JOKES IN THE CORRIDORS

It might bloom in the corridor
idling in loneliness:
a red red rose.

It might cast in a salad mind
at a winding staircase:
a mighty magnetic spell

A hesitant moment, demure eyes
blood surging to cheeks:
your dream is done.

Burning sleepless
smitten by the feverish thirst
days reduced to moments
your eyes searching in vain:
your femme fatale.

And yet-
aisles would go overcrowded
and staircases, to morgues;
where roses fade away,
trampled, nay, traded,
or, worse, strangled.

And now-
As you bask at putrid shores
of time, being through
thunderstorms of amorous days,
thinking of no roses to bloom
why time chose to rattle you
into a dreary stupid joke?

A new apparition of the diva
silhouetted against the ugly door
of a stuffy corridor
a creaking staircase led you in,
a stinking house dealing in
emergency love*.

Heavily made-up face where
cheap rose powder mixes with
nauseating stench of halitosis:
marks the last lover left behind.

Now you could sleep becalmed.


            (Based on two true incidents: one, in which a young friend of mine was bitten by the thunderbolt of infatuation on a winding staircase, never to see her again; and two, what an old syphilitic acquaintance whose life curiously resembled that of Florentino Arizo narrated)
           *(The expression “emergency love” is from Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Times of Cholera, wherein Florentino Arizo is the protagonist.)