How the so called poet stopped writing the so called poems!

The urge,
The obscene urge
To extract a ‘poem’
From anywhere
And everywhere
Had started to become nauseous.

It’d been coming for a while,
The urge, like a nouveau riche’s
Desperation to show off his wealth,
And the subsequent wrath towards the self.

The ‘poet’ first noticed it standing
Outside a chicken stall.
One among the chickens
Had been pulled out of the cage
And butchered.
A piece of the innards was thrown
To the cage, and the rest fluttered
And fluttered, eager to get their share.
The ‘poet’ assumed a ‘holy cow’ face
And pity the chickens’ unpardonable
Response to the tragic death of their comrade.

Then, one fine day the ‘poet’ got to know about
‘Thalaikoothal*’, blood oozed out of his heart for a while, suddenly
The ‘poet’ gleefully thought of cashing on the practice
Of killing mothers, fathers…, and settled down comfortably
In the evening at the favourite corner of his favourite watering hole nicely
Covered in a woolen sweater and cap in order to resist the November chill.
After a while the monk, the very old monk, told him what an asshole he had become.
Out of shame the ‘poet’ downed and downed the ‘monk’ till he couldn’t gulp anymore.
He paid the bill, caught an auto and proceeded home muttering to himself.

Constant knock on the door woke the ‘poet’ from his rum induced stupor the next day.
A woman and her teenaged daughter, all dressed up, were there at the door.
The woman explained why they were there at the ‘poets’ door; marriage of the daughter.
Despite her conditions, the daughter maintained an expression of dignity and humility.
The sleepy ‘poet’ shoved in the mother’s hand a 20 rupee note, closed the door and returned to bed. But sleep was adamant and unyielding. The rest of the day the ‘poet’ tried to figure out poverty rather than poetry and its thousands of manifestations, but didn’t reach anywhere.

Though, not quite sure when, it might be during one of those moments, the ‘poet’ realized that he no longer gets that high he used to get thinking about writing ‘poems’ and decided to put an end to it, forever.

*http://www.tehelka.com/story_main47.asp?filename=Ne201110Maariyamma.asp