PEOPLE FROM ACROSS THE RAMPART
These are the beautiful people I met one evening in the walled city.
I glide among them like an apparition.
Was Neruda immortalising them?
People are so good
Or were they the other
The common the ordinary
Like the neglected speck of sand?
I might have belonged there
And in Miss Austen’s world of love and liberty
You can’t eat your cake
I see women in shoulder cut attires
Leaving their fragrances as they sweep past
The men, slightly overweight, following like proud owners
They cook in modular kitchens
and eat their cakes too
even after their nine to five loop
These are the beautiful people I met one evening
after a long sabbatical in my dark room,
Strolling in the malls, parenting in the
smart city parks with rampart walls
And I realised I don’t belong to this beauty so rampant.
AGING GODDESS
She once saw men playing Gods
Disposing and disposing
Tearing off entrails
It was a never-ending summer.
She awaited spring which never arrived.
And the winters hid soothing secrets beneath the floral quilts.
She lies in scarred maples now,
The ageing Gods at her helm.,
Blood turning to powder on the lips.
The chill of winters in her hair hurt now.
Yet she turns her head like a proud Goddess
Disposing and disposing
POETIC NARCISSISM
The baleful ambitions threatened to beleaguer my intents.
I ruminate on the ruins of narcissism of sublimity.
The crepuscular times in purlieu of my hours
Wane to obfuscate the obscurity of the mediocre
With facetious ease of this life fragmented
as a triptych puzzle
Gravid with abrasive frieze coated truths.
The mirrors of stray verses imbue with
beautific mist of narcissistic lavation.
This quill quiver now with
phlegmatic disillusionment.
Here lies this odious inevitability!
There the scion of sublime glories of the bygone!
The inevitability of the mediocre lives,
A cabal to thrash the throes of creativity
to nefarious self-glorification!
ON PAIN
I was born with the pain that settled near the belly.
Next to the one end of the umbilical cord.
It gave me company in the crib
when the darkness and silence descended.
And at every other place.
The pain of loneliness and being alone.
Of not belonging here.
Neither there.
The pain that I no longer feel.
It dances in the veins.
It doesn’t trickle now.
Like fear down the spine.
It erupts on the lips all of a sudden.
And blooms like a bud in the dark.
It unravels the sunshine within.
Malkeet Kaur hails from Mumbai, India. She works as a teacher and enjoys indulging in penning down verses occasionally. Many of her poems have been published in online journals and anthologies- Episteme, Yellow Chair Review, Dead Snakes, Acerbic Anthology against gender violence, to name a few.
