Skittles with planets
An amethyst, he said
slamming down
the prayer beads.
talking above
the nauseous fumes
of camphor and incense
he drew skewed circles
intersecting subsets –
seventeen of them
jotting numbers on a paper
that presumably charted
the rebel trajectory
of all the wayward moons
and wastrel stars
that had driven me
to my fate thus far
the amethyst, he repeated
meditative, protective, calming
the countermeasure
to set right
all my woes.
I scraped together
three months worth of pay
got a pendant fashioned
from the choicest quartz
the size of a grape
luscious
with an inscrutable heart
of the darkest purple.
threaded on silver
around my neck
it huddled grudgingly
in the warm crease
of my moist cleavage
proud, patrician
resenting the ignoble droplets
of stale sweat
and city grime
that sat beside it
on my streaked skin.
I stepped out
with my new armor
to play skittles
with the offending planets
and watched the days
tumble as ever
in retrograde.
Graveyard Detour
The sky is aqua
with jellyfish clouds
membranous shadows of cirrus
skimming stone monoliths.
tracing loops through gum trees
magpies land on the lawns
a wizened woman
in a houndstooth scarf
lays chrysanthemums
on a secluded plot.
I’m not here
to visit a grave
I was passing by
when I saw the golden wattle
fluff arms
dusting yellow blooms.
I suddenly recall
a childhood story
about spirits
clawing up through the earth
bursting through the gravel
on moonless nights
seeking to hound
the living.
a ball of fear
huddled
in mother’s lap
through the blackhole
of clenched eyes
amorphous shapes
of bedsheet ghosts
with cartoon mouths
menace through the air.
father’s feathery voice
like a plume of incense
cuts through the nightmare
anchoring me
back to reality
baritone laugh saying
that the dead
were harmless
to always fear
the living instead.
Nada
It creeps upon me
this nihilism
in places
where I least expect it –
the froth of my cappuccino
in a bustling coffee shop
between the screaming tones
of a Led Zeppelin riff
in the space between
the last two pomegranates
in the Specials aisle.
in these terrifying moments
wrestled out of my body
respiration rasping
people around me
stand reduced
to eerie smudges
withering
on the treadmills they run on –
breaths and bodies
reeking of marriages
mortgages
maladies.
I later read
that this
is a panic attack.
I once met a great optimist
who said
that he hoped to live
till a hundred and twenty
I rolled my eyes and said
that after forty
life glitched
a broken record
looping the same menu
of events
hurtling towards
an inevitable end
with all that went before it
utterly purposeless
why even the sun
would end up
a burnt out match stick one day.
the optimist never called back.
lying now in the white throat
of an MRI machine
I think of all the time
I squandered
ruminating about codswallop
when my neck and spine
had worked just fine.
it’s a toss up
between spondylosis
and multiple sclerosis.
strangely I feel no panic
or pessimism.
the technician
brings earphones
and asks
what I would like to listen to
Led Zeppelin I say
the MRI machine swallows me
neatly
and noisily
to the strains
of I’m a Fool in the Rain.
Coolness Revisited
One summer morning
fresh into my twenties
I took a razor to my hair
shaving my head
to a glistening dome
a kind of a middle finger
to the world
not that the world
noticed or cared
but I was on
my own retrograde path
to proclaiming
that I would not be singed
by the scathing judgements
of the brigade of line-toers
raining down on me.
yesterday
I found that photo again –
me in my volatile avatar
as sweet child of anarchy
ears pierced
like Christmas ornaments
smiling
with a personality
like a Molotov cocktail
and adjusting my glasses now
fresh into my forties
beamed with pride
as my children squealed
that mother used to be
so utterly badass
my Instagram cool quotient
going up by sixteen –
the teens who saw
that photo on stories.
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is a Sydney based artist, poet and pianist. She holds a Masters in English. Oormila has exhibited her art and accompanying poetry in Kuwait, India, Singapore, and Australia. She is a member of Sydney’s North Shore Poetry Project and Authora Australis. Her recent works have been published in Red Eft Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Poets Resist, Eunoia Review, Rue Scribe, The Maier Museum of Arts Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry, and several other literary journals in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Oormila regularly performs her poetry and exhibits her art at shows in Sydney. Her Instagram is https://www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings/
