Kashi

Kashi goes to sleep at 10 o'clock piously
Kashi rises before dawn to hail Mother Ganga
Kashi wakes the tourist with laundry-thwapping
Kashi scars images into my mind
of burning flesh, a dead man's foot
like a roast chicken over open flame

Kashi bathes in heavy metal deposits
Kashi sneezes sinus infections of pollution
Kashi rickets thru narrow streets on rickshaw
bike heaved thru burning sun in traffic ocean
Kashi layers and births itself upon itself
like so many past lives revisited
It has so many names

Kashi where fleets of tourists set out at dawn
in 100 Rs. boats through seas of salesmen
Kashi where night is suffocating silence of
black alleys, star studded black sky
Kashi where capillaries open to vast stairways
Kashi where the Ganga stretches on forever

Kashi where guest houses crowd ontop guest houses
pile up over the Ganga like suckling children
like the markets, thousands of people
crowding around various shops, tea stands

Kashi where pilgrims walk without shoes
the ground here to holy to be trodden
on bare feet over cow manuer
Kashi where men gag themselves repentantly
at the edge of the river, shit in bathing water
piss all over the ghats

Kashi where the holy men cover themselves
in funerary ash, and eat bits of the dead
Kashi where the insipid fear of tourists is used
as a scam, to suck them dry like ATMs.

Kashi where men pluck, gouge, shave, clip, preen
like a beauty salon under a rag-umbrella
like the ancient baths of Budapest.
Kashi where the city's piled up on one side
and there's only silt on the other
at night there's nothing on the other bank
only a great black expanse at 3AM

Kashi where the Holy Trident of Shiva stands
Kashi where the Holy Fire is kept burning
Kashi that is two thousand years old
Kashi the city that Shiva made