I Can Explain This

Maybe you think I didn’t look at your roses

(Yes, yes, I know they were only twenty a bunch)
Because glass-caged, glassy-eyed, voices do not reach me

Or that

Conditioned-hair, conditioned-air, the thoughts in my head are frozen

 

But my eyes didn’t go to meet yours

Only for the fear of what they might find there

And because I couldn’t have explained all this then

In the flicker of a red light.

First published in Muse India, Jul-Aug 2014.