Toast To 36-24-36
Fat is beautiful, thin is beautiful too. Black is beautiful, so is white. Isn't beauty subjective? Aren't we crystallizing 'arbitrary constructs' way too much? And ending up victimizing that stranger, that friend, our very own selves? The poem examines this.
Every morning when the mirror greets her
She would scorn and yell things bitter
"Thick fat of skin
More like trash-bin
Speckled like a corpse rotten
Duh, or a desert of fossil forgotten"
Until one day when she would hashafashasha away her noodles
Her eyes fall on a pamphlet colored in blue, beneath her plate of snickerdoodles
The words written come sailing through the air
As if she has found kryptonite to her everyday nightmare
"Plastic surgery" it reads in bold
"Why miss on your 'perfect' 36-24-36, get rid of the ugly folds"
Satire smirks
Irony laughs
And she sneaks to the address
To the house of illusions
To the purgatory of euthanasia
Euthanasia of innocent hearts
That could fit beauty only in the diameters of 36-24-36
Three days in future returns she
Floating in an island of glee
Amidst the ocean of audience -
In real and virtual world
That would now "wohoo!" and "ahoy!"
To her perfect body of contours and curves
Fabricated with intricacy-
"A work of art!"
Satire smirks
Irony laughs
And she cheers
And waves to them all!
This newly found stardom is beautiful indeed
As she would prance to the symphony of her own queendom feed
One fine day
In sunny May
She undoes her heels
To keep them in the shelf, kneels
When BAM!
Her nerves jam
Blood oozes
Pain booms
Perplexed and in pain, she shouts
And calls out.
Thirty - eight months, her breaths, she hauls
In excruciating pain and hopeless bawls
The pockets of blood and fluids wouldn't cease to ooze out
"Dang! I would have been the happiest with my protruding snout."
The plastics couldn't be undone
So she wriggles in the lanes of Manhattan
Then arrive the cruel blossoms of March
When her body couldn't anymore bear the brooding discharge
"Euthanasia", she hears the whisper
beneath their bony nose
And mumbling lips of melancholy
Yet, she seconds the decision, to free herself from the long standing agony
The room is cold and blue
Final words she murmurs, still ballyhoo-
"The spring has sprung
The songs have been sung
... Only if I had recognized that I was since forever beautiful and young.”
Copyright © Bhaavya Pahuja | Year Posted 2020
|