Irrevocably

The day is clean like sunshine.

I woke up with a few bad dreams;

I refuse to call them nightmares.

 

The kid had bad dreams too.

Of being stuck in an elevator for 24 hours,

of forgetting a window isn’t screened and jumping into it,

of fire starting on our third floor.

 

The anxiety of my oncoming travel,

filtered in me in the form of

a maid servant in an old house – Sweet Home, where I lived a decade ago…

she goes mad and uses a pen to stab everyone in the chin.

 

Then as I send her free with a bag, money, and some distracted advice….

 

As she trundles down the stairs, people collect in the distance.

In an instant I realize an old man has jumped off a building

to his death.

But there is no blood around him. He is asleep on a park bench.

 

It’s morning and the hara-kiri of dreams is over.

Sunlight kills germs.

I can feel my petals gathering up, closing in snugger.

I am becoming a bud.

 

This is how we leave…

 

This is death.

 

Not of body

but a new beginning.

 

I have inklings only now.

You can say I did not permit them earlier.

I wanted to be distracted by everything existential.

This is so I don’t savor a laddoo still being moulded.

Now I allow myself to eat sweet meat –

a pinch in a circle.

 

I allow those thoughts tapping at me

of my life changing irrevocably.

I can sense and feel it. I know it.

It’s here…

and nothing can stop it.