Tuesday 11 February 2014

the attic

Illustration: Bharati Varrier
                                                    


A cluttered storehouse is my attic,
an overflowing archive of rankling thoughts
crammed into dark spaces of isolation.
Accumulations of stubborn grit -
damp, stale, acrid residue from outdated grief -
survive in greasy reticence
the cycles of time and reason.
Rags of unwanted memories,
chunks of broken vases of dreams,
lie abandoned
with old records of truth and fallacies.
Fear, like a creepy multi-legged,
is entrapped in a fuzzy cobweb
of flashbacks and extrapolations.
Will the tarantula crawl out
and traverse the hidden crevices
of the crowded attic of my brain?
I’ll let the darkness, the silence,
and the stillness be,
lest I send the mites –
the qualms –
running all over my raw nerves
in fits of frenzy.
I wish I could vacuum my attic clean.

[Featured as Weekly Poem by Oz Poetic Society for the week February 2-9, 2014]