Raising the Bar by S. Jagathsimhan Nair

Two Women Sitting at a Bar, by Pablo Picasso, 1902.

Raising the Bar

Come along, mate,
Let us cross this concourse of coincidences and pray before this
ever-evaporating deity of oblivion.
And offer the termite hills of our doubts
at the altar of this counter-god.

Placed before his liquid justice
is our shared compendium of one mind
two heads and four arms in the form
of some kind of a binary or joke.

Are we algebraically trying to tie up
the imponderables like
mind, head and means,or just
offering up our movables like
money and matrimony and
immovables like kids and tits.

But the new mind is a dumb platform
like meadows are just mud
And the means as always converges
to come-what-may.

Any which way, let us not go slow
into contrition
into oblivion.

S. Jagathsimhan Nair

This poem was written for the 20 Poem Challenge.

S. Jagathsimhan Nair is the author of three poetry collections, and has also been published in various anthologies.