Oprah-Flavored Ice-Cream

Who are these people, that come and haunt you
The happy father, the phallic tongue of
Your mother
My Mother
All our children.

Happiness is an Osho temple
Sorry, a boutique island
A real estate agent
A Travel and Living catch phrase
About travel and indulgence
Or royalty
Or a perfect smoked salmon fish
Challenge.

Sadness is nothing more than a bad fit
A bad choice with your hat
Watching the Oscars
Longing for some of the fame.
A bad trip and a job gone awry
Sadness is a mild dream of yester years.

Humble spirits raise you to hear
The true color of life
Between the trawled sea and gashed ozone layer
So much metaphysical speculation
About the stars that lit up our
Domestic chores
Market and bazaar fare
A normal day of unfaithfulness.

Day care centre breeding your kids,
The pet dog accompanying you to the Austria trip
Maids with fallible human strength refuse
Another day of maddening labour
Super-mom sweeps the sky
Replacing the witches of Salem
I stand alone beneath the stars
Inspecting my washed clothes
Cleared dishes
And evaporating enchantment with
A supposedly greater order
Called life.

Cable guy is always the Jim Carrey show
Oprah reminds you of orphans and idiots
Living under the same roofs
Katrina sweeps the Earth,
An ineffectual West Wind.
So much for a good bungle
And the riot victims get their
Fifteen minutes of fame.
Allah, Almighty, Amen.
All is the same and again.

On the bank of Allegory

It was unnecessary.
To have failed once more

I know how to kill a curiosity
And a cat.

My allowance is a maidenhood
Of soliloquy
And arbitrary endings
That nurses poems
Of high school feelings
And hopes
Of nursery softness.


Later today
I am supposed to find
An allegory
To my answer,
Do I or don’t I deserve
Hopelessness
Of the right shade
Grey or a blinding dazzle -
Incompletion.
Debacle.
Abortive correspondence
With prominence.
Fatigued fulsomeness,
Gaunt dreams,
Weary with chase and rotting,
With mass verisimilitude.
Custom made fantasy frolics
Fallible scholarship of a three hour
Canvass.
Bridge courses meandering between
Degree calibre
And unacknowledged help
Of non-improvisations.


On the bank of allegory
And by the edge of pungent satire
I stand precariously
With failure at one hand
And the recognition
Of a handicap in me.