Janice, a poem by Abhinav Aradhi

 

Janice

Mother, darling, broad,

She’s got a lot of names,

Because she is a chameleon on the kitchen wall,

Hidden between domestic tiles.

 

When the clock strikes the moon,

She slips out of the kitchen in a billowy dress,

Like a marauder in the night,

A true femme fatale.

 

She rips past a trembling car,

Slips by the houses with their judgmental eyes,

As though the panes of their windows were the

Irises of god, blooming into espionage.

 

She comes up to a backlit alley,

Where degenerates come to curl up and die,

And she bangs fiercely on the cruel iron,

Then wafts inside like an insidious breeze.

 

She hurries backstage,

And peers beyond the curtain,
Searching for any familiar face.

In this hellhole, everyone is a chameleon on the wall.

 

They’re all scaly and wrinkled,

Like the worn, weather skin of a chameleon

Who’s tried too hard to hide all its life,

And now has to live in constant shame.

 

This place, it’s a fluorescent hell,

Laced with ecstasy,

The kind that you get in little pills,

Or the kind that makes you cloyingly euphoric.

 

She’s a moonlighter,

Both the cheerful side of the moon,

And the side as bleak as terminal illness,

But which is which?

 

Little miss in the kitchen,

Taking out all her frustrations,

On the dinner plates for the night?

Is this the dark side of the moon?

 

Exotic baby in the club,

Sipping tequila with her boys,

In glasses reserved for VIPs?

What if every side’s the dark side?