Ecstatic, a poem by Abhinav Aradhi Warning: violence in poem may be triggering.

 

Ecstatic

Janice, you’re an awful woman.

How could you let this desolate place

Be stained by your presence?

Get back to the kitchen wall, darling.

 

Leave the building,

Higher than euphoria,

Stripped bare of all your senses.

A ripe flower ready for the picking.

 

Who’s this man in the parking lot, then?

Janice, look out, he’s got a knife,

And it’s been in some girl’s throat.

You could catch something.

 

Does he recognize you, Janice?

Does he realize he’s knocked the light out of

The bitch back home?

Better tell him soon.

 

Her hair’s strewn about the upholstery,

And she’s giggling like a starstruck teen girl.

He’s pulling his usual spiel,

Because love makes you blind.

 

She’s dancing in the seat,

And he thinks she’s struggling,

And the houses have their eyes closed again.

Two twisted figures intertwined in an erratic car.

 

She’s on a plane of thought

That transcends sobriety,

And entails the opening of the mind like a lotus,

Colored like a psychedelic dunked in glitter.

 

Janice, honey,

You’re going to have to tell him.

Her heels are caterwauling as they clink

Against the back of the seats.

 

His knife races along her throat,

Like a thrillseeker at the edge,

Or an addict on the cusp of recovery.

Suddenly, she can’t speak.

 

She spasms a final dance,

And she tries to tell him,

But there’s a knife in her throat.

Her hair’s bloodied and strewn about on the upholstery.

 

Oh Janice,

You wanted an escape, right?

This is what happens to chameleons

Who doesn't stay stuck up on the kitchen wall.

 

There’s a rapture in the road as the sound of sirens approaches.