city life

It comes back to me,
very often these days,
the blurred vision,
from the vacants from where
the moths surface every night
with such unsurpassed promptness
and to where the ants
carry and stock their everyday’s meal
bit by bit. so religiously. everyday
They play hide and seek with rains there.

from those forlorn corners of
city roads, where once burgeoned
the superfluous foliage- green and wild,
where stray cattle used to graze,
and now stands like a victorious warrior,
on a cemented paseo, a pole
with a white metal plate welded to it
indicating in black the
speed limits for vehicles, ever followed
or even noticed?

the night doesn’t seem
a night anymore, when stabbing fuzzily
through the thick layers of smoke
of the evening’s traffic still hanging
over the city, draping it in its cloudy wrap,
the neon lights of multiplexes
stare back at you
precisely at the moments
when all you could ever solicit is
complete darkness to hide in.
or an urge to sleep under the
billions of stars above you,
with their light unadulterated .

this part of city is sad
as sad as anything ever can be.
Packed in its odious plastic bag
life suffocates here, and commits a
gradual suicide every second. and still
lives on, and sustains like the
fading scent of an allegedly strong perfume
of someone’s jacket, which still lingers
in air refusing to admit its awful collapse.
While in some other part of
the globe, amongst the mountains
and rivers and vales, where
life dwells in its quotidian affairs
stretched (squeezed) between the sunrise
and sunset, amongst those woods and
rocks, and among those blossoms of
pastel blue, the parts of me
still yearns to live
a life, deceased years back.