The Perfect Anti-climax

It’s rush-hour, every hour, in her head:

 Always lost in the past, or worried for the future.

The gift of the Present becoming rapidly estranged.

Veira believes her life was full of one-ways:

All detours and backroads led to quarrelsome chaos..

Her head was stuck in first gear, afraid of stalling,

With monotonous tracks on repeat played as background noise.

Veira’s heart was the occasional drably-dressed hitchhiker:

She was never sure when to open her door to it,

Since she was many a time disillusioned by its disloyalty.

For Veira, words were many and sense was sparse.

Like a twisted treeline of incomplete motorways,

All leading to one destination: hodgepodge porridge.

She never found herself, except out of gas in the fast lane,

And she never quite understood why.

At standstill moments, Veira’s head drifted to a place:

A farfetched longwinded road which she believed to be fulfilment.

Alas, many a time she allowed the mist and fog to fool her.

With no lights or wiper-blades to clear her windshield,

She felt compelled to stare, mouth agape, and hope for the best.

On one particularly ordinary & colourless day,

At a quarter to lunchtime but long before noon,

Veira set off on her mundane routine through life,

En route, she misplaced her tracks and veered off-piste,

Until she became acutely aware that she was alone,

Accelerating hopelessly towards the edge of a cliff.

Veira’s senses were jolted to the smell of her fate:

Her eyes widened, body stiffened, with blunt breathlessness.

Her foot amassed as rocks firmly upon her brakes,

Which saw her life screech to a complete stop,

On the verge of a fork in her Life’s Path,

Unabashedly and unashamedly windless and hot.

Without a second’s notice, Veira’s heart barged in,

Demanding a dramatic yet emphatic entrance.

Face to face with her head, silence exploded,

Its omnipresence both feared and familiar.

Beads of sweat dripped onto parched sand,

Tumbleweeds drawn into its parody.

Neither Head nor Heart daring to blink or budge.

It was fight or fly, game faces on!

An eerily comforting foot traffic of thoughts eroded the tension:

“Flight would serve the engine…”

“Fighting resistances strengthened defences…”

This was a time when light and dark were mutually destructive,

Where chalk and cheese together made a foul-smelling paste,

Where neither Ying nor Yang were complementing,

And everything was out of balance!

What happens here is a mystery to all but the trees.

Veira’s Gut strides in with white robes and yellow aura:

The Middle Man, the deadlock mechanism,

The “if in doubt” back-pocket surprise,

The one she knew was always there in the face of imminent death,

The unexplainable faith-based solution,

The tortured tragic hero; the protagonist,

Tossed like leafy greens into a tug of war.

Veira’s head wants what it wants,

So too with her heart;

Each capable of manipulating the other with ease.

Shoving, tugging, pulling, screaming, growling ensues,

Putting all three in danger of the same fate.

Veira’s head fell first, yelling curses and complaints,

But not without yanking on her heart by its strings,

Allowing them both to gracelessly trip over the cliff.

Unbeknownst to both, Veira’s gut stampedes in,

Selflessly jumping after both, grasping at straws.

Aimlessly, passionately, stupidly, yet collectively,

All three endured the same fatal thud upon its meeting the ground.

Peace…

For the first time…

Harmony…

At last!