An Encounter With Dracula

From where I sit in a white monobloc chair,

Her face is pretty, sympathetic, calming as

Her white apparel. Between us are two people.

One moves closer to her. Suddenly, I see her

Eyes glint with mischief. She grows fangs; I

Sweat. Profusely. Dracula drops her disguise!

She draws fresh blood out of her victim. And the

Next. They do not die; but I will. And she is coming

For me. No escape. My feet get cold; my knees

Weak. This feeling of drowning after the boat

Capsizes…I am about to lose consciousness

In the belly of the ocean. Then Dracula calls

My name. She gets a rubber rope, tightens it

Around my left arm. Next she sticks out a long,

Pointed object. Like a snake’s fork-tongue,

My dizzied eyes tell me. Very long, very thick.

Longer than my courage, than the hours I spent

Bracing for confrontation with evil incarnate.

Deeper than my faith, the bottom end of the

Ocean will siphon my breath. The blood sucker!

With my heart in my throat, my sweat on my

Upper lip…My breath ready to escape me,

I plead for my sanity, for my life. Too late. Too

Late. The fork-tongue poked deep into my

Vein, I feel the prick. Then peace follows

As blood oozes out of me. I am in a boat peacefully

Sailing to sea, dancing to the music of the waves

Beneath, blending with the hum of the breeze

Above. I must be dead now. This is Nirvana.

Just as I slumber away, Dracula pulls out her

Fork-tongue. I feel like I stepped out of the boat

Ride- disappointed that it is over, emboldened

By the near-death experience. She wets a cotton

Ball with alcohol and presses it on the skin where

She buries the long, thick snake-tongue that is now

A short, thin syringe before my eyes removed

From fear. With the voice of a mother putting

An infant to sleep, she says, Come back on Tuesday

For the result of your blood chemistry, Ma'am.

cld/2006

0 Comments

Act

Green Dot

Reading mails, I face the computer screen
Again, the gray dot beside your name turns

Green as mine is. Available, our dots say
How can that be when you and I are both

Shackled to commitments in isolated worlds?
A high fence between: hindrance to treason

I could click the mouse and knock on your virtual
Door. You will surely open; we will chat endless

But it does not release either you or me; We
Are like prisoners talking through iron bars

Sharing fantasies that elude us in the real world
So proximate and yet so remote from each other

In pain, I watch as a gray dot evicts the green
Temptation departing with graceful, quiet footfalls./chyt2007

Watching Daddy Struggle to Read

(My parents and older siblings taught me to love books. But Dad was the one who told me that reading could be humbling. It expands your knowledge, but it reveals your smallness. The more you read, the more you realize how little you know.

In the years before he left us, it was so sad to see him holding his grandchildren's books, turning their pages, and unable to read the letters. I wrote a poem after watching one such incident in 2011 or 2012.

Watching Daddy Struggle to Read

You hold a book open on pages 44 to 45

But it is just a weight on your jittery hands

Your decades of alliance with the written word

Have been broken, or worse totally obliterated

Your unsure smile reveals the hidden helplessness

You used to have such a sharp mind:

Your high school classmates would say

A genius with numbers

An English grammar police

Despite the strong accent

Reminiscent of that rustic place

You were born in

Where forthrightness and truth

Are more important than oration

With a foreign accent

I remember everything:

“You say, ‘independent of,’ not ‘from’

‘Result in,’ not ‘to’

‘Comply with’, not ‘to.’” I was nine or ten

But never too young to learn

For someone who believed

So much that familiarity with correctness

Could lead his child to bigger things

Perhaps, a voice for the unheard

A defender of the oppressed

Now, at 75, like a baby taking her first steps

You struggle hard-

I can only imagine how much-

To make sense of the letters

Your hand used to write so beautifully

The words you wrote were always

Shaped like an artist’s masterpiece

Now they are jagged on the edges

Like your memories- fuzzy on the corners

I wonder, Daddy, do you have nostalgia

Of the days when it was not like this?

How I wish the vacuum in your memory

Did not swallow remembered love for us

And our obedience, however failing, to your edict:

"Always be something for others

All the good books teach that."