My mouth is like a gargoyle
On a desiccated sun-parched dessert,
Hanging on to hope like the hump
Of a dromedary camel, looking upwards
To find not even a single raincloud,
On an empty sky and all I can do
Is perform my rain dance every night
In front of a discolored washbasin,
Letting you drain through me in thought.
And one day you rained on me,
The night I dreamt I was incapacitated by how
Quickly I could be uncorked.
I guess the wine that is aged the longest
Has a breath of anticipation about it.
I was a chardonnay, a white wine,
But deep down, I wished to be fed with
More tannins, like a vintage red wine.
The grape grows wild on the vine,
And the savageness of a dream
To meet the perfect woman, sweetens;
Helen of Troy’s face, Mary Magdalene’s hips,
Cleopatra’s figure, Aishwarya Rai’s smile,
Mata Hari’s seduction. Handicapped by
Them all, I stand my ground, capable of
Understanding how our paths
Could have crossed, if not for
That one technicality. I am unaware,
I’m dreaming right now, until I wake up
Suddenly and you’re still in my thoughts,
Like a female mosquito carrying
A contagious virus, droning around,
And something is telling me, you’re off limits.
Perhaps except for Sappho.
Dilantha Gunawardana, a molecular biologist, lives in a chimerical universe of science and poems. Dilantha is published in Writing Disorder, Kingdoms in the Wild, Heart Wood Literary Magazine, Ravens Perch, Canary Literary Magazine, Boston Accent Lit, Forage, Kitaab, Creatrix, Eastlit, American Journal of Poetry, Zingara Poetry Review and The Wagon, among others.
