Hide and Seek - part 5 - Rhyming & Non Rhyming Poems by Nikhil Parekh - HTML preview

41. AFTER CONSUMING A BARREL OF WINE

He babbled incoherently at innocuous pedestrians traversing through the streets,

Clenched his fist high in the air; barking a malicious volley of rustic expletives,

Spat loads of colored saliva on the ground; blending superbly with the loosely sprawled mud,

Danced languidly listening to the slightest of music; eventually collapsing in a bedraggled heap on the ground,

Swayed frivolously at fair skin; only to be slapped with fervor on his bearded cheek,

Occasionally stumbled badly on sharp pieces of stone; hurtling at fast speeds to get a taste of disdainful soil,

Scratched his hair in wild rhapsody; with a ravishing hunger in his blood shot eyes,

Took deep breaths every once a while; as if getting strangulated by bouts of suffocation,

Wailed passionately; vociferously proclaiming his unrelenting misery and tyrannical pain,

Was thoroughly oblivious to his boisterous surrounding; lost in realms of sedative fantasy,

Had lost all appetite for cooked food; relinquished to chew and eat,

Looked waywardly towards the sky; trying to decipher his blurred destiny,

Rebuked his children severely at home; at their most innocuous of provocation,

Kicked acerbically intricate furniture in vicinity; dismantling the sanctity of

household to threadbare junk,

Illegibly scribbled few lines of script; making a ridiculous mockery of calligraphy,

Slapped his wife with tenacity on her ear; for disobeying his dictatorial rules,

Audaciously revealed startling facts about his life; which he had embedded

deep within his heart,

Was saved by the scruff of his neck on umpteenth an occasion; from high powered cars; and monstrous traffic,

He had completely lost the dignity to speak; the ability to stand firm on his knees; distinguish the light illuminating air from darkness,

In the end; he collapsed in a disheveled heap on the ground; awaiting the first rays of brilliant dawn to terminate his sleep; wash all traces of the barrel of red wine; he had obsessively consumed the previous night