Dear, with your sketchbook and a pencil box,
neatly placed beside your trendy cigarette case;
and the book that you read with so much grace,
you look as if you were sitting for a portrait.
This ‘Instant Portrait’ that reads over your head
flickers like a dying flame. As the time’s wheel rolls
you‘ll think of Van Goghs and Andy Warhols.
Dear artist, I’m afraid
these ghosts obsessing over the cellphone screens
and shouting their heads off over the banal
spell out the i-r-r-e-l-e-v-a-n-c-e of art.
My dear artist,
waiting for my caffe latte, I see you
on a love-seat with a Picasso in hand—
You pose as if you were only reading.
Lead-grey sweater and casual footwear,
a goatee and fashionably unkempt hair:
you sit alone, half visible in the corner seat
near the exit aglow with a dull blue,
which is rather odd in a place where they come
to talk in superlatives over heady drinks
and stub the butt-ends of their days
in heavy-duty glass ashtrays.