Arranged Hopes

 

Hopes are arranged.

I take my seat.

The dishes shine and

instead of the tried and tasted cuisines

you serve something

that denies the temptation of the form and shape.

 

‘Mother, what will we have

tonight?’

‘Hope’, you say.

 

My father’s name is hunger

and since the day

he went to the factory

and returned slope-shouldered

he always lingers here,

near, too much near,

everywhere.

 

Death Strolls By Hope

In the laughs of a streetlight

a homeless man feeds his

kittens before having a morsel,

and death passes him even tonight,

him and all those kittens.

The man begins reading eight obscure

words related to sleep-

oscitancy, logy, soporific, dozy,

sleepify, peepy, somnolent, sloomy.

Death returns nearby, yawns and

let a planet inhaled inside.

 

Hope In Straightjacket

 

The thoughts,

pointing at the pills utters the nurse.

Her mouth will turn platypus

once I swallow the pills- the ‘red queen’ first,

then the ‘father’s broken bottle green’,

‘yellow submarine playing in a loop’.

I name all of them.

 

I shall never know what they go by in the market-

perhaps ‘a touch of wind for your head’!

I swallow all those thoughts, and they

witch dance washed in the moon of my nocturnal heart,

witches who dance to bring dimness, more dimness,

and they dance merging their bodies

into each other again and oh, again.

 

Thoughts have never been easy to swallow.

What I think about not recalling them in the first place

chokes my pipe, system.

I call, “Mother!” and the nurse

wraps my flesh in the white stillness.