Waiting for water

You queue up for water at ungodly 

hours in a city of imagined ladders

Plastic tumblers of every hue, your passports to  technicolor dreams

Around the corner, they sew sinews 

and nerves to cinema screens, 

Winged unicorns devour grown-ups

But you wait your turn to be carried by chance 

You, you are just one among a billion 

taught in telugu to long, to not wait to belong in and around 

Temporary queues for temporary wants

Airports feature in your dreams too

Oh yes, as bright as a hundred drums of 

drinking water, freedom, being adult,

One hundred drums, twenty trumpets and  fifty tall elephants in a temple fair, a queue to enter

Every unopened door, jostling through

Multitudes, senses, smells, desires

All merged into a jealous, nervous wait for your turn 

Not too long after the gods carry you on a crystal craft, to a mirror-wedged city

of perfectly-aligned rubbish bins, 

polite traffic lines; neat lunch queues

You see small gaping holes in the sky

You count them all, oozing technicolored 

Airplane fuel, oil slicks from up the heavens,  

Stardust of memories, water gushing 

off unlimited taps, those holes in the sky 

Fill every cell of your mirror-wedged city 

And you learn to queue again, 

for toilet rolls, oil and rice, to seal

Some of those holes, but without 

water, this time around

(As posted to a Facebook poetry group Singpowrimo)