Across the square road’s

entire body,

the operational blood of vehicles

has leaked and hardened

into maps of wounds.

From those stains,

an incurable rot-smell rises—

and inside that quarantined fragment,

in a tea shop,

Two aberrations meet:

a dense-haired poet

who obeys the shepherd’s invisible whistle,

and a bald professor

who has never learned the grammar of fear.

Inside the teacup’s private cosmos,

in the drifting foam-continents,

The professor’s eyes wander,

begging truth

to surface like a drowning god.

Meanwhile,

the thick-haired lunatic poet

inserts his forefinger into the cup

and releases the tea

drop by deliberate drop

onto the earth—

as though transfusing time

into soil.

Suddenly, he screams:

This road is real.

Death is real.

Signs are real.

But life is false.

Poetry is false.

The original is false—

only the copy survives.

At that exact fracture of a second,

a lorry passes—

dragging centuries under its wheels.

Epics, caught in its turning teeth,

are torn open.

A particle—

from a shredded page

of a grand Marxist epic

that once betrayed the herd

and preached the monarchy of the family—

falls, trembling,

into the spilled tea drops

and becomes sediment.

The professor watches it drown.

He begins to sip again—

his hand slowly caressing

his bald head,

as though remembering

the hair that history already executed.

Then the mad poet speaks:

You teach history.

I… convert accidents into poetry.

Man and woman—

all are chrysanthemums

flowering from the debris

of a love-accident.

You, who never understood this,

have failed

to instruct the Bodhisattva.

But I—

even in these fallen tea-drops—

can force

cactus-thorns to bloom jasmine.

Understand this, fool.

He screams.

Millions of wheels

continue to cross the road.

The sun and the moon,

confused at a sign reading

TAKE DIVERSION,

hesitate—

unable to abandon

their inherited orbits.

And still,

in this universe,

that tea corner

remains exactly where it was.

Only the square road

keeps extending—

without memory,

without mercy.

Somewhere,

an old king’s descendant

runs frantically,

spinning a planet on his finger,

shouting “Baa… Baa…”

trying to herd

the crossing animals

into obedience—

mistaking traffic

for destiny.

Ragavapriyan Thejeswi