Words are flung in arced tongues,
Amid the din of bottles clanging,
Champagne-popping in smoke-ringed revels.
Someone flings a salvo of punned pantoums
As the walls scream with indignant epistemes,
Ceiling crawling with sordid images, teeming metonyms
And contorted referents. ‘Ahoy!’ goes the bray.
And across the room, scarred, anagrammed,
Someone howls Ginsberg like an angel-headed hipster
And another, utopian-dreaming, hurls darts,
Like witty aphorisms on a clean white sheet,
Prophesying, ‘One day, a place for us all.’
By midnight, there is only a hum from the fluorescent tube
That flicks and spurts to the swirl of heady ideas,
And fancies fit for kings, and drag queens,
And princely sums are squandered
For a priceless turn of phrase. Night descends
And the Raven cries its distant tale.
Tomorrow the house will start again,
Erudition-powered.
© Nikhil 2020
*N.B. When Viraji Ogodapola tagged me for a prompt on Rejoicing, or a celebration, I could only think of one thing to celebrate — the only kind of mysticism worthy of complete and utter devotion, Poesy.
So, it made sense to conjure a house full of poets, celebrating the act of creative explosion. Rather than Saturnalia, I saw Bacchanalia!
