A girl full of headache comes home
To a room made of cream walls
She puts her earphones on the table
On the wall behind the table is
a rainbow-coloured cycle sticker
The girl puts her blue pens in the racks of the table
She puts down her imbalance with a sigh on the table
Rolls up her anger from speaking to her mother unkindly
She puts it in a pouch inside the drawer
And caps all the red pens writing mystery
The table records a jangle of keys
There is her softness, her large handwriting
Her laptop in red, a worry, three
more worries, a2 + b2 = (a+b)2
-2ab,
a maths teacher’s memory, a hairclip,
some sound of life and her friends in her mind.
She puts everything on the table
And it still looks like a pebble.
She now takes off her spectacles
And puts its dust on the table
She puts her cough on the table
Puts paracetamol on the table
She reaches out and touches the pile
So many days she had wanted to rest on a cloud
And now the thunder of that sky is also on the table
She positions there her sight of letters
She places there her waking hours,
Her typing, her running shoes, her continuous tenses.
All this while the table is doing well
It is greeting several such paragraphs
On top of one another
Firm, fixed, nothing moves
Only the cycle on the wall hides.