R o a d s i d e P r a y e r
Everybody wants to slip into that crooning gap
readied in the corners of betel-stained marble pillars
collecting an unyielding mythical dirt,
painted by unpolished mud-stained boots
since the last millennium.
In the crook of its neck,
street food like an old sacred word
is splayed open with a distinct red sauce—
a combination of sweat, podi and prematurely-distilled tanker
water, consumed with the routine of remembering
the world that once was
before the ballooned silences of Sunday evenings.
And now lies that bedridden in the eyes of an old haggardly man cajoled by tourists in palazzo pants and office gents with brown beating-belts, as they drop their coin in the mouth of his hunger,
hoping that the orange of his serpentine garment,
weathered with the effort of faithless prayers,
can summon the old-world violence
of the mother’s womb.
**
C o n t a g i o n
Against the soft gazing light
of the community pillar–
underneath which the night evaporates–
born are the new pigeons
for eating men and their eating games.
When, despite all the (n/l)oose knots,
language returns to the papers
with a religious routine,
and I am left with the same newness– I
cannot help but hope for a flicker under the
sheets and the books and the oven, that may
have escaped from
the contagion of the repeating word.
**
Image Credit: Night cyclist in Varanasi, India, Juan Antonio Segal from Madrid, Spain, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org