It’s a post-apocalyptic scene.

Until you see the flower floor.

Concrete walls, bare but for paan stains.

Looking like a fresh massacre.

A murderous rampage

written in shotgun spatters.

A pack sits, rhythmically rocking,

hands mindlessly at work.

But with their backs to you,

you can’t see they’re stringing garlands.

Looks like the junky fidgets

of a Zombie horde at rest.

The impulse to tip-toe past, rationally quieted.

Then you peer over the rail to the flower floor.

The flower floor is brightness.

The visual gravity of oranges and yellows

exerts such an aesthetic pull on the eyes

that one can’t see any sign

of dystopian dreariness.

[National Poetry Month: Poem #12]