Tell it to the walls

A widow is made miserable by the ill-treatment of her two sons and two daughters-in-law. Her misery is compounded by the fact that she is not able to share her woes with anyone which in turn made her fatter, and that made her feel worse. One day, she wandered outside of town and went inside a deserted house where she felt the need to narrate her miseries to the walls. With each tale of grievance told, a wall fell and she lost some weight. At the end, all four walls had come down, and she felt much better. Plus she had lost all her excess weight. Then she went home. (Summary of the folktale “Tell it to the Walls” from A.K. Ramanujan’s “Folktales from India”).

& to the odd passerby, even to the
one who does not pass you by but

is content to let a dark whisper
coagulate; the walls come down one

by one & the wind is incessant in
Reminding what should have silently

transpired between it, the spoken word &
The word that is licked up and spewed.

slippery trope

Truculent in the passive sense, as the leveller of hubris, as
the creature that claims you from the dark, an evermore
arbitrary closure will greet its shadow and culminate,
fulminate silently at the puncturing of possibility; and it is
only a silent crowd which will condole the length of each shadow,
the pressing of violet upon dilute yellows; the repetition, singsong
yellows carted off in their primal unwittiness to reversal.

Agents of lava-induced caricature move about in
circles, circumspect; the willynilly streak of dark is compounded.
Arguments, persuasions, exhortations of a less than wanted
reckoning pile up in a bowl of hollow oak; rivet them now with an eye
to seek and an eye to wander off tangentially, provincially, categorically.
The revellers that solaced in the lengthening of shadow now eye
the piercing avenues of trope, of a slippery train of unchained thought.