Victorian, the archaic caste consciousness or lint flying from carpeted floors
Of Persian rugs: only the finest.
With 7 pm ethnocentric gatherings where fragile foam cups and frothy cream
serve as bitter reminders of chai filling my throat,
my lungs, until I can no longer hear over
the bubbling inside my insides.
Kipling would have scoffed at my homage–
a diorama of Rajasthani sun adorning each sari in diaphanous ruffles,
belying the heavy brocade of monochromatism
that long ago forsook the quarrel I still seek.
Why, they are positively regal in their silken threads, glistening, a regular
glass menagerie of polished mouths moving, captive in stages of butterfly formation while
psychological warfare is waged in every costly
Persian rug.
Vermillion design seeps into unused
mahogany mantelpieces of the mind, and to
turn nostalgic by reassessing, reconsidering
is numbing like
parting the Red Sea but knowing of white phosphorous;
more valiant attempts at spiritualism.
