Anindya Arif
You are too average
To throw around words
Like depression or molestation.
So you keep staring
At your lousy green bedroom walls
For them to keep reminding you
Why everything that was ever done to you
Is justifiable in one way or other.
Seven windows from yours
Resides a man who spends his days,
Watching transparent glasses
Being filled with orange soda.
He slowly adds three salted ice cubes
Which slowly fizz out with a distinctive odour.
In the distance
Two millennials argue
Why the soda feels purple
And why the odour makes them nervous.
Soon the ice melts into orange fragments,
As the millennials keep arguing.
The walls have now consumed what was left of you,
While the millennials keep arguing
Over the purplish nature of the soda.
You slowly give in
To their pessimistic arguments,
On why purple represents
Slow death and self-inflicted abuse.
In an alternative re-telling of a similar story,
The millennials felt too exhausted to argue
And the man drank from a technicolored glass.
In this re-telling
He cried in seven different pitches
Which made the millennials alcoholics.
Years later someone down the same street
Recalls your story
Of a drunken man
With two derailed millennials
Arguing over a suicidal corpse.
I have now stopped paying attention to it
The narrator makes me feel vulnerable
And the purplish odour makes me want to throw up.
Now and then I try to listen
With an increasing vulnerability.
I will give up soon
But for now
As the narrator narrates your death scene.
I reposition myself to scream.