Skip to main content

WHAT IS BEHIND THAT SMILE???



Her plastic smile spreads across her face at nightfall
the puckered brow, the kohl lined eyes, the cheap lipstick
Waits beside the kerb--to be sold for one more night,
to be picked up and tossed into bed.


Her plastic smile covers a night full of tears.
greedy eyes , greedy senses, greedy hands reach for her,
twists her, turns her, plays with her
---- as a night full of tears and unrealized dreams
trickles away--- with the plastic smile on her plastic face.

What is it that shines in her red neon bed?
“Are those halos in her hair?
without a prayer and without hope”
the glistening tears dry with fake ecstasy
-- the mask of lewdness, trembles and hopes each moment
for a day void of fabricated love and that fake plastic smile.

The neon gives way to the light of day;
she leaves her bed and walks away
The gratifying moments when she washes and rubs herself
to get rid of the shame that sticks to her like a cheap perfume.
The smile breaks into tears washing away with it,
a veil of paints and colours.
The pristine rays of sun
sparkle in her watery pure eyes--
with questions that do not go beyond
the walls of her chastisised city.
The parched skin, without paint
without kohl, without whatever she is not,
Walks towards the rising sun--
hoping that red would not just be
the colour of her painted lips .

But the flush of hue that will someday touch her unpainted cheeks.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

De ja vu'

Those days, hot and sultry as young love, ended with tea and smoke. I never smoked, though...or did I not? Smoke like love is inductive. When all around you, people smoke and drink and love... A yearning grows in you. Which satiates itself in passive inhalation. Much like falling in love with characters from folds of a dusty classic. Forgotten and imaginary, just like me. In the commotion of a roadside stall, filled with smoke layered conversations that oozed out of us, like the departing sunlight filtered through a mess of cracked wall and cobwebs, I had seen you. I had seen you through a gap within the smoke. The snakes and dragons of smoke curled around you and you looked somewhere far. It is as if nothing touched you. That mad unsettled look in your eyes had settled in some other world. You felt the weight of my gaze. I had always wondered how gaze feels like a touch. Like a deep slumber that has touched your eyes and you cannot see. And you looked at me...
Post a Comment
Read more

Two boats in a blue stormy river

Hey can we just put ourselves aside.. and think like two runaway boats  capsized in churning waters  of a blue stormy river? Can we remember how we felt drowning and saving ourselves instead of each other in the stormy churning waters? Imagine the rocks that we hit and the holes that were made.. the scars that would remain of that night in the blue storm? We would return home some unknown shore Laying side by side battered and lopsided. Masters and people would think  we were runaway boats, While we would know how shamelessly we shamed ourselves  in the blue churning river.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Dirtier skin

"no ship will ever take you away from yourself"---Constantine Cavafy That was long ago. Very long ago. It was that particular time of year when the shadows dance around your face as the moonlight seeps through broken clouds. We lay close, your hands trying to sketch the reality into my ears----the existence of a career and success, of a circle of friends and family, of fame and of you.  Your soothing words were covering my eyes like a lullaby, I was slipping but slumber wasn’t heavy on my eyes. I heard your voice. I saw the clouds. There was something I was waiting for. I didn’t know. Maybe a kiss. You kissed me tight. I was still waiting. I looked at the sky. The place where the moon supposedly hid herself was dimly bright beneath the clouds. I heard you say something… "your skins dirty from all that walking. Go have a bath and see you at work tomorrow”. You left.  I lay there numb , playing with my hair …minutes lapsed …I don’t know when but I slipped into a...
Post a Comment
Read more