Arjun Rajendran
Painless
I fill out forms. The cabin crew walks down aisles serving
one final round of anti-depressants.
We’ve entered the airspace of a country dangerously low
on the Happiness Index.
If you’re normal, you get to take one pill.
If you’re like me, someone whose legs haven’t stopped trembling
in over a decade,
you get a hug and syrup— just so you don’t start sobbing
soon as the plane touches down.
An officer examines my documents, checks the validity
of my suicide-prevention kit against a database.
Everyone bids for deals on euthanasia these days. The most popular
ones come with wifi, and are advertised as being painless;
though you who left me widowed should know there’s no such thing.
But I hear more than jet lag: my neighbor, punctually up
at 3 am with a noose, and her will, always unraveled
by the Dalmatian’s barks.
Arjun Rajendran‘s second collection of poems, The Cosmonaut in Hergé’s Rocket, is forthcoming from Paperwall Publications in April 2017. His poems have appeared in Strange Horizons, Berfrois, Caesura, Star*Line and The Bombay Literary Magazine, among others. Anthologies include Eclectica Magazine’s Best of Poetry (Eclectica Publishing, 2016), and 40 Under 40: An Anthology of Post-Globalization Poetry.(Paperwall Media, 2016).
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