Masks

What kind of person is Leftist?
The rich do gooder
Yes
Sometimes hiding rapacity under the veneer
Of fashionable Leftspeak.
A little slumming in counterpoint
To having a lot of muchness-
Some of the richest people are indeed Communists.

And then there's
The frustrated poor articulate
Yes
Getting older and wiser and nobody gives a damn
The deluded?
Well...
Woolly-headed maybe
But someone with the resilience to justify what does not work
Till jhola after jhola  gives way
And pajamas flutter like pennants on the clothesline
Cleaned
But
Stained by too much heat and dust
And below them
Chappals gnarled like callusses
Clearly having gone places
Where chappals like that
Fit right in
The seasoned man of the people
Holding on to a wounded clarity
A self-righteous victimhood
Of allegedly denied entitlement
So not fat
Socialists are rarely fat
Unless they win gaddis

Still they're often blessed-
With surprising masses of hair
He, they, are
Hormonally sympathetic perhaps
Not troubled by too much testesterone or aggression
Of the obvious kind-
His, their
Economics is tinted pink
His, their
Scotch best comes free
To be most satisfying-

And his, their dreams
Are
Of measuring up to
Everyone as an equal
While looking down on his
Their
Theoretically equal servants.

Gautam Mukherjee
17th August 2012