Keeps Affecting Me Deep! Poem by Rajendran Muthiah

When his friends are roaming in shoping malls,
he is in the library, sinking in Shakespeare,
and not noticing me in the opposite seat.
When his friends crave for a glance from me,
he never looks at my face, while walking
on the other side of the road.
While taking food in the dining hall,
I am expecting a flashing gleam from his eyes,
refusing to respond for the calls from the eyes around.
But what nixes him from watching me?
When my friends find difficult to clear my doubts,
he tells aloud the answer to a surprising third person.
Why he tells it not to me, the longing darling?
He seems to ignore me but really not.
His scant attention on me keeps affecting me.

When he gets into the bus before me,
if there is a single vacant seat,
he leaves it to me and goes to the front of the bus.
He offers a fleeting smile when I thank him later.
Once, he dashed against me
on the threshold of the classroom.
He apologized to me several times but I was,
in the silent mirth as he spoke to me for the first time.
I feign as if to have no interest in him
though his lovely manners have already drawn
the map of love at my pleading heart.
There is no visceral excitement in his actions;
may be due to some wound caused by a viper in the past.
But his self-restraint exhilarates my modest heart.