I am decisively chosen
For the deputation next time around.
I also like to drive around alone at night,
I need to feel independent.
You wouldn’t understand.

Just like you need
To meet your foreign client,
Every weekend at that classy restaurant.
Its work, I know, dearest.
And Sunday mornings are the only times
Your stallion honchos
Can find time to swap wife-jokes
And slap backs over hormonal escapades.

Have you noticed that
My diction has moved
From Daniel Jones to
Prime-time soap opera bombshell?
In your absence,
Digital phantoms entertain me,
And netizen compatriots
Calm my frayed nerves.

Did I tell you that
My hair now falls in clumps
And that my face needs a lift?
And this inspite of the mail-order
Volume-inducing potions
And anti-cellulite concoctions.
The fantasy is finally spent,
But do we notice?

Never dreamt of looking
Coyly at a husband
With whom I would whelp
In our bondage,
‘We two, our two’.
Must I look to motherhood
To deliver me from my malignant ache,
That simmers on our kitchen stove?

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