Who needs drugs?

She greets me grimly,

With a smile robbed of warmth and love.

She lives just around the corner,

Next to the old lady.

The one who looks secretly,

From under the magically changing veil.

From green to brown to green again.

 

She lies there with her discrete invitation,

Lips laced with plastic pink,

Curling into a meaningless smile,

And her body is drunk in a vile scent.

 

Deaf to the word sorcerers’ cautions,

I crawl to her blindly,

Carrying a bag full of despair and lust.

Running like a mad child on dark smooth lanes.

 

To lie in her poisoned arms,

And think of someone else,

As I make unwearied love to her pain every night.

There hides a tree in the backyard,
Wrapped in brown and wrinkled history.
It stares at me with emotionless eyes,
Like the orb of a future teller,
Like a jar of void and darkness,
And ornamental stitched lips.

Its stares at me,
Standing in solace,
Like an ancient thought
Or a drunk mast.

Standing aloof from its roots,
On the suffocating tiles.
Standing still like time,
With unhealed wounds of separation
And a dozen bleeding branches,
Waiting for another Sunday and some new wounds.

When I sit under its borrowed shade,
smoking, pondering, talking continuously,
It drops a seed or two on the floor.
I look at the split open seeds and
feel amused at the cruelty of hope.

It hurts me to see him,
Standing there like an old poet
Or a child who walked too far from home.
Looking at the wicked faces,
Plotting and laughing under its leaves,
He screams ‘Is nothing sacred?’

I don’t have the heart to tell him,
That nothing is.
Except the cancerous cement.
That will devour it one cell at a time.
And one day devour all its thoughts and hope.
Should I ask him to run?
Or just play dead like I am?