down by the dikes and
gently hold my hand?
India
Indian Connections
Mumbai beggar's hand
formed of
bird's nest sticks
reaches desperately
big eyed
naked
brother
clinging
apelike
half asleep
nest building
crow
grapples with an
unwilling branch
shakes his head
and looks right
through me
like the vendor
on the corner
apples from the
Okanagan Valley
shielded by
a broad umbrella
are sold next to ripe
papaya
me and those apples
so very far from our
orchard home
Mumbai Weekend
Traffic insanity
Acrid fumes
Bites white-eyes
Cartoon taxis
Beetle-bug rickshaws
Homeless bands of beggars
Black bikes
Trains more packed
Than cattle cars
Shared air
Is heavy
And all bodies
Breathe
As one
Heaving,
Wheezing lung
The food, they say,
Don't eat it
Or you'll be seated
And sick
And shitting
And sorry
Mumbai weekend:
Dirt
Poverty
Heat
Stench
Compact masses of weary humanity
All this, all this, and all this
And
I will remember most the
Wonderful smiles
Of
Bombay
Pretty Indian girl
Pretty Indian girl
Your sari's wrapped
With austere dignity
Your hair is pleated so well
But in this monsoon of poverty
You often wonder how
Pretty Indian girl
Dust on the roadside
Cakes your naked feet
Fetch water from an old well
And slowly ponder the
Daily meal
And then you wonder how
Pretty Indian girl
Your God, the gods, My god!
Why can't they see
You live your small life so well
How can they watch you so blindly?
You often wonder how
Pretty Indian girl
Your cousin works in
Mumbai city
Her family eats so well
To sell her body
Used to seem so base
And now you wonder how
Japan
Japanese Wife
If I had a Japanese wife
I would not spend—true—
Half my life
In a smoke-filled karaoke bars
With business bores
And plastered whores
John Denver songs a-ringing
Paunch-bellied little
Japanese men
Drinking Johnny Black
And singing
I would wrap her—so—
My little fawn from Kyoto,
With love
Her pretty smile
Would draw me,
She wouldn’t fill her lonely
Days with lonely friends
Shopping in a haze of
Sadness; disillusionment
Loud ringing
She would have my love to hold
As I would be her lover true
Bring flowers home for
Her soft hair
Try to write her verse
Both powerful and pure
Listen to her arguments
She would hear my soft laments
And I’d make such soft, sweet love
With her
Blood
A history
So complete
Heritage
Grandeur
And spectacle
Such sorrowful
And greed-soaked shame
To be splashed so
Liberally over all
That dignified past
The sham of leviathan blood
The lies of rationale
Technology to be
Copied and admired:
Such a clever race.
Why, then, so soaked,
So stained in blood--for what?
Minute financial gain?
Such lies
Such shame.
Kuala Lumpur
Stasis
Sitting in a bar that
Used to hang the Croatian
Checkers, used to play
Football and rock and roll,
Used to have
A wisp of a fag
Who slung beer and squealed
With delight at even the most average shot
On the table—oh, how he
Loved to squeal—
The barmaids were
Transvestites…
Where are those naughty girly-boys
Now?
Now they play boybands
On the set in the corner;
The bartender’s straight-laced
Stone-faced,
Tough to crack a grin.
“Stasis” need not be a bad word—
Some things should not
Change—
Autumn in the Tropics
Autumn is most oft most missed—
Its restless leaves from trees dismissed—
In lands where Autumn has no name;
Here, natural must, each season same,
Here, sun-drenched water wets my feet—
In Canada they’d love this heat,
But I would give each ray away
To feel cool Autumn’s kiss
One day.
Machinations
Taking pictures of cold steel
And reflection glass
And gasp in awe
At all of this machinery—
Can it be art?
These Meccano machinations?
These human creations?
Bolted with parts,
Pumped cold with blood from
Air conditioner ducts
Through heavy, metal hearts.
(Previously published in BOLD)
Poser
Poser posing for the shot
A man, by god, a man
Tussled hair by his own hands
Smiling naturally
Looking off o’er wondrous land
So dramatically
He makes his girl re-shoot the shot
To catch his spontaneity
Such a wonder is to see
This poser posing
Naturally
(Previously published in BOLD)
Hearts of Darkness
White face skin cream:
We so skilfully sell them our colour—
Our absence of colour—
Our pale perspective;
Sell them our ideas
Of nose shape
Under the small neat knife
Or chemical relief—
Better than their herbs ground in mortar, applied with poultice;
Free trade that works this way, one way;
We then slip in Jesus,
As it makes it all easier
If they become similar…wanting sameness:
Same fears,
Same hell:
We sell
We sell
We sell them.
We used to enslave their masses
With insidious addiction of sweet opium,
Or we’d chain them to rubber tree
Threats
And decapitations
And roping and raping wives and children;
Now we politely poison them
With our homogenized culture.
We are ever the imperialists,
Ever
Spreading our pale
White Hearts
of Darkness.
What Would Conrad Say?
Sitting out a wicked storm
In a trendy road-side café
Sipping Earl Grey and
Watching this side-show
Of humanity, wondering at
How we’ve come so far:
Our progress.
Two North Africans
Sit with a local
Chinese woman; the
Blackest of the two
Strokes her arm and
Talks loud over the
Pounding rains and the
Ominous warnings of thunder,
His sentences punctuated
With raw strokes of lightening:
This devil has his seductive flair.
They motion to the blonde
Australian back-packer
Who sits—smoking—behind me
Reading her Lonely Planet,
Unable to see them from her table.
The Chinese lady wanders
Over
And sits like a friendly local
With the Australian:
“How you doing?
Some storm.
How long you here?
You travelling alone? How brave.”
I listen to the setup and know
She’s been marked;
This is post-modern, post-post-colonial
At its best-worst.
What would Conrad say
About this turn?
What should I say?
I leave in the lessoning rain
To let modern evolution run its course,
To let Africa get
A small
Piece back.
Laos
Children Playing Ball—American Pastime
Smiling Laos children out playing in their killing fields:
poke a hole,
plant some food.
Hit an “orange”
lose your life
(or at least one limb).
In the days of the secret war,
where the tactics were American terror,
they dropped a million in one country:
kill the threat, the menace,
stop the movement;
the country wasn’t even at war!
So small—tennis balls
landed and waited to
score: unforced error!
Some are orange,
some are yellow,
meant to destroy
young children at play:
stop the movement,
snap the threat,
break the children
like brittle dolls.
But those Yankees—
damned Yankees—
don’t want to comment
or help clean up their mess (twenty-odd years later),
and so
the kids will
continue being children,
and the old Laotian farmers
will burn the parts they can find
when the smiling children
“Play Ball!”
(American Style)
Singapore
6 a.m. at the Elizabeth Hotel
Alone through rains that start to fall,
Through early morning lack of light,
And lack of love, and absent mate,
She wanders through the vacant cars
Whose owners, all well coupled, kept
With warmth and love—without regret—
Behind the bleak, unblinking eye
Of the Elizabeth Hotel.
He exits through revolving doors,
But only once the air’s washed clean
Of perfume from his tawny whore
He knows he’ll never see again;
The taxi waits, quite monolith,
Except for lights now wide like eyes
And blades that wipe the tears from skies;
He’s soon to ride far from this night
At the Elizabeth Hotel.
She turns once as his cab door slams;
Headlights on high, he rolls away;
She wonders—in this high beam trance—
If she’ll be captured in some way
That might ignite romantic flare
That could replace his rough, plunge thrust
With fingers, soft, through her dark hair
And whispered words: love, trust, and care.
But taxi only motors by,
And water from a puddle formed
Within this half an hour’s rain
Splashes on her perfect calf
That just one hour, or so, before
Was flexed, for him, seductively;
Slowly she lights a cigarette—
And throws the match, now doused by rain,
Towards the blank and vacant stare
Of the Elizabeth Hotel.
Bangkok Dreaming
Midnight in a back street
Walking lonely as a whore
Trying to find some Bangkok
In this lonely Singapore
The streets are neat and tidy
The roads safe and secure
The smiles manufactured
The prices set and sure
The cars are new
The rivers clean
(as clean as they can be)
The smokers have their sections
The birds assigned to trees
And within lines and ropes
And fines you’re happy
And you’re free
Still I tramp through
Darkened walkways
As tired as a whore
And strive to find some Bangkok
In this ruled Singapore
I guess you don’t miss freedom
If you’ve never known its choice
And confines could be comforting
If not seen as bleak tyranny
If you’ve only ever whispered
Never sung with your sweet voice
But me
I long for chaos
And the stresses that it brings
The wrongs and rights
The long wild nights
The sadness that it sings
The laughter ringing
The stained streets
The open smiles and shoeless feet
The chance of dance and danger
In a simple alleyway
But now
For me
Abandoned
On this manmade sandy shore
I wander late and lonely
As some love-struck country whore
And dream of distant Bangkok
In this lonely Singapore.
Inevitable
One degree and change,
This sandbar, turned capital,
Equatorial rain,
Tragic and wonderful
As day slips into night
The slow wash of black
Long-legged Chinese girl
Seems so Inevitable
Sleek Grendel-crow
Waits till the timing’s right
Glides swift and low
To table’s top and steals a bite
He doesn’t find his courage in a bottle
Swoops by one more time
Spies another beak-full
That he will stealthily swipe
Stomach’s now full
For Aesop thief
Who’s black as coal
Inevitable
Seems so strange,
Again a stranger, even here:
Passport stamp
A cigarette, a bottle of cold beer;
Where did it go? Who let the
Daylight seep away?
Traffic now glows
Under Halogen-lights’ flows
And blinding slit-eyed tears;
So without warmth,
So without care,
So Inevitable stare.
Birds squawk trees—
Braches must be bent from them,
Thick-black-feathered-leaves
The din is overpowering.
Fully away from the sun,
Even in this dividing time…
Inevitable.
Alone, alone and so
Very far from home;
To live in ellipses space
A bleak moment between
Here and there
It doesn’t matter where I am
People are people everywhere
Tall Chinese girl
Seems so unapproachable
Long legs, night-black hair.
All men must stare at her—
Untouchable, regrettable—
It’s all so Inevitable
Rain Falls
Rain falls without sound
I crouch alone
Under bamboo’s fringe
And watch the drops
Cry all around then
Smoke a silent cigarette
A stranger in
An island town
With only ember’s glow
To hear the sighs
Of this brave heart
In lonesome Singapore
I wish I had
A hand to hold
A naked neck to slowly kiss
Some hair to tease
And brush away
To frame her face and downcast lips
But on this lazy afternoon
There are two hands, no more,
So sits alone,
This one, brave heart,
In lonesome Singapore.
When Rats Come Out
You know it’s cool
When the rats come out
When the rats come out
In Singapore
When warm winds blow
And night wraps round
And tourist men
Have Found their whores
And loathsome
Rickshaw’s
Squeaky wheels no longer
Haunt and hunt the quays
The rats come out
The rats come out
In Singapore
When expat Brits
No longer brash
All in their beds do snore
Bar lights now dimmed
And Christian hymns
Will not be sung
For hours more
The rats come out
The rats come out
The rats come out
In Singapore
In this brief breath
Of quiet time
When busses do not roar
And rats feel safe
From prying eyes and ears
Of Singapore
They enter, apprehensive,
From the gutters