Sorties

I

Monsoon evening trickles down
With smell of trash from open vats.
Seven O' clock.
Chewed up ends of bony days.
And now a surly breeze will wrap
Plastic sheets around your feet
From broken roofs and fallen tiles
Of grim shacks on barren tracks.
A naked urchin totters by.

And then the engine whistles on.

II

Morning peeps with uncertain feet
And wafts with the stale smell of urine on walls
In platforms with latrines unclean.
Here among hundreds of feet that are rushed
You stagger into coupes
Full of baskets of fish,
And mouthing your quips
On climates and cost,
Drowse as an old dog at noon.

III

You disclose your tab
From smooth leather flap
And finger through posts
That are heaped on your walls
With least bit of care
For the tear on your dress
Or for that man
Who bundles down stares
As a rat that has gobbled its cheese.

You finger your hair with humanoid limbs
And blast from your discs the loud latest fad
That drowns all the insistent voices that float
From bleak little rooms where you played.

IV

And all of these fragments of dolor and dross
Now rush into your streets and scatter
Along declining overbridge or tracks,
Remnants of faces that rose strong at dawn
And rotate as splinters of perforated cans
That groan as if skeletons in epileptic fits
With discord of perfected schizophrenic mime.

Step out of the wings and dance.
The world now'll mumble and tumble in dark
And snap all the circuits for fun!