Reflection on 2016’s Visit to Mumbai

Zahara and I weren’t having sex
which is why the walls crumbled and pressed
edges of jigsaw slices of spine torture of turning
the gaslighting of gasoline the pederast of headaches
coming in close and it’s dark and it’s night
and the city doesn’t shut itself
and the flight from itself doesn’t stop

worry while the people live eyes alighting lit larger
pauper despite a deeper set of pockets
fabricated tho damnest set of problems
plague like fabric or heat because it gets hot
the way the temples stare back from behind
slums of millions and we can see straight into them
if we look but this headache reeling like fishing
like phishing this realizing is quantifiably silent

it gets harder the way the softness looms and gleams
in a day-lit pattern causing angst and anger
the body feeling dead within as the world spins out
of control surrounding us and who gets used to this
that doesn’t live within it and I scream like fire
take me back and shove me into the box where smoking
it will be a gigantic, uncanny, alluring smolder

the weight of being a combatant of the self in a range
of arrangements and I’m thinking no smoking no liquor
no coffee no cooling stature amidst this sick, fucked city
a city engorged and swollen and sticking straight into the clouds
while my body writhes in an unbearable, wholesome darkness
pale skin pallid yellow poignant green elderly purple
fingers more talons than the forest more flipper than the ocean
a strange box hanging from my neck and breathing up into me

says breathe this and let yourself ride
says breathe in this and feel like the chariot
while black metal shuttles crane their necks into the heat
and every man on the street stares like they have nothing left
my own desire to break open like an egg leaking its mass
shifts and shuffles across those Ganesh-covered streets
shortages of pain bringing an ironic awareness of what’s lacking
lax a funny term in a landscape of abundance and excess
(remarkable distribution, thinking back on it, empty)