san/

you keep talking about that trip
like you didn't experience the paranoia
I did
like you
weren't afraid of burning the house down
a second time -
I was

you keep talking about it being earth-provided
but there's nothing natural
about my head

dancing out and away from my body
a tiny me-ghoul reminding me
of my own
creeping mortality

every time I am high now
I remember I will die
and I imagine all the ways
it might happen

including you turning a knife on me

there's nothing natural about that

and when I am awake,
alive and
not in other states
I'm caught up in the most
unholy, unworldly of heads -
I'm not even here
I'm culling myself thin

thinner than when I vomited for two days straight
thinner than my bones feel on acid
thinner than the line that's driven itself
between I
and
you

thinner than my bank account
thinner than my ability to talk sense
thinner than my ferritin levels
after rice-bread-potatoes
for three months straight

thinner than the space between my eyebrows
as it slowly collapses in on itself

India #4 of 5

India feels like
being squished onto the knees of a stranger
in a tiny state "bus"
neck right-angled under the
luggage compartment, the
juddering pot holes
of neglected roads

it's a spice-licked stomach,
a flush of water around my thighs
the infected rash of a toilet-paper-less world

a stranger pressing himself in to me
and the adrenaline exerted
in whacking away his hand, my
other hand
in my boyfriend's lap

a scarf enveloping my shoulders
and constantly rearranging it

it's the light step of coconut feni
the heavy pace of too many chappati
the aching backs of poor women
who have no choice but hard labour

the tension of a furrowed brow
that's argued too long about the price
the stiffness of a neck shaking "No, thank you" -
over and over -
and eventually, just "No."

the feeling of India
is suffocation by smog
a billion consumers burning
plastic day into
dusky warmth

a drafty train window
jammed open, forever un-fixed

dust between your toes
dirt in your eyelashes
heat-itched scalp
salvaged by Mysore oils

the rising of chilli
from gut
               to throat

this place locks firm your shoulders
between strong, callused hands
and shoves you sideways -
a hundred humans
desperate
for a single seat

the cold concrete floor
beneath your sitbones
as you find a place on the floor
to eat.

India #3 of 5

the taste of India

is vague, accidental goat

a potent aftershave that chokes your throat
mouthfuls of years of jaggery but never a toothbrush
milk tea politely declined -
or taken, in shame - it
swells the throat with
confusion and
guilt

India tastes of
practised love kneaded into chappati,
soap lingering on fingers
while shovelling rice with your right hand,
the dirt stuck under your fingernails

papaya after pineapple after pomegranate
fennel seeds stuck between your teeth
deep-fried, plastic-wrapped everything

a whole potato-stuffed chilli
stuffed into your salivating mouth,
despite the heat on your forehead,
despite the heat in your stomach;
un-named and unpronounceable
treats, oddities, commodities

the putrid after-taste
of a deeply wounded culture
asphyxiated by its own identity
the hard-to-swallow-truth
of disappointment, bewilderment
and disdain

India #2 of 5

the sound of India
is a restless quiet,
so piercing it has the weight
of a billion
horns blaring
down the labyrinth channels of my Western ear-wells

It stops you in your tracks.

the sound of India
is a kettle that never stops boiling
a thousand children's high-pitched Namaste
a pseudo-bomb going off in a rickety cobbled street
and no-one blinking
a heavy golden eyelid

it's monkeys screeching blood at each other
the sparking of exposed telephone wires
against a puddle of urine
a disastrous tragedy-in-waiting
that no-one will ever fix

it's waking up at 5am
to a chanting Muslim prayer
it's a garland-adorned tractor howling
Bollywood at you, the driver
stoic and sober

it's an apocalyptic shut-up
the sound of blackest midnight
no possible life behind the grey roller doors
cows, hogs,
limping dogs
the only survivors
staring you down
their heavy heads following your rigor mortis walk home,
the rustle of a lone plastic
bag caught in an abandoned kite string

the heavy thwack of a mallet collapsing a sad fish's head
flattened on to the blood-stained cobbled road
echoing through the
four-storey flats

the disjointed "how YOU?!" "GOOD morning!"
the wrong emphasis, the wrong
time...

it's a symphony of toxic snot hoiks
hurled aggressively up through the trachea
expelled from the nasal channels
out a moving bus window
-- it sticks to the side and
adds to the palimpsest...

the sound of India
is the drunken patriarchy, booming,
"YOU ! FREE ! MY ! HOUSE !"
and the soft gradual exiting of women's chappels

it's the host's Uncle's brother's wussshhh
as he plonks himself on your couch
asking you kindly if you're
married and Christian.

India #1 of 5

the smell of India
is shit mixed with wafting jasmine flowers
lotus incense masked by sun-stenched, fly ridden fish
asphyxiating leather varnish
and Ayurvedic oils
rose petals delicate with curdled milk
exhaust fumes and cinnamon
sugary tea and rotting rubbish dumps
masala sweat
and
overpriced marijuana

eve

We're lying under
the vast stars of pre-historia,
our eyes see the colours of Christmas,
backs arched against impossibly-held rocks,
precariously heaved into each other
like consoling lovers.

We imagine aliens might have passed through these
enigmatic landscapes
-- or at the very least, dinosaurs...

a Very Yellow Lights darts right --
"Look, Tom, a shoot-- ... a satellite...," I say.
(My Christmas eyes must have deceived me.)

But it hovers a while, then
comes to a stand still.

My Christmas eyes deceived me. Now it's
stopped, completely.
"Oh, it's static," I suggest.
"Just a Very Yellow Star."

A very yellow star.

We imagine xeno-scandinavians
landing from expansive avian pursuits,
we uncover possibilities for beaming telepathic calls
into space; we let our consciousnesses leap
from mountain peak to mountain peak,
following the soft pad-prints of Hanuman.

The Very Yellow Star
starts across the sky
impossibly swiftly
it flares into a
Large Yellow Sun, a
nod to the yellows and twinkling golds
of the wrists below it.
It disappears instantaneously
into a hidden black hole --
it's
Gone.

My Christmas eyes blink, my heart
swells with the same fiery yellow light
and won't shrink, won't
follow the disappearance
but stays loud and thinking in my chest

"That was a U.F.O.!" says I, stupidly
stating the uneasy, alluring, impossible obvious.

We sit a while in silence
taking in the expanse around us
then make our way back to the house.

Murali

she's sitting on the floor,
cross-legged, bare-footed,
bright yellow gold and jingles,
peeling the vegetables with some heavy iron instrument
her eyes salt up slightly
as she sheds the skin off the onions,
wiping her sweaty cheek with the
chaste edge of a pungent hand --

she's so happy,
all smiles
and cackling
laughter

(her age inflates and deflates -- I'm not sure
if she's forty-something
or sixty-five... no
grey hair, body soft --
and that brattish beautiful grand-daughter,
that cackling glee...)

but when she squats below the steps
to feed the hysterical chooks
her face falls tired, empty
her head drops to her open fist one side of her neck
and I see she's worn,
desperate, pitiful

exactly as I feel, and I've only been here
five weeks

Gokarna

The distant, floating echo
of some disillusioned psychedelia
hovering behind
the shattering click-clack-crash
of metal wheels
jarring against metal tracks
[if-out-of place Palm trees
made a sound
it'd be semi-tropical green]

on an overnight train to Mysore

we're like boomerangs
going in reverse
returning back to where we
came from

part "Fantasy Hotel"
past the coconut palms
back into the cold
to come out the other side:
into the scorching heat, again -
we search out the extremes, we
won't settle for mediocre

except there's
no such thing, in this country, anyway
so we couldn't find it, anyway, even
if we
tried

I've never seen so many mangled bodies
I've denies them my four cents
because that's the rule here
and then I mourn
my own apathy
and console myself
by holding your head
with the
two good hands
I have

I walk past a
foetus of a man
nestled between the motorcycles
almost certainly an empty body
and I wonder why nobody
does anything
while I also do nothing

we descend back into the mountains
there's barely any streetlights
but I recognise their shadows
from the last time we were here