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.