Monday, February 2, 2015

1 (29)
Me and my wife spent a month traveling India for our honeymoon.  Using my phone to keep notes these are the poems i fleshed out on the journey.

---

"Plastic fires"
Even the rubbish was beautiful,
it's western colors
burning with that sweet
acrid smell,
pot fires of waste
like cremation ceremonies,
burnt to satisfy the hunger of necessity,
need and want.
All blackened,
infected.
The body breathes it in
but the soul keeps it inside
forever.
The latte
colored lungs
like
juice bags
of every thing
we cant
exhale.

---

"Winning against the odds."
The local kids
peel me off my banana lounge
drunk
to play soccer
and I say, are you sure it's cool for me to join,
he passes the ball to my feet and says
"yes"
we move the house turtle from the dirt
and kick the ball around.
No religion, no race,
just football.
I loose 6:1
but I feel like a winner.

---

"Stained feet"
Her bare feet on the desert sand,
her toe touches her mouth,
leaves a clean strip in her sole,
and on mine.
I Google
Punjabi foot porn.
I lose myself in God
on a windless night in Jaslimer,
the earth
so still my cigarette smoke
billows in my eyes
Everything is sun faded,
gently worn of its original shine
over thousands of years.
But today a nice
Muslim man brought me a cushion
as I drank beer by a drained swimming pool.
There were bright orange colors
left in folded cracks of the cushion not yet worn by time.
The color was hiding there;
and if you hunted for it,
pulled at the seams with a bit of pressure
it was there. Life. Beautiful orange felt.
That is what India has been to me,
Pull at the seams,
hunt through the worn ages of time
and you will see the beauty.
The original heart.
The mist makes ghosts of us all
i want the bright red stain of my heart to be found
when you break me open at the seems

---

"The heartbeat of concrete"
The morning fog of Amritsa
and the spot fires
warming tradesmen
on the sides of the roads
light up the
shrouds of sore body's
that creep out of tents for another hour
in the sun.
My Hindi translators word of the day
was "combust"
I drink beer and watch movies in Punjabi
while men piss on piles of rubbish
Outside horns blare in different
harmonious tunes of
absolute madness.
Sleeping gods and dogs
lay in warm piles of burning rubbish
Yet houses that could be pushed over are not.
The man with a barrow of smoked yams kept warm
by two charred lumps of coal
calls out in the dark
India awakens
at ever living second
of the day
and night.
I see gods everywhere.
I can imagine them.
Angry at us
but not violent
Not mad enough to kill a man.
More like the way
A father would shake a thong
At his daughter
For a large phone bill
While she cycles through
Television channels.
Her white socks bouncing
Over the side of the couch.

---

"A mile away from you"
As humans we travel to all these places
that are more beautiful than anywhere else in the world.
To believe, and hope for something more perfect than our self.
Places made by man to worship God.
Thousands of years, billions of men dead to praise the highest,
someone outside our time and space,
someone more perfect, more beautiful than our self.
There MUST be a place more perfect than this.
But we are so quick to dismiss him.
I pray, as I always have,
that the friends we loose are safe and happy, drunk and in heaven.
As hard as it is easy to dismiss
it, there MUST be a god and he is probably the coolest dude of all time.
He has upset me a million times but
My wife
my forgiveness in him.
I'd build a road to the stars if I could,
to prove that being alive was worth the time.
Love is the ONLY thing that matters.
Just love. Always love. Love man, love.
The lengths men goto for God
and the tiny steps they make for mankind
are distances between small children and flying kites
that dive like pigeons in the northern wind

---

"Womanless streets"
Where under a over pass freeway bridge in Delhi
in a small bar
a woman walks in and D'Arne says
oh, finally a female.
She is the singer of the band
or a stripper,
I'm not sure about this place enough yet.
She sings Elton john.
A queen then,
obviously.
We walk home and neither of us were raped.
The hotel room is a solid wood den
and we were board
in its walls
as the city
SCREAMED
out side

---

"Burning bodies"
Cows warm
There self on cremation fires
By the Ghats.
The guides phone rings,
Soft wood creaks as we row home.
The Ganpati guest house
With
Neon
umbrellas
hang above the heads of
Swamis
Emblazoned with Radio advertisements
I see in their eyes all the woman they will never lay,
the beers they won't drink
as they sit by the river ready for Worship
Ready to purify their souls to the rising sun
wearing a pair of knock off
Bonds undies.
Ipads capture rituals in glossy
gutless neon's
and gods always want money
as a tray passes my knee
a silver plate full of chrysanthemums
and crinkled rupee notes,
locked in the everlasting embargo
of buying your way into heaven,
or out of hell
I have
Washed my self
In every holy water
on the earth
And I still feel
Like a dirty
sonofabitch

---

"Heaven and hell"
I watch pigeons from the hotel bar
pick at dirty roofs
and think
what the hell do you expect to find up here?
I look down at the tobacco clouds
and homeless children and think
what the hell do I expect to find down there

---

"Homes for the vets"
There is as many forts on Indian hills
as churches in Europe
and still no sign of God anywhere.
Just memories of war.
Pigeons build nests in the bullet holes
in the walls of Jallanwala Bagh.
out side a man asks me to give blood.
Even though there is to much blood
inside me i tell him
no
thank you...

---

"Russian Limbo"
At 9:30 am
a spastic drunk Russian man
with no teeth offers me a strawberry.
We eat them and he falls asleep,
I lay in the sun.
I don't know if he is harmless yet,
so I keep my eye on him.
He woke up and waded in the water.
D'Arne says
We better watch him;
He might die,
I go back to my book.
and say
Yes, with a little luck he will.
Red stains of his
strawberries
still on my lips.

---

"The way is through"
Fat English men walk like maharajas
across Goan beaches,
the sun gods burn them a pasty red and white,
The cheap beer the river Ganges substitute
that cleans the inside soul
and leaves tattoos on
toilet bowls across this
foreign
sister
fucking
land
If I can just get home,
out of this country i mean
and back to my cats,
I will Build a wonder of the world
from all the bridges I've burned,
glass roofs I've shattered
and the floors I've been to drunk to stand up on.
I have seen how it's done.
A man pulling a cart showed me the way.
Dig your feet in,
stare forward,
no compromise

---

"Poets of the machete"
When we got a flat Tyler
I gave the woman who stopped
cutting at the branches
with her machete
and helped us
A leather bound book
my mother gave me to write in.
It had only a phone
number written in it
and some flight
details.
I gave her a pen.
They would write more poetry
on its pages
with their shopping lists
children's drawings
and letters to
friends
than I could
ever dream of
creating.

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