Poem Thirteen

I noticed that I hadn't posted a poem on here since March.
This one is about one the strangest movies I've ever seen. Of course, the strangness was magnified by the setting. The poem doesn't even address the annoying hanger-on/beggar I saw it with...









ROBOTRIX

Movie theater; Puri, India


The Sacred’s decay
surely picks up a little speed,
each screening of this
obscurely dubbed Japanese
“comedy,”

its grainy rip-off
Philip K. Dick
plot
robot police just
leggy props for defenestration
and rape played for laughs

to an audience
reeking of frottage, mere blocks from
Lord Jagannath temple,

a site so holy those
shady men lose track their count,
the rupees got leading
foreign travelers up any

old building when,
as every guidebook warns,
the library’s rooftop
offers the only view of

that spiced chaotic throng
worth paying for by
that non-Hindu swath of the world

banned from entry by serious-sized
red signs, so even
the Lithuanian Hare Krishna
wielding a specially stamped letter of permission

isn’t welcome
because his parents ate meat and the temple priest
is a stickler

and stricter than ever
knowing such strictness
can’t hold, and sensing how mere blocks away
this hand-painted white sheet advertisement ripples
illegality over the ticket booth,
carnival faces sharply artful
considering

a folk art perspective’s grotesqueness
strands the arms detached
with hands larger

than heads,
and makes one ask if the position of the sex act
so boldly depicted
is called The Giraffe,

if the yellow-circled
A means rated for adults
or promises agony

dark as the temple complex’s six entryways
made caves by bats, clouds
risen off the sleep of a
devotion-hobbled baba
whose father resurrects nightly in his beard,
mother from his knotted hair,

cold watchers readying
an announcement,
hushing and ultimate.