Sour Love on a Bleak Day — Day Twenty-Two of NaPoWriMo 2022

There’s a bottle of my mother’s love

Sitting on the kitchen table

It’s gone sour

It’s Sunday morning,

In the piercing comfort of a place

I once would’ve called home,

And the world woke up and walked out on me

The aftermath of July grows right outside my bedroom window

While I sit on a desolate strip of imaginary sand,

With my head in a water cooler

As significant as an ill-fated horsefly

The abject horror of it all

Existing in my corner of the world

With salt-and-grease-stained fingers

My memories mistake me for a little old man

And they come to entertain me in my wicker chair

It is a bleak day, with the weight of a mallet in my hair

And there’s not a stutter in my stare

Spare me the bills of this rich unease

Why does everything have to be so sad?

You see,

I seem to have caught 

The deathly hug of hubris

I know everything,

But what does it all mean?

The pleasures of life go right above my head 

Time drips from my fingertips

Plip, plop, plip

I am a blip

And when I can think of nothing else

I am a dead rat, in a scientist’s fat hand

Being extorted past the boundaries of life

What’s supposed to be happy,

Dancing? Laughing?

Oh I’ll do those, I think

Because,

Why does everything have to be so sad

I’m a minute away from misery

Smiling at a thick, drowsy sky

And all I want is to be so, so happy

Written by Radhika Krishna for MTTN

Featured Image Outside the Beach Cafe by Mark Briscoe