Three Bombay Poems

- I -

Bombay: A Paranoic Critical Landscape

Marine Drive at Oberoi's feet

The Arabian lapdog holds in its teeth

Tetrapods of the sheriff's shit.

A grasshopper bred in the municipal waste

Guards the entrance slits

Of Kamatipura's mannequins

While the Kotharis and Giladas

Collect entry fees

Ten million scavenger ants dream

Their delirious dream

Of feasting on the chief minister's

Succulent ,gelatinous body.

The red smoke of AK 56

Rises in concectric circles

Inside the Amul butter domes

Of its Gothic heritage buildings

From the cigarette and country liquor halitosis

The satanic verses of the

Rigveda invoke a somnolent Mumbadevi

Irani restaurants and their

Black tentacled vegetarian crabs

Glare behind the ailments

Who collect money for Ganesh

Parents break coconuts

On Tuesday nights inside

The Contractor's obscenity

Called Siddhi Vinayak for

Topping in courses that taught

Their wards how to pee

Just like their fathers did.

At the Worli seaface

A Titan quartz melts

In sadistic copulation

With a sterile virgin from Mahim

Suburban Boddhisatvas check out

Against the rock cunts of Bandra's bandstand

The third phallus they bought

to substitute their two-inch complexes

On Gokulasthami

Puttanas fan out in the gullies

Suckling proliferating foetuses

With growl tiger's bile

After a meal of Deonar's asuras

Bhima farts an ammonia yellow

In nuclear Chembur

While Benazir burps her

Crescent green in Bhendi Bazar

Red is the cheapest colour

White is superabundant

In a billboard painter's

Raved exhibition at Jehangir.

Over this mulch of oneiric ecstasy

The rainbow -coated fruit-fly

Buzzes a Bollywood tune.


- II -

Colored bats

Colored bats await customers

in their shreds of the night

on the lighted streets

of sin steamed Bombay

bloodred lips, shiny handbags

high heeled attempts to rise

above the routine leasing

of insensate pubes

lathi wielding voyeurs of law,

rust genitalled drunks

bawling bastards at home

and, of course, inflation

sometimes, hanging from ceilings

the coloured bats leave

their shreds of private darkness

in search of the universal pimp


- III -

Street Sepulchre

Cow's eye fatalism

Of those led to slaughter

In matador tempos

Chameleon cats

That raise by a millimeter

Topography of inner city streets

Thick skinned forgiveness

Of rats that leave

Only tails on the tar

Street death has a peculiar habit

Of squeezing out grace

From ugly worn torn bodies.

Authors Note: The first poem is essentially an attempt to do in verse what Salvadore Dali did in painting his surrealistic paintings. Those who know of it need no explanation...but for those who do not...I want to say that the essential part of Dali's often "publicity seeking" and truly spurious brand of surrealism, used an excess of disparate imagery, scatology and anti-establishment activism as its warhead. I write this to merely seek understanding from readers about the intent.