LII

Dear elixir

december is not the cruelest month
a feeling, falling, freely falling september,
has dealt a joker, a poker-faced scream
-ing sighs unsound in uncovered mouths

shifting, slowly, approaching the genius
of brown, tawny brown, bottled dancing song
consuming, softly, destroying the dreyfusard*
drop of life streaming, in kaboobs on tongs

becoming as Johnny, unable to resist
a few rocks, a little watering down
to be consumed as a naked song
in the heart of a sleeper of the deep dawn

(*dreyfusard refers to the kind of specific race based partiality destroying someone's life. The word originates from Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish descent whose false imprisonment for treason in 1894 raised issues of anti-semitism that dominated French politics until his release in 1906.)

Manav Sachdeva Maasoom, 27, is presently wandering in Afghanistan while working there to transfer the ownership of Afghanistan's development back to the Afghan Government. Maasoom studied Poetry and Policy Studies, an independently created field, as a Master's student at SIPA, Columbia University. Maasoom reads and writes poetry in English, Urdu, Punjabi, and some in Persian.