Days cyclic as Rangoon traffic turning so many yugas of hostaged

           time, at any node of its unraveling a thousand words ransomed

to a thousand other gods of perfect memory. Jaundiced light at the

           edges of uncounted towns, dogs and barbershops, old men

with tinned food in their hands, people on bicycles looping

           between potholes on roads that cross India, China, places

between designation, unrepresented in official-worldese.

           A woman stretching to reach a single papaya on a tree, the

birds that rise up when the boys on bikes take the billowing

           curtains of daylight into greying fields and palm tree groves,

the solitary shrine with its dripping candle, the coitus of gods

           kept close in the sanctum where none can overhear them,

ringing bells, ringing bells, in the dusk, through the night…
Who saw any of it, from some concealed place? All the worlds

           that swam into view, and receded. The half-demolished buildings,

engorged moon hung low and pregnant with an unshed blood, past

           midnight at the provincial station where in a yard of broken glass a

girl showed the amnesia pubis under her skirt and motioned a stranger

           to come. Who saw the theatre minus all spectators, calling from some

other barely-held frame, trains racketing through plural globes of life

           untouching, unrelated but contiguous in some apparent space, boys with

soccer-balls, girls singing within earshot of a warzone, days before their

           wooden stilt-houses slid down the mountainside. Office-workers on

the suburban lines didn’t read it in the thumb-smudged papers left on

           seats behind the morning rush. Umbrellas against the radium glow of

premature sun, cobbler of sweat putting new paan in his mouth, become

           a master of knees and torn, rain-washed newsprint. In some places no-one

could ever cross the streets, you must stand and wait a lifetime, guarantees

           in hand, letters of recommendation to an eyrie in the air on the 19th floor…
Who would reach there, or if reaching fail to unburden wings and fly across

           to Macau or Rio de Janeiro, or somewhere that had never yet featured in a

motion-picture for stateless driftlife? Still the woman who cut coconuts

           for iced-drinks had I.D. papers in a curbside drawer, and spoke to the

delivery-boy with the benefit of only five teeth which she counted on

           large, saurian fingers. Not too far away her incoherent daughter who

walked epicycles around the house and only for brief moments gazed out

           a window at the passing clouds. To passersby she was a piece of brittle,

frayed wire. Would she have a funeral? The delivery-boy might know,

           or the half-sized man who lived at the bus-station, with no arms on his

ironing-board torso. His neck and missing shoulders were the same part

           of delicate plank with a chess-piece head on top, the head of a pawn who

had only ever moved ahead, one step at a time. There was another habitué,

           carrying a dozen shopping-bags who whirled around him like a satellite,

an exotic, large, plastic Chinese bird, space-eyes a-flutter. All in space,

           cycling in wide concentric circles, the traffic alone a certainty in the

flux. We’d never fly to Rio but it was the notion alone that counted…
Words were everywhere, to be sold on street-corners, in bunches

           beside enormous flowers and fruit-towers, girls with rafflesia mouths

and kohl-rimmed assurances. The rain came down, came down, on our

           mutual parade. Honeyed light at the edges of the fields, gongs sounding

at the beginning and end and in the middle, bodies moving and turning

           through time that as it rang had no foundation. Whatever happened next

was something that had happened before. You swam, saw and cycled like

           a water-dragon through liquid forests of event, some luck, much death

and home-coming. In the mirrors of the tea-shops, the coffin sweatshops,

           in the gold-markets and trinket stores the aging eyes and teeth and death’s

heads looking through, right at you, smell of decay between your feet,

           incense rising at the temples and the humid mirrors full of happenstance or

possibility, each branching-off a tributary of another, not truly replicated,

           nothing so certain or perfect, never fractal in the repeating but repetition

itself that would every sun-blinded morning recur and recur and recur,

           vertiginous blur of prismatic lives in the markets and roadsides and

foodhalls, allcomers to the feast, primeval dog-headed servants at the gates

           letting the guests through. Megaphones announced it, bells ringing through

the night, the various marriages and their blessings amplified through rubbish

           laneways and you passed, you passed through to another place, another

town, uncounted, unsought after those that had come before …