After Dinner Chit-Chat

I am actually sitting here and typing

because I'm too lazy to get off my arse and get home.

5 feet away por-por is waving her paper fan

and talking non-stop

every so often I toss in a question, grunt, make a sound effect

she's nagging about religion

or my having none

she's bitching about my mother's family

my mother's lack of discipline, integrity

these are stories I have heard again and again my entire life

The bitter rich matriach, looking down her nose

at the poverty from which my mother came

She is being downright rude yet still I sit unruffled

Now I see why daddy and aunt don't speak a word to her

though they live under the same roof.

She asks, yet doesn't about my plans in life

questions more to belittle me than actually find out what they are

she tells me I should have a plan

that I shouldn't jump from man to man like ______

She doesn't wait to hear that i do indeed have a plan

and that I haven't had a boyfriend in over a year

because I just can't be bothered with trivial relationships

I don't try and tell her.

I know that this is probably the longest conversation she's had in months

she saves them for me, the only one who will listen

and with each, she gets more scathing

In one corner, the African Grey parrot, Polly

is also chattering incessantly

If anything, I feel pity

Not anger.

One day, when I am not suffering from yet another bout

of PMS and sheer physical drainage

I will take my grandmother aside

and really talk to her, really tell her about me

who I am, what I do, what I want to do

I will tell her that she has been a horrible mean bat

and this is why her children don't speak to her

I will try and show her how being nice

is just so much more fulfilling than being a bitter old bat

I will teach her about appreciating the good traits

and constructively criticising the bad

rather than just plain pernicious commenting

I will show her that I am my own person

and that I shouldn't be punished for whatever happened between her,

my mother and my father over 20 years ago

Her verbal beating has never gotten me down because my childhood

has armoured me with such a strong sense of who I am

that it would take a tank to bring me down.

Okay, she's gone and shuffled away

and I am being eaten alive by the pet mosquitos.