Solace
A poem
With cognition as its mahout,
the mind, in its bone howdah,
wishes the body would call it
honourable sahib, but the body
has another name in mind not
befitting mixed company and
waits till its flyweight rider
has fallen asleep to pictures
of itself in emperor’s clothes
before body, in its own form
of dreaming, imagines racing
naked under a crescent moon
with another kindred spirit,
freed from similar bondage,
who completes it, delights it,
doubles its sense of itself as
sumptuous in its pachyderm
heaviness under streetlamps,
till it can almost forget how
kicked into line it is by day.