It's Been a Rough Couple Days

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Bombay, your streets are honking

and I cannot sleep.

Your nighttime parades of drunkenness,

arguments, inexhaustible vendors.

Bombay, I am exhausted.

Will you stop

for your beggars,

looking for food or limbs they once had?

Or, for the furrowed brows of your foreigners?

No,

Because you too must be exhausted.

With your 17 million mouths,

your crammed and makeshift homes.

The crevices in your streets--

not fit for much,

but now the foundation

for generations.

There goes another child,
whose smile
forces mine.

Bombay, your stray dogs are innumerable;

All with tired eyes and street coloured fur,

and limbs that don’t seem to carry them.

They are carried by and to the trash on the tracks.

(Where do they go?

Where do they come from?)

Bombay, even on your best days

You wake me with a heavy grey sky.

Bombay, I cannot get a good look at you through this air.

I will not even be able to look into your mouth

Before it swallows me whole.

Bombay, from my flat (a room with a fridge)

I see your sea-- endless

of ancient trade routes and present day fisherman.

green    red    blue    orange    brown 

shifting boats and shifting men.

Who leave their homes

Into the streets that are like a thumping pulse

to the country’s veins.

Where the cabs are older than I,

But not as old as you, Bombay.

These cabs hug incongruous buildings,

Of the Portuguese, of the British,

Of plunder and defeat,

And now of deterioration.

But something beautiful comes with their age,

And with you, Bombay.