You defer that next meeting
at the doctor’s,
knowing that to talk to oneself,
for far too long
makes poor verbiage of one’s days;
and worse for wear is your mind.
naturally then you look at yourself
a certain way
and then to see round eyes of others’
pronounced judgements
is a slow death.
***
It minces your thoughts,
word by word,
little by little.
You see yourself as a jester and a fool,
testing out your own expressions
before the mirror
and then imagining the doctors’
reactions too.
They swim like floating weeds,
coming up to the surface without
clarity amongst dirty pools
and you somewhere are sure that
the three letter word is on your mind.
MAD.
*
That’s why you seek your shadows
in convenient silences,
stretched out throughout the
longevity of teenage
and young adulthood.
***
But now you are about to touch
your thirties
and shame is what you need to barter
with the devil on your shoulder.
For years,
he bespoke your innocence
and ignorance,
disguising them as parameters of bliss
So enough with him.
You have marked the meeting,
spending Sunday ticking by,
like an implosive time-bomb of sorts.
And then,
you gather your twitching thoughts
together.
Palpitating about how the perpetual
traffic in motion
means that nobody really stops,
to work or feel or see.
Certainly not to see you like this.
They just move
They just move
Or spin in the same static time zones.
Your brow receives a light downpour
then
and your body gets cold,
from counting the number of closed
switches in the rooms
and checking the stove in the kitchen,
for the twentieth time within a
minute.
***
11 O’ Clock,
Monday morning.
marked for a show of reality.
And when the doctor does raise his
brows
and makes you more nervous by the
earnestness of the session,
being as he is human,
or just acting professional,
you doubt if coming here was worth it
And your mind keeps moving
and moving,
in a static frame,
of what it means to go there
in the first place.
****
An Awadh Boy's Panorama : tracing words on these filigreed, discerning fingertips. 
Palpitating about how the perpetual
traffic in motion
means that nobody really stops,
to work or feel or see.
Certainly not to see you like this.
I LOVE the above lines. The entire poem has this “motion” throughout. It “palpitates.” It “beats.” It “pulses.” Ironic that you call this poem “11 O’CLOCK, MONDAY MORNING,” since the poem is NOT static at all, and yet maybe that’s the point?
But now you are about to touch
your thirties
and shame is what you need to barter
with the devil on your shoulder.
I also LOVE these above lines. “Shame” is a topic I write about A WHOLE LOT! It has followed me many of my days, from infancy (I think, anyway) to twenties and thirties and forties and so on. Now that I am in my fifties, has shame stopped for me? It still hangs around and creeps up, a doctor of sorts yet NOT human and NOT a professional. Just an annoyance and a deep lie. There is nothing I have to be ashamed about anything! I’m FREE now and will always be so. As a massive feeler, I’ve learned to accept ALL my feelings, ask each feeling that shows up to pull up a chair, and “let’s talk.” I welcome the feeling and ask it to tell me what it needs to say….or feel. When all seems finished with the intensity of that feeling, I thank it for visiting me and excuse myself but tell the feeling I’m always eager and willing to have the feeling come back again so we can “let’s talk.”
Once again, I LOVE the way you write, Prithvijeet!
Blessings,
Timothy
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Thank you so much for your gift of words and heartiest wishes. You truly read the poem with the spirit in which it was written and conveyed above all.
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