Small Confession

I just finished the story by Perumal Murugan
where a chair comes between a loving couple;
it’s not controversial—

there’s no intercaste marriage or infidelity, 
nothing to offend anyone’s sensibilities 
or to provoke the police, a court, 

or a right wing mob to ban or burn any books, 
or to threaten a mild-mannered author 
with damnation or bodily harm—

there’s just a man, a woman, 
and a chair that slowly drives them apart. 
Of course, the chair is a metaphor 

for patriarchy and other problems 
that inevitably come with modernity—
like the wailing toilet in another 

Murugan story, or this phone I use
to talk with the people I love,
and also to avoid them.