They will come, dear friend,
they will come smiling
like sweet poison
and praise you for your courage, your energy,
vitality, zeal, industry,
they will convert these nouns to adjectives
and attach your name to each of them.
They will give you books full of lies
that, in a matter of time, will multiply
like maggots and devour your brain,
and your conscience will become
like a netted dry leaf.
And you will have no remorse left in you;
your canine teeth will grow
and project themselves out
pushing sideways the supple skin.
They will come with bags, as swollen
as their tummies, full of absurdities;
they will seed in you ideas, nay, ideologies
cloaked in delicious speeches hiding vengeance,
like colourful capsules covering bitter drugs.
And when you are ready for them,
fully inebriated with strange philosophies,
with burning eyes and trembling lips,
macabre images dancing in your mind,
they will give you the steel, my friend,
to kill those who don’t believe
in their weird notions and eerie strategies.
Then, go and kill, dear,
kill all those who think their minds are their own;
kill their brains, sedate their nerves,
let them be strewn all around you
like fallen bougainvillea flowers on a footpath.
And then, wait for the news
of the next year’s civilian honours.
***
Madras Courier originally ran as a broadsheet with a poetry section. It was a time when readers felt comfortable sharing glimpses of their lives through verse. If you have a poem you’d like to submit, do email us at [email protected].
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to [email protected]
