Last section of the last part of Dog Soul World Beat Solo in 9 Parts: Voyage to India . . . Updating the Map Incognita

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Soul Dog

My soul is a dog that everyone wants to take for a walk on a leash --

leash woven from the tears of the Holy Slut of Sorrows
leash of post-Newtonian physics
leash assembled in poetry sweatshops protected by the National Guard
leash equipped with a doggie GPS
leash of the newest ofay slanguage

I am the soul that is the dog that everyone wants to take for a walk on a leash

see the nice gardens they tell me
don’t shit in the gutter they instruct
pee by this tree they beg
here’s a little doggie biscuit they giggle
here’s the dog park they shout take off your leash for a minute go for a run

I am the soul-dog that woofs in the night
I am the soul-dog that slobbers on piano keys while a gangbanger performs cunnilingus on the soprano in the closed opera house
I am the soul-dog on whose back locusts ride
I am the soul-dog’s bared teeth detached from its body and falling like hail on the moon
I am the soul-dog at night shitting on your street scratching your front door crying out for everything I can’t find

All night I prowl and hunt down unsuspecting prey in the furthest reaches of the towns and cities I love
In the morning I bring back my kill
I bury it in the back yard beneath power lines that stretch beyond the old gristmill and beyond Anand Works in Vijaynagar above the road where a dog barks at speeding lorries piled with sugarcane stalks

By noon my first visitor has arrived at the front door
may I take your soul for a walk on a leash she beseeches

I smile she takes her life in her hands my soul on a leash

5 poems currently at Alternative Reel.

Prelude to a prayer

Bent over, Nazma whiskbrooms the tiled floor,
sweeping, along with the dust, a chapati crumb, as weighty
as a lost epoch,
from the corner.
"Who's that playing flute on the CD?"
"It's the radio," Dada answers Kunda.
The TV sound is off, but the picture’s on;
Serena loses the serve.
Four months after the monsoon, the buffalo pond
has shrunk to nothing.
Nazma stands in doorway sunlight, looking out.
Still not 9 a.m.
Further north, separists blow up
a police vehicle in Kashmir
while here the coo-coo sings to Nazma from a custard apple branch

-- excerpt from What the Bird Tattoo Hides

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Three of my poems are in current (October) issue of Underground Voices. Check them out.

-- written almost 40 years ago

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Letter to Gary Tartakov in the form of a ghazal
Dharwar, 1973

The gulmohar flower’s red isn’t tenuous.
And back home? The war’s still ridiculous.

Cut off from everything I know, I need
things to do. But nothing vacuous.

The beetle eats a hole in the rose leaf.
Each bite is violent. And sensuous.

Miracles grow teeth outside God’s empty house.
Lamb and lion fuck, the lily’s seditious.

The Malaprabha river sings in my heart.
It’s tone, as it should be, is sumptuous.

Cut off from home and what I know, I’m at home.
You taught me to honor the incongruous.

My own foreign policy is simple:
to bring the giant down, be meticulous.

from "Beginning with the beauty of the world"

We stepped off the bus
into rain-pummeled mud. Violently
rushing streams of runoff water
gurgled everywhere
like nonstop thoughts
in a mind unlikely to

regain self-control soon enough to ever
find sanity again. Trudging
down the alley adjacent to
the Parsi Fire Temple I saw a dog

drag a dead rat from a puddle
like a man extracting
hope from a murk of words. The squall

was bad everywhere. Hours earlier

further north

a roiling river washed out
bridge pilings, preparing the way
for 3 trucks and 7 cars

to plunge into
the seething below. All this
after the previous night when

no one knows how many families, lucky
to escape alive from huts
destroyed by the flooding Vedaganga River

-- near Chikkodi
where the sugar refineries are --

were housed in a muddy tent colony
at the edge
of whatever happens next. Still

is isn’t
a bad season. The smell

of monsoon flowers is so thick that it almost
chokes you to death, a perfect
erotic asphyxiation, the or-

gasm coming when
wind and rain make the lavender balsam flowers
in the field shiver while the white
snake lily refusing to take no for an answer
finally battles its way into
an anus or vagina. It’s then

that you see how
the future sits

-- stilly, like a drab Chiasmia moth
without even a hint
of a quiver in its wings --

on a leaf
in grand mindless meditation
on all the things
it brings to the table but doesn’t
care enough about to cease

even for a second

the way it luxuriates
in the rain.