Empty Nest
By Anshu Choudhry

When you stand in a queue for healthcare,

you are no more the robust, dusky, sun-baked crisp

 cookie-youth. Instead, your alopecia skull fragile

like stale melon shrunk to half seems wilted on a slice of

 the frame that you were before. And your knees

cracked bending loathe the lift, the humongous

burden of your waist tinier, than you ever

 yearned. While you still retain your accounts

 and your name on ancestral bricks, your own labours

of gold lie idle in cuboids as dark as the air in coal

 pits; your own flesh and blood that you once shed

as slime cleansed under a running tap, now throb

 under your veins as systolic readings

 estranged from your heart.