Better Than Starbucks!

I Had a Meeting with Generals of Absurd

 

A 14 feet deep ennui. May be 15 or 16.

I don't know. Despair enclosed in a

gothic cathedral, steaming inside an  urban ventilator.

 

How I wish to open your skull

 like a fortune cookie; to steal the ores

 of horror, encrypted inside like the words of Roman gods.

 

Time silently moans in quantums of minimal deaths.

The conclave swells in concaves

 of heart-attacks in some parallel, perpendicular

 or slanted universe.

 

A void pulsates in a void of a void in a void.

 

Let it sinks like bass canon, the sounds

 of lack projected

on lo-fi grains of a half-awake illumined absurd. 

 

Sudeep Adhikari is a structural engineer/Lecturer  from Kathmandu, Nepal.   His recent publications were with   Red Fez , Kyoto  , Your One Phone Call, Jawline Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Yellow Mama, Fauna Quarterly, Beatnik Cowboys, After The Pause, Poetry Pacific, Silver Birch Press and  Vox Poetica.  

 

​

IT’S THE COMPANY YOU KEEP  

 

We wait together,  

magazine on my lap,  

wonder how anyone 

could read in this situation. 

You’re the only woman there 

who isn’t with her mother. 

 

You say, it’s what 

happens if you love too much, 

whatever that means 

You hate men, 

you tell me, 

and not even for the way 

they will not stand by you. 

 

You hate men because they write 

these pamphlets in the waiting room, 

because you have to use 

the bathroom down the hail 

as there’s one of them in white overalls, 

working on the sink in this one. 

 

You hate men because 

the female doctor is sick 

and it’s a male who’ll be seeing you. 

In deference to my company though, 

you mumble “Thanks for being a friend. 

Ah friend . . . the third sex. 

​

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Stillwater Review and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Columbia Review and Spoon River Poetry Review.