Jannatul Ferdous Tulona
My mind is an untouched canvas this morning,
or less artistically speaking,
as blank as the empty document staring at me since the last hour.
Mr Gecko on the wall also stares, with droopy eyes,
a little sorry I feel for keeping the LEDs on all night,
assuming he was like me, a regular insomniac.
For inspiration, I look out the window.
Everything’s as still as the moment before the bombs had landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We are in a somewhat similar turmoil,
except, the nuclear war here is deafeningly silent.
Step out, you’re dead,
stay in, and everyday we’re spared an iterative life after death.
I stretch around a bit trying to focus,
it will come for sure, I imagine the words
like the army of ants trailing out of my stale coffee cup.
Cooking? Cleaning? Decluttering?
For a change, what should I try next?
Can’t I just click Refresh?
I wondered looking around the undone laundry on my chair
and the unwashed lingerie littering the floor.
The numb pain in my head goes on like a siren.
I couldn’t bring myself to care more about a chore
than my ex did for me.
In a deeply desperate attempt,
I try to use heartbreak as a fantasy.
Hoping, praying, waiting, it’d at least bleed some fancy poetry
in this crisis of a starved mind.
Like him, however, his grief too, disappoints.
Or it is perhaps, because I haven’t seen
anger, happiness, melancholy, or any other colour in a while
except the occasional bitterness, I am now practically blind.
I check the clock,
five minutes have barely passed, and I’m exhausted,
time for a break, I decide;
yes, it is absolutely necessary to take breaks
even though all you do really is procrastinate.
The Internet, where I go for a break, is a freak show
of awareness of righteousness of positivity, of negativity,
a free exhibit of a myriad of creativity,
and also,
a free version of parody
for anything that trends, and/or resembles idiocracy.
Oh, and a good deal of protests too, for the mockery, in turn
cause, effect, re-run
the cycle goes on…
The Internet is a freak show, I tell you;
disfigured, yellow, black, and other funny coloured
home-made food staring back like alien eyes.
There is something hypnotic about their beauty.
I want to scream “Enough!”
yet somehow, I’m always left tongue-tied.
You’re entitled to voice your opinions though,
in block,
“STAY HOME” hashtags circle DPs in red.
Some streets from reality are parallel universes,
where crowds explode like acne on a troubled teenager’s face,
on the face of a troubled society with maimed morals.
The Internet is a Wonderland for those
who are already lost,
and look how long I’ve been immersed
in the maze of the Internet’s scattered thoughts,
ideas pouring out of my head like ink from a broken pot
into an eternity of blank space.
Jannatul Ferdous is a procrastinator by day, and a poet by night.