a few poems

A few of the poems that have been borne...

birds eye view

off the balcony
of this fifth floor flat
i watch the north end
in a green floral nighty

rickshaws mostly
automated
buses and men
men walking
men riding
few women are out

the street is suicide
distance below me
the birds are level
scouring and flirting

i see the people and feel
nothing
the crows rise
i feel everything


the Gach*

your child has an empty stomach
so you give him yours
full and brown

your child's eyes have gone dry
so you give him yours
full and brown

your child's mind sees only Kolkata
so you give him yours
and you see only a room
a street
the tree

what will it be today, sir?
Mother God, hear our cries

*Gach is the Bengali word for tree, it is also the word by which we refer to Kolkata's largest red light district.


untitled

here in this place of hatred
and horns
across the street from the prostituted
not whores
children
ripped open, run dry
like a wooden sail boat
dropped on the rocks

you can't even close your dreams
and eye it
for you've never seen the sea

in my mind's eye
the eye at the center of the storm
same, same
there is a harbor

i dock you there
safe and salt swept
by the oceans healing licks
long enough to paint
your names
along wind weathered sides
and seal it over with varnish


first full moon

tonight the man on the moon
is a woman

a Bengali woman
who has eaten too much Mishti

i laugh at the earnest way she sings a story
as she waits

for her husband to cross the sky
bridge, and come in for dinner

when she was born, she was clever
but like other women here
she rarely has a chance to think

her round bulb of a head
has grown

not from a wisened mind
but from paneer

in her favorite rose water syrup.