Inside a falling room
I learnt the first lesson;
vowels ejected sluggishly
from a throat
oiled by Ghazals
the skin collected
jaws and palate resisted
verbs messed up the taste buds
I traversed punctuations,
but all freedoms are short-lived
the English teacher
reined the rebel in me
the subdued ones
stilled into mock-alligators
swallowed a tricky idiomatic
figurative or metaphoric
God knows! I chewed and gobbled
but some of it remained
beneath the tongue
with fricative diphthongs
and signs of exclamations
I choked, cramped
made faces
like a harlequin
until the appetite for Punjabi tales
and Urdu flourishes
perished in caries
then consonants took root
in time the local enamel
went away
they made a new denture
for I was their advanced learner.

Come ! and pluck me, each entry
each page is a bleeding gum.