by Ullas Marar
This city has little space to dump its waste
The landfills are full and the junk is piling up.
The residue of our dreary existence
Is clogging up our lives.
Our whiskey glasses are stained
From all the heartbreak we pour in.
Different people, different stories, the same stains.
Our faces covered in our hoods
Or greased over with cosmetics
We all carry bruises we don’t show.
We have satin sheets that bear no creases
So no one can tell
A dreamless sleep from sleepless dreams.
Our songs are sad
With words we wish we could speak
Our regrets, our thoughts, borrowed words.
The pillows are soggy
With the tears we have shed
We change the covers so we can weep again.
The landfills within us pile up
With debris of our broken lives
We console ourselves the trucks will arrive
And cry ourselves to sleep again.
Ullas Marar is a marketing communications specialist by profession. In other words, yet another corporate sellout. While that helps pay the bills, writing in the dead of the night helps him stay sane. He writes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. As a writer, he’s like a kid in a candy shop. Everything around him is a potential story. The only challenge is to build the discipline needed to bring those stories to life and he continues to work on getting better at it.
A heartfelt poem about the real human issue of ‘debris’, both physical and psychological, and maybe even moral.
Cheers to the poet for being emotional without being sentimental, and clear-eyed without being cynical.
Ullas’s writing reminds this reviewer of the moral indignation of George Orwell, a writer with whom he appears to share several commonalities.