college.

A hundred other people-
Look exactly like me.
Walk exactly like me.
Speak exactly like me.
Think exactly like me ?

The same Fabindia kurtas.
The same dangling earrings.
The same Janpath chappals.
The same drawling talk
With the same curse-punctuation.
The same drinking parties.
The same gossip about the same people.
The same songs on the guitar
In late afternoon out on the lawns.
The same life ?


But
The same late night aloneness
When I wonder what the hell?
The same annoyance when the
Same old classic songs are strummed and sung
In the same old college way?
The same shrinking, shivering doubt
In stabbing moments on a busy day
When I wonder- What if I'm not ?
The same long hunger of
Wanting to be - ?

Maybe not.
Maybe so, but maybe no.
And that, there, might be the difference.

impressions

There are impressions, and there are impressions.
I wonder which ones matter, after all.
A boy, who speaks with a funny accent, and wears street-dude clothes,
Has read more books than anyone I know,
Or perhaps than most of them put together.
Another, with a earring in one ear, from a goon school,
Is awfully cool- going to be a philo professor,
And wilfully flunked a year of computer science to do it.
I've never wanted anything that much.
A highly religious one, who listens to no "secular" music
Can play any instrument I can name
But reads no music.
It's all in his head.
The girls surprise me less.
Maybe girls surprise me less.
Annoy me more.
Competition?
One annoying one references Balzac and Virginia Woolf
Before I've registered the question,
But has no sense,
Or spice, or Something.

But the thing, the thing, the thing is
I don't know whether when I see them-
First thing in the morning
Or twenty years later at reunion-
I wonder which impression will matter, will have mattered.

But that is, of course, my problem, not theirs.