Cotton Candy Poem by Madathil Rajendran Nair

Gra pa!
I ate cotton candy,
it looked like
a full-blossomed rose,
but It has vanished
without a trace
in thin air.
Have I eaten it at all?
That was my grand daughter
just four-year old.

Looking at the ceiling,
aged ninety,
half-paralyzed
in a stroke,
that is what they call it
in medical parlance,
I lay fathomless.

A cotton candy hung over me -
idiots call it death.
Come down candy,
so I know you are a rose
that never existed
at all anywhere,
other than in the forebodings
of fools on an unfortunate globe
that sold themselves
to the idea of a beginning and an end.