Compost For The Cultured

I was once promised a stage

large enough to hold thousands,

and then denied it

because a geriatric piece of shit,

living on borrowed breaths

and overdue time,

who had lost a spouse

not to death

but to decay,

because they weren't merely old

but ancient,

decided obedience

was the price of admission;

submission,

the unwritten syllabus.

And no one had the tongue

or the teeth

to tell them:

poetry isn't the bastard child

of the colonial blood

they've spent a lifetime

mistaking for sophistication.

If buttering vanity

were the road to literature,

ghee podi masala dosa

would be the greatest poet alive.

They could say, 

this isn't a poem, 

but a rancid insult at best.

And I agree.

It is. 

But then, 

who gives a fuck, 

unless they have a comeback?

I could burn them with words

and call the ashes poetry,

but poetry would strangle herself

before letting them inside her —

dead or alive.

Life forgot them decades ago, 

and literature never bothered to remember. 

I have heard the doctors have diagnosed them with severe constipation

and I find myself wondering how;

considering all that butter, one would think their exit would be well-oiled!

You see I could go do this all day;

in fact I could have stopped three stanzas ago, 

and that would have been enough to bury them six feet under, 

right in the heart of irrelevance, 

and yet I kept going, 

because, boy oh boy, this is fun! 

But then again, 

I have more pieces of shit to flush, 

and they don't have many breaths for debt.

And as I stand here, 

watching them vanish into decomposition,

I leave this elegy:

the only poetry they will ever be inside of,

dead or alive.