Vinay Vashisht
The window of my room frames
A bubbly girl and a caterpillar green
Wound around her pudgy finger
Creeping and frolicking, with her giggles
And caws a crow nudging its beak
Zooming on the distant butterfly
Awaiting the friendship of hunger and death
Relishing in my dream of being a poet,
Stunned into stirring silence.
It’s great to do nothing, and just dote on lives
Through the windows of, camouflaged schools of life
Changing dreams seared through the veins of
Little pricks, troubled adults and harlots alike.
Doctors, lawyers, writers and actors; stylish things
Wrapped in refined mystery of fame and dough
Reality filtered through hope
Burrowing against the warmth of daydreams.
I have very simple dreams though, of existence
And double blue ticks, and dog-licks on my face
Nothing of which lets me sleep
And I drown in deep frown of, judging eyes
That never fantasized.
Somewhere fair, there must be respite
For people with low and no dreams
That forget to ponder and wander in
Dreams of suicide, barrelled down the expectation-highway.
It’s not that I never hallucinated big
But my needs surpassed the worldly pretences
Like a soldier who saves and dies, no fame
A nation’s dream lost in a mother and a wife.
Not to label it unfair or so
For all of your dreams, where would I go
And share them with someone too
Between sloshing tongues and woven breaths.
And it’s not easy to select and foresee
Of on the beach, or roof, or car
Lapsing into stillness and screams
She’s everything you want, everything you can’t have.
She looks with her moist eyes
Milk snatched from her feeble calf
And there you go for the praised sacrifice
Shoved down your humanitarian half.
And only if I could utter some hope
In the caterpillar ambling towards a butterfly
Its dreams collided with that of the crow
And just then and there, some things had to die.