A Yuppie entrepreneur chides his old teacher

By M. L. Raina

All my rage is just an encrustation,
On the basic fact of my frustration.
So lectures my muse without even a comma,
That I am suffering from an infantile trauma.
I fancied a car, a house and a kitty,
But never could acquire them, O what a pity.
That is why I rave, and scowl and sulk,
To see my neighbour’s prosperous hulk.
For his well-earned riches and his wife I pine,
He thinks I’m a scavenging upstart, swine.
Instead of wallowing in jealousy’s shit,
Can’t I do what he did to make myself fit?
Into his circle of the ‘honest’ and the ‘pure’,
By simply taking to Darwin’s cure.
Damn my Freud, my cussed dirty Marx,
The likes of me are nothing but petty, petty sharks.
He wants me to rise above pettiness and hate
And see for myself how little I create
To keep me alive, a whiny old crone,
An ungrateful grumbler, a parasitic drone.

An aggrandizing critic, a probing prying rat,
An intellectual worm with vision of a bat.
Discontented natterer, disaffected bore,
A tubercular loud-mouth, syphilitic whore.
If I must reproach him, I should be polite,
Pickle into humour all my spite.
Be a little indulgent; turn a Nelson’s eye,
Remember he is pampered by the old man in the sky.
He sends him all his bounties, and I am being crass,
Not to love his chosen, the privileged middle class.
He is marching forward, he is forging ahead,
And I mourn for life that my wishes never led.

Comments

Rajesh Sharma said…
I always suspected Prof. Raina to be a poet.

Will he let other five poems also tumble out of his secret chest?
Surbhi Goel said…
I suspected that too...and what a marvelous, unrelenting, unabashed verse....M.L.Raina in new avatar!
Badri Raina said…
so i had surmised and suspicioned;
congrats;
having begun, do run riot please.
isslah from older practitioner, though:
the thing with rhymes is that they should surprise, and appear out of the blue with unpredictable impact; the more you write the better it gets.
salaam namaste.

Badri Raina

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