Becoming Wallpaper... Feby Joseph

Slipping into the wallpaper is easy –

Just drop the avant-garde citations

Like those elite palates

That suddenly find canned tuna

Distasteful.

Pretend to not understand Schoenberg

(... won’t be too difficult for a Mozartian)

And you will have moved away

From the epicenter.

Accuse Mahler to be a madman

and be addressed less.

Admire Glazunov and Raff

And feel how lepers felt.

Bit by bit –

Decade by decade drop

the experimentalists and romanticists –

Listen for the hush that follows…

Very soon your shout-outs

To Boccherini will fall on deaf ears

You will have finally become

The faded filigree of roses on the wallpaper

Unless

You stumble upon a crowd

Of Baroque enthusiasts.

Start then by loving Schubert…

Hailing from the beautiful South Indian coastal state of Kerala, Feby Joseph is a spiritual vagabond who is still trying to figure it all out. At present all his formal education has landed him a job in a desert – in finance – so he works with numbers while words waltz around in his head. Some of his recent poems have appeared on Café Dissensun, The Wild Word and EntropyMag.