on a publisher's table

On this fine morning
A Publisher has a poem on his table
He also has two of his cheques bounced
And hundreds of others left blank and due
For those failed writers.

Still he is having a happy breakfast with birds.
And with reason!
Just paid back his nine months' dues to the printer
Far away in Tamilnadu.

Looking so sharp and beautiful,
The poem on his table, an ordinary one,
never had expected the publisher to take a look at it.
But it could see through a veil of its own stiffening rhyme
The deadly investment of a mad woman's time

Suddenly the publisher brainstormed
With that romantic old poet's lines
Yes, that too with reason!
Those scholarly fathers of the country
Once had taught us those lines like scriptures and reforms, you know
He thought to reprint the virtuous old poet,
That's doing a classic job!
But that's in vain, reported those grandsons when contacted.
Their romantic grandfather had already given the sole rights
To the best available sales man at door, in his very own poetic lifetime.

Looking so sharp and beautiful,
The poem on publisher's table,
But it could smell in his briefings,
The deserted sigh of a language

The publisher these days does not talk to his wife
Or teach his son any arithmetic
But waits for a poem to fill their gap
He doesn't publish his photo
But dreams to own a newspaper to advertise him

Looking so sharp and beautiful,
Poem on his table,
But it could taste the publisher's happy meals,
illustrated with plenty of pictures
And there he sits filling all post-dated cheques
with hellish confidence in his 'exotic cookery' series.

At last with a thump in heart
the publisher touches the poem on his table.
It looks so lovely to him
He licks it with love
He bloats its poetic buds with a move
And drops his hot tears on the best of all its stanzas

Who knows?
Poetry was the woman he loved most in life.