Lost items

Found: The Macarena, long thought
lost to history, in a Delhi Café Coffee Day.
A lot can happen over Coffee! As long
as it doesn’t presume dangerous
adjectives, filter coffee or love marriages.

You gotta lick it so we can kick it
and Jimi Hendrix looks down from the walls.
‘I’m better when I’m drunk’
says the Muslim shopkeeper’s shirt
in the tangled bangle-aisles of Old Delhi.
Salt’n’Pepa doesn’t want want want.
Still the cycle-rickshaws ply
‘Abortion by tablet’ between the mosques.

Once upon a time there was light in my heart,
and now there’s only love in the dark:
Anthropologists trace exactly the moment.
The release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller
marked the last ship into Havana
carrying the music of counter-revolution.

Another night, another dream,
but always you. So they say
planting gardens in Laos:
Chillies grow best in casings
US 920378 or bigger.

We Shall Overcome, they sing
in the hills of Nagaland.
In Jaipur, a young boy,
almost to himself
No woman No cry
No chapatti No chai

Plagiarized poem

It was written by C.J. Boland, and plagiarized by me

The Two Travellers

"All over the world," the traveller said,
"In my peregrinations I've been;
And there's nothing remarkable living or dead,
But these eyes of mine have seen.
From the land of the ape and the marmoset,
To the lands of the Fallaheen.
"Said the other, "When’s the last time you ate
Purple sticky rice at Vientiane.

"I've hunted in woods near Seringapatam,
And sailed in the Polar Seas.
I fished for a week in the Gulf of Siam
And lunched on the Chersonese,
I've lived in the valleys of fair Cashmere,
Under the Himalay's snowy ridge.
"Then the other impatiently said,
See here, what of sunset off Walnut Bridge?

"I've lived in the land where tobacco is grown,
In the suburbs of Santiago;
And I spent two years in Sierra Leone,
And one in Del Fuego.
I walked across Panama all in a day,
Ah! me but the road was rocky."
The other replied, "Will you kindly say,
Have you wined in the streets of Old City?

"I've borne my part in a savage fray,
When I got this wound from a Lascar;
We were bound just then from Mandalay
For the island of Madagascar.
Ah! the sun never tired of shining there,
And the trees canaries sang in."
"What of that?" said the other, "sure I've a pair,
And they can’t beat the songs out at Green Line.

"And I've hunted the tigers in Turkestan,
In Australia the kangeroos;
And I lived six months as a medicine man
To a tribe of the Katmandoos.
And I've stood on the scene of Olympic games
Where the Grecians showed their paces.
" The other replied, "Now tell me James,
Where have you put your bike through the races?

"Don't talk of your hunting in Yucatan,
Or your fishing off St. Helena;
I’d rather see anarchists racing a bed
Down the hill past the ‘beer and pizza’
No doubt the scenes of a Swiss canton
Have a passable sort of charm,
But what of a warm fire in Houston
And a walk home without alarm.

And I’d rather be sitting in Ortlieb’s Jazz Haus,
After a dinner at Dahlak,
Than watching young dancers in Cuba carouse
Or mining out in the Outback.
And I wouldn’t care much for Sierra Leone,
If I hadn’t seen Clark Park in fall
And the man that was never in dear Crimson Moon
Shouldn’t say he had traveled at all.

Flyover work under Prrogress

7 Oct 2007
Ranikhet, Uttaranchal

And when it was red on
one side, green on the other,
blue on the final two.
The dogs of this valley
called the dogs on the
other side of the hill, where
perhaps they dry their chillies
differently, and the
monkeys are not yet in heat.

Underneath my shawl
my collarbones burn my resting
fingers, frigid and forgotten
paused in writing
drowned in colours
slowly turning
Himalayan night.

Tombs of these colours
built by people of the farther
Hills are fed by waters
These careful waters so
described to the men today
who sat, crosslegged, days
and days, and learned where
water comes and goes, and how
a heart pump is like a water pump.
And while we have you here,
why the earth turns and how an
eye works and what
methane makes.

Until yesterday, I had never seen
a ginger plant. I didn’t know
mountains rocks are really
water, ancient and newly
gathered by barefoot engineers.

Lights through the valley floor sit
safely lacking the water
kept in trees up here.
An old man sorts lentils by a
single bulb.
As I watch the blue take over
sneezing, shivering, hoping for chai
wondering how to put
into a poem both
cow dung and colonialism.