my Mumbai woman
~~~
to my Indian poets & friends
all be advised,
my piety, my muse,
has decamped me for weeks on end
to your
yon far and fair lands
the red dot beside her
electronic signature
a sign of her absence,
seemingly to have been
magically transferred
to her forehead
so perhaps my love poetry
will become absent, reticent,
quiescent
or perhaps
it will build brighter, effervescing
in my very own Taj Mahal,
an edifice built by great love past
and yet ever still present,
for I testify,
I have many times it,
seen imbued,
lovingly observed
between a certain
men and women here writ large,
who there permanent reside,
and in my heart as well
spend a minute many,
all my fingers and
toes employed
how many, so many,
Indian fellow travelers
on poetry lanes and yellow dust encrusted roads,
in cities unpronounceable
that this illiterate literary fool
has come to know and multi-arm entwine
to you,
I commend and command to you
her safety,
asking immodestly for
an imposition, an interference
pray to the local gods,
your heads of state and highest nature's,
that they be her
beside,
her unobserved
safe-keepers,
as she treks your country's
Northern pastures
let her skin glow from
your brighter rays,
eyes even wider~wiser opened
by the newness of your antiquity,
your glorious,
poetic place
in our world
of words