Poem Three

“GARBAGE! GARBAGE! EVERYWHERE. START A YOUR MIND TO THINK”

Chamundi Hill, Mysore, India

Suddenly it’s amazing:
An American television youth of so many
impressive detective mustaches
and none of them were Indian.

One lesson from viewing those 20,000 murders:
Everyone who occupied the room, even for a moment, left
behind something to declare their presence: fingerprint, fingernail,
hair, thread, pencil, or, if really dumb, blood.

So what could be brushed,
and bagged into Evidence from
these streets of three thousand years of people

building to a billion, and all that time intent on
shedding impurities,
spirit and body?

What downward path the bloodhound’s madness?

Smells become stinks,
baths become worthless. Enough baths and the river
lies thickened past darkness,
a cow wading in
thousands of empty plastic water bottles.

A billion people means liberty
beyond First Amendment, Hare Krishna
counts as mainstream.

The Times of India “Sacred Space” column often
quotes the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
A billion people you can do what you want.

Almost anything, piss anyplace.
Hope a small bribe can fold up the rest.
The grime fluidity, a few rupees exchange.

At any moment, India sputters,
rags and cartons,
50,000 small fires.

Worms roll into snugness
in warm stomachs of
curled-up dogs with cinder-plugged nostrils.
Everywhere settles the sunken shine of that ash
of what can’t leave here

all the way.

Spongy rot, even on
the blacker edges of the Void,
its faltering fertility
a venereal canker’s pucker.

The Unnamable’s
gummy breakdown to focused convulsions, plastic fruit,
that haughty aimlessness of privately schooled teenage Death.

The Beyond Form
stuck to your shoe.

No wonder the Shanti Guesthouse owners
get upset
if you’re not in stocking feet
to walk across their carpet.

Would you knowingly expose
their home to such manifestations

of diarrhea headache?
Open their door to such gruesomeness?