Half Real Dream

Bipasha Bhattacharyya

There is a lane that winks
at me
from the window of a
house I once had in a city I still
have
It is seldom without the bright
This lane which makes nonsense of personification
Not the blinding brightness of a pandal or the high rise shops
Selling is always the kid who gets beat up in these places that have little to do with my lane

For it is indeed mine
This lane that sells happiness with the precision of a pharmacist
A drop more will make it all real
There is no price for the real and nothing
is spilled
Mounds of flesh with real faces buy the right to cut into other mounds of flesh in order to feel more like mounds of flesh who are real and mounds
Real mounds who don't need 3-D glasses as they saunter out the door

My old nursemaid
counts pennies in her head as they cut her open
Surgeons in their own right with music playing in an operation theater
Anasthesia is sold by the penny in these establishments
My nursemaid usually thinks of the pennies as they cut her open
Each penny she stores away will grow into a book if planted with the manure for which there are seldom pennies
Left

She left once and has never had to since
Then
Much like the book of fairytales she used to read aloud
The same mistake never made twice by mounds of flesh who seldom count pennies or books or get farther than the breadcrumbs

Today
As the mounds of flesh cut her open
She thinks of the mound of flesh she pushed out eighteen years ago
She wonders how he made books grow out of manure without pennies
The world has given her little pennies
Little to see but these pennies that never buy manure

Today Macaulay spilled a drop


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