Blue dripping from the aerial nosering
Trying to shut out the forest fire
Jewels atomised in the dark air
Blurred in the reflection
In the milky still waters
Mountains haunted by glowworms
In crackling silence
The scene
Demented by the eyes
Overlooking
From the edge of the woods

It crawls
Into your ear
- when you've finally laid down your head over the grass cooled and numbed by the evening dew -
And eats away the last remaining shred of reality
Right behind your nose
Right below your eyes

How wonderfully it itches

You can't keep your hands off

The moment you lift up
It plunges you back into that wretched world of fantastic dreams

Every morning you are late for your share of reality

This is the time
When it hatches the eggs - the sleep-bug -
In different corners of your head

Where they wait
Wait for the right time
To execute their master plan
To take over
To control

It's it
It's it

If you close your eyes
And close your ears
You can hear them speaking in their
Carnivorous tongue in unison
The anthem of corruption.

Written on the fingertips like morning dew,
The regrets of the night past.
Furling around the grass beams
Uprooting
The screech.
Moistening the ear canal
With slow dripping spit,
And the sun drags down the noon
Air goes crazy in the skull.
Haunting voices
Waits for the crack.
An escape
Into the sins of the dark night
Waiting
Hunger like.

And at the crematorium.
We laid that very old body on fire woods. Put some woods on top of him. He let us lit him.
And he, with quiet crackling, burnt away.

I saw his flesh give a way through the bones.
I saw his hands burn up first then legs and then face, but feet were left out because he was tall.
So then we pushed them in the pyre.

Then we hit the burnt skull with the big bambu stick and huuuuptttttt it cracked. The pressurized brain matter, it just huuuuuptttt.
The 98 yr old brain, the 98 year old skull.
Our bodies were getting heat from his funeral pyre. A

And then burnt his pelvis and then chest.
That hip was faster than his chest, his heart.
He had 6 children, 10 grand children, 10 great grand children.

When nothing was left. The ashes from his pyre flew and settled on my head and shoulders, on all of ours heads and shoulders.

Now on the 12th day, in some ritual, priest will announce that this is the ritual which will cut the final cord with the dead person, for u all have to move on then.

Some will cry again. Some foundations will shake again. But priest will say, "All you can do is, LIVE AS HE HAD LIVED."

The knife cutter calls in the summer noon
on his bicycle he pedals his wheel
sharpens all that rust too soon
knives past prime too blunt to ****!

Glues his hair the sweat of roam
his cheeks bear long uncut beard
pray he finds a wanting home
that needs to sharpen not just word!

If comes his way a timeworn knife
he sits to roll the clunky wheel
works to feebly sustain life
bowing to the smallest deal!

He is no poet no skilled scribe
an old hand from a vanishing age
belonging to a losing tribe
that still gives knife cutting edge!

Since killed them the Diclofenac
vultures never came back
riverside carcasses in the sun dry
with not one long wing to swoop from the sky.

But vultures around me still abound
preying on the living thriving all around.