Flight

Years ago my mother wrote short stories about mice
who lived in the store room in Hatton.
It was magical yet familiar,
a dream set in all the intricate details,
smells and feel of home.
I was in the stories, and Appa and Ammi, Akki, 
Saras akka, my cousin Shehan 
and Subramaniam aatha the cook.
When I read them now the memories flood
back like a warm, inchoate blanket,
a winter duvet where the years
have gnawed little rips
and the occasional tear.
Sometimes I wonder
whether those days
were ever real.
Whether the vague terrors of childhood
have been smoothed over
with the velvet dust of years.
I try to grasp again the feel 
of cat’s whiskers on the back of my hand,
the smell of morning in Hatton,
as if nothing in the landscape had ever been touched.
Complex multi-layered bouquet
of crushed guava leaf,
thrill of chlorophyll like perfume...
as a kid, I remember smelling
it for minutes while in a tree.
Smoky crackle of twigs in the fireplace.
Uneven squeak of floorboards.
Scarred cane wood settees in the sitting room,
furniture we’ve had from before the riots of ‘83
smooth curves jarred by occasional old wounds 
exposing the innards of ivory-yellow wood.
Books on Marx and Engels and Mao,
next to a row of frayed Reader’s Digests,
some from the 70s.
I remember finding a biography of Neruda,
didn’t even know who he was
but was fascinated by the word sketches 
of his conquests of un-named women
in harvest fields.
Smiling, subservient faces of estate workers
with whom I couldn’t speak, my Tamil too halting. 
Even back then I knew vaguely of their grotesque poverty,
having to drink tea from a hollowed out half coconut
gristle still spiky on the outer shell,
breakfast a morsel of unleavened roti bread,
livened only by a bite of nai miris. 
Shallow walls of the tortoise enclosure,
residents trundling
in a constrained oval
jaws chewing in slow motion.
They laid an egg once, but nothing came of it.
Sterile white oval,
small work of flawed magic.
Five years later, 
In Rajagiriyra we lived upstairs
above the Bandaranaike’s.
I used to slide down 
the banisters of those stairs
for hours.
Dreaming up a dozen lives that I
thought I led. 
Always been like that. Always will be.
Living in my head.
Living in worlds 
I made for myself. 
Ten years later,  after we moved to Wattala
at lunch I used to read books, TV 
blaring in the background
and appa and ammi nearby, 
The smell of sambol, mallung salad, fried eggplant... 
would drift in the air, mingle with 
updates from Saras akka about food prices, 
our driver Appuhamy’s lectures on politics,
dog grunts and the smoothness of cats
lurking hopefully on chairs, waiting
for a piece of fish-bone with watchful eyes.
Now, in my own apartment in Clingendael
(watched by a fat Dutch pigeon 
on the balcony rail)
I read my mother’s poems.
She has that knack of catching colours
A painter’s eye.
Clear window that cuts through
mundane daily updates, stilted
language of emails.
I wish talking to family was always like this
Clarity and warmth in colour.
I remember as a child,
when left alone
I used to feel their absence
like I had been moved away from a hearth
like someone had tamped down the central heating.
Now, I’ve been away for so long
I have forgotten how
proximity floods the mind
with the fullness of warm silences.
A few days after I got married,
Krystyna and I had a chat.
She said when I arrived at the poruwa
surrounded by family, with my parents,
I had looked strong.
Different from how I usually look.   
The memory of it tightens my throat,
made me wonder whether being atomized 
had robbed me.
Whether flight from the cocoon
had made me a man but killed the boy
carved sharp lines
but emptied my veins
of some essence I can’t define.
Singha Road to San Francisco,
my family is an uneven web
splayed across the world.
They are like friends I made in early childhood,
chosen by proximity, not personality or chemistry.
But like childhood friends they have seen me
when I was a seed.
Before I put out leaf and grew tall
and bent and green and twisted.
Knew me  when my bones
weren’t hardened ,
when I was knobbly kneed.
They fit me like we’ve
spent time together 
in a womb
or a sardine can.
They are not my size and shape
but the concave in my body fits the convex in theirs.
The kinks in my limbs and the pointed ends of my mind
fit into familiar groves in theirs.
After some years, and a few thousand miles,
the groves and kinks have become unfamiliar
silted over by change and age
and exposure to  different
kinds of sunlight 
and wind.
Email and voices on a telephone, record
only imperfectly
this inching apart
like the blue-grey tint on a Hiace van's rear window
making the landscape on the other side
seem obscure, unreal.
Once you meet in a year or 
two, the differences
in face and skin and timbre
of voice 
and mind
are as disorienting
as  walking out of a dark cinema into daylight
or a shift in the tarmac beneath your feet
That’s it I think. The ground
beneath your feet.
When I see appa and ammi 
somewhere other than in Wattala
they seem strangely out of place
like people shipped in by time machine. 
One a Peter Pan in a world that doesn’t understand
the need for fantasy or crocodiles with clocks in their stomachs,
or the joy of crunching lettuce.
One a silent weight
of cigarette smoke and man-smell
blunt, true, scarred and brittle as old iron,
quiet as an empty room with someone
in a chair in the shadows.
While getting a haircut
I searched in the mirror  
for appa's and ammi's features.
The giant forehead perhaps.
Maybe the beginnings of my father’s nose
Akki has a big forehead too, 
although hers is round
and mine is oddly oblong.
Laabi writes of a nomad
who confuses one city with another,
one continent with another
gets tangled in tongues,  
of pounding on the bars of separation... 
No wonder emails don’t feel real.
They’re like a yoghurt cup on a string,
taken with you through
the wardrobe
in those Narnia books.
I wonder whether writing down
these thoughts will change things,
like breaking an ants nest to see within
or capturing an insect
to stick it on a cork screen.
But I don’t care.
I have no other way of holding on to those days
memories that wrinkle and deform
like fresh basil leaves overnight.
Intangible as evening light
beginning to fade
on a dirt road.

Ride

The Dala Dala crests a bump
swings in to pick us up.
Conductor hanging out the window.
Sliding door, bodies bulging
out of the broad opening
in the van’s flank.
Inside, a pool of faces, school uniforms
I search for space.
Next to the seats there are
smaller seats, that flip open,
and then there’s always the ledge
over the engine
where latecomers perch.
The conductor, thin youth,
bangs on the roof,
engine growls

Pavement begins

to go past...

Inside the Dala,
a young girl clutches her books, I
can’t help reading. Neat
numbered flow
of paragraphs, lines
A baby in a tiny hoodie
in her mother’s arms.
Tiny face
like a miniature
a painting an eggshell
drawn with the tip
of a thin brush.
Features so delicate
it’s almost as if my gaze
might bruise her skin

On the radio, someone

is singing about Arusha. Slow,

heavy bass beat. Hypnotic...

Warm,
vegetal smell of corn on the cob
drifting from the pot
of a woman squatting low in a corner.
by the side of a pewter pot,
black, on a clay cooker, flickering
licks of flame
and her chicken-wire grill
on which she watchfully turns
the half-cooked maize
once in a while.
Grey ash,
hidden gleam
of burning coal.
She is having dinner,
two banana’s
cooked in a stew.

“Sawa Sawa”

A boy on a motor-bike weaves
to avoid us, accelerates
into a dusty halo of tawny light
framed by the headlights
of oncoming traffic
like a caricature
in black ink.

The words

make me think

of a hammock’s

pendulum-

swing

A girl in her teens
has curled up on a chair,
just inside the verandah
of a small house.
She is texting.
Children pour out of Kijenge church
bounding about
with pent-up energy
like baby goats
or Dik Dik

Smooth voice

unseen mouth sculpting,

shaping syllables...

Bottles of beer
on the tables of a roadside bar
men sitting on plastic chairs
dusk softening
their outlines.
Past a cobbler’s bench, (three planks
arranged in a triangle,
surrounded by slippers
of colours.) and a sugar
cane cart, with small rustling
see-through bags of chopped
sugar-cane hanging
from its corners.

...of Swahili like whorls of clay on

a potters wheel,

ductile, clipped...

A heavy bodied old woman
climbs slowly off
with her wares in a big plastic bag
She rests a moment on the roadside,
to catch her breath.

...and round at the same time

speeding up into rap, staccato...

The conductor’s (fake?) leather jacket
is loose on his thin shoulders
coming apart at the seams
under his left arm. I
wonder how much he takes home
when he and the driver split
the crumpled 500 tsh notes and worn
coins, after paying the boss.
He tells me
he went to school near Njiro
where I live.
Failed out two years ago.
He is shy about his broken English

...then slowing to a lilt.

Hip-sway. Pouring

oil.

A gaggle of girls run across the Kijenge bridge
to dodge traffic. Bags heaving,socks flashing.
Past the bridge,
A pane of glass leans against a wall.
Colours gleam incoherent.

The speakers have seen better days,

they vibrate, I

keep wanting to move

to the beat

tap my foot on the engine casing.

The voice fades, leaving

thumping bass

and I think of Ebenezer…

(at the orphanage that I visit
sometimes on Saturdays, there
is a kid called Anderson
he likes to sing a song
called Ebenezer,
shouting out the chorus.
When we sang, it was the first time
I saw him grin)

 I hum the tune

My conductor friend,
mostly silent
“ssss”es through his teeth
to bait more prey
there is good hunting today, people
standing, ambling near a shoal of picki picki bikes
beached by the side of the road.
He tempts a young girl
With the promise of a seat

We pick up speed,

bumps come thick and rapid.

Sudden yaw, engine

roars up an embankment

bumpy with balding, rocky outcrops.

A woman sweeps the road
with a brush broom (twigs
emerging wild
and uneven),
in a billowing
shroud of dust
as cars roar by
How unlike
the robot
that they plug-in
to clean the pool
at the Impala Hotel
where dust is not even a memory
and traffic a comforting rumble
beyond the palms.

...and then we bank, rickety

getaway plane,

down a dip

back onto to flatness

of asphalt

The mud has spread
on the uneven metal floor,
in glistening patterns.
A hole in the door exposes
its metallic innards.
The door-handle is a stub, a
digit from a long dead
rusting, metal creature.

Music is pounding

from a tiny shack

with CDs on its walls

A girl leans in past the counter to browse
tall, graceful body. A
sewing machine surges, slows
to speed of a women’s
pedals. She guides
the dipping needle
along a patch of fabric.

We accelerate

past Kijenge

Outside,
a child pauses,
hops over a puddle

Swing away

tramp steamer, rusty

steering hard a-port

in a choppy,

rising swell

of dust and rut...

Four toddlers in a row, past my window,
little brown peas in a pod
Hair so short they’re
almost bald
eyes shiny,
luminous with curiosity.
Next to them, their mother is tall and still
Silent sentinel.
For a moment I am envious
(always a stranger
in a strange land
spirit tugged from Clingendael
to Colombo, Sydney to San Francisco…)
of their warm, intangible
cocoon.

...overtaking a line of traffic,

bounding over potholes

like a galloping beast of burden.

Smoke plumes flare
from the exhaust of the Dala Dala ahead
into a grey flower
that disperses.
At Mister Button
a young boy sits behind his sewing machine,
reading the paper
with his fellow tailors.
Smooth-faced
beautiful woman
selling peanuts. A child tugs
at her dress, tiny baggy pants
mottled with dirt.

We pull-up

near the clock-tower roundabout

The Swahili hesitates on my tongue
But I say shuka hapa

Step out
into the fading light.

Love Song for Hemingway's Town

Thinning

fronds of canal-

side trees

like uneven

strands of white hair

on an old woman’s head.

Tendrils

like veins in leaves

tiny blood vessels 

spreading away from trees

bared by winter

Fatness of pigeons, fullness

of Ugg boots.

Texture of tree bark

posters fading on garbage cans

misshapen saddle-bags on the backs of bikes,

asymmetrical.

Icy puddles on the road, treacherous, 

as sudden as XTC or a

blow to the head  

dips and valleys

unusual surface of Clingendael roads, like

the hide of some giant leviathan

on whose back I ride. 

Cycling through Clingendael

reminds me of Lindsey Stirling videos, 

There is one of her playing violin

and dancing at some sort of dumpsite

or an abandoned building at the foot of some hills.

The buildings are derelict

Grafitti in big blue spiky letters, leaves and vines

mixture  of the delicate

and rough, of smooth and grit…

I’ve always liked opposites and contrasts,    

Juxtapositions

and their in-betweens 

rasp and quaver

in a crows croak

cobalt blue of street signs, straight and true but

rounded at the edges

Loud arguments of water birds

A trunk so covered in light green moss

that it looks like it spent all eternity on its side.

Rank vegetal decomposition

in the back of a dumptruck.

Bike leaning on a lamp-post, an

Albert Heijn bag as a seat cover.

Old dirty canvas draped

over rusting corrugated metal fencing.

A duck cuts diagonally across canal scum

like a windscreen wiper. 

I pass a swan’s nest  (and then

the “verboden voor honden” signs

begin to make sense)

They’re both there. One on the nest,

one nearby, shifting muddy leaves

with its large beak.

Two crows peck

near the sleeping swan. Its neck

thick as a rope

used to tie ships to a quay. Sinuous

as a mating snake. 

There’s been a bicycle parked, locked, by a tree in the woods

I wonder who it belongs to,

Whether it  belongs to anyone at all,

Pale light on water, like beaten metal

Water-side reeds, dead leaves gone wheat-beige

There is a gentle, fragile magic to these woody lanes

That you only notice when your mind is quiet

Brick roads and gentle arched bridges

Spreading out in a lazy patchwork,

Know only to water birds

and dogs,

a pulse of life so slow

you won’t hear it

unless you wait for it or

of there is static on the line.

The web of tree shadows

is sometimes the only reminder

of the pale

imperceptible light

of early spring.

Sharp spikes and small curved windows

of clock towers,

marred sometimes by the ugly squatness

of new buildings (themselves softened

by the presence of toddlers

on supermarket trolleys being wheeled to cars)

(and by the curves of brick side-walks

made gentle, deformed,

by weather and age

and by the irregularities in the cement paving on bike paths)

all in a rhythm so imperceptible   

that you must slow down

breath slow

to feel.

Sometimes I wish I had a broader lens

So I could take in more of this tapestry

of embroidered light

that glides by.

Fly into nooks that dip 

between hillocks and crannies in canopies

like a video camera strapped to a toy plane.

Capture liquid notes of bird sound,

note by note,

in intricate, exquisite detail like

etchings in jewellery or the folds of a robe in an old painting. 

A swan cuts the set-gel surface

of the Haagse-bosjes pond

like a knife-tip through the pimpled skin of sago pudding,

it docks by the pond-side, white, minature

carnival float.

Trees flowering 

in powdery bursts of white and pink, 

Shock of yellow leaf.

I wish I could set this scenery to music,

it would be such a potpourri, a tapestry of sound

so detailed, so rich, so sensory I overload 

with the grass and the ducks and the trees and the benches and the mailman in a red

jacket, and cars parked in a line I wonder

what sound would represent the car      

quick smooth vowel notes like

sea-turtle eggs being laid

slippery globular slide and plop

as they pass

cyclists could be a sibilant whizz

like the sonar signature of a small 

metallic creature

in the sea.

Feathers would be barely audible

and a nesting swan

would be a long, low, wind-tone.

latent menace, tenderness.

Rapid murmur of smooth grass passing

flowerbeds tinkling like a field of tiny wind-chimes 

weeds anarchic, bushy broken sine-curves

parked scooters, swift, small whooshes of air-stream.

Lithe women in jeans, slow

rhythmic swaying beats

on broad-hipped low-

voiced drums.

Pockmarked paving, sunken gratings, tiny

puffs and coughs.

Lorries and trucks, trundling elephant-sounds

Trees, rustling so complex 

you couldn’t write them down.

Intersections like a herd of wildebeest 

crossing a river in high season,

brakes likes squeals 

of calves, 

and beasts caught

in the jaws of crocs.  

This morning,

passing a church disgorging

its faithful, I saw an old lady

She was holding a sprig of some leaves,

spare, like pine.

Legs that no longer taper, stockings 

weaving, staggering walk,

Like Maggie Thatcher

in The Iron Lady

talking to herself,

to the dead in her head

grip on the moving mosaic of

time and place,

loosening.

Watching her made me want, desperately

to peg everything

onto paper 

While my mind

still has a gecko-foot-

-grasp 

On the canvas of the past. 

Roti and other memories

Tea was made hot and sweet, back at home, a strong, almost cloying concoction that I can rarely replicate over here. We had some coffee plants at the bottom-end  of the L-shaped garden. They would be plucked sometimes, seeds extricated and dried, occasionally the drying beans would show signs of mould or fall afoul of a passing spray of cat piss. The beans that survived would be ground. Made into, grainy, earthy, cups of coffee. Nowhere as smooth as instant coffee. But I miss it now. In a way that I will never miss Nescafe, or my caffe latté, latte macchiato, espresso macchiato, ristretto etc today.

Amina Saïd in her poetry

talks about weaving a carpet of memory

My carpet is patchy, fraying at the edges…

Thosai, eaten hot off the pan. Appa used to eat thosai on the little pantry table,  next to the kitchen, and not in the dining room, so that he could get them hot and eat them before the cooled. He used to get annoyed when they lost warmth. Saras akka was an expert with the thosai ladle. First she would take a ladle-full, from the thosai mixture. Pour it in a broadening spiral on the hot iron surface, then smoothen it in another spiral. She would make two varieties. Cooked on a flat black slab of iron.  One was a sedate, soft, pancake-like creature. The second was a glistening piece of magic, slathered with a coat of oil and cooked to a crisp so that the bits crackled in your mouth as you chewed. Sometimes she used to cook them with ghee, and those days were heaven. 

I could write poems, books, about ghee. It adds flavour to anything, subtle, aromatic. As if someone melted butter, mixed it with some magic herb. They call it unrefined butter. Perhaps that is what adds the flavour, the impurities, the bits and bobs of unknowns. (like what I imagine the flavour of kassippu liquor to be, brewed in the jungle, derived from whatever falls into the barrel). Or maybe that's not what unrefined means. Anyway, sometimes, on special occasions, you get the hint of ghee in fried rice, lubricating the slide of grain against grain… shiny on thosai…perfuming the decadent softness of Bombay sweets…

Roti. We often used to eat roti. Thin, unleavened bread. A hard pancake of cooked dough. When the roti is hot, scrape a bit of butter on, it begins to melt. Twisting-off pieces, sopping up hodi (gravy) on one’s plate. Maybe scooping up some dhal, add a smidgeon Katta Sambol for spice. In my head I can smell wafts of molten butter, mixed with the coconut in the dough, rising up, mixing with the thick, wholesome, milk-gentle fragrance of dhal… The thought of dhal reminds me of Cadju curry. Piles of cashew plucked, separated from the fleshy fruit, dried and cleaned, cooked in coconut milk until their raw crunch softened into a milky chalk-soft creamy texture. They’d be cooked with peas that would bob about amongst the cadju and rupture in a juicy burst upon biting, or disintegrate.  Sweeter, more vegetal than the cadju.

…and Poll (coconut) sambol. First you use a coconut scraper, (there’s a place called Odiris that makes them), to scrape a decent pile of coconut, holding the half-coconut steady while you turn the handle of the scraper, round and round. Then you mix in chili, lime, and umbalakada - maldive fish – and mix it about, adding in a pile of chopped onion. Its all mixed up until it is a small mound, fluffy, in a bowl. When eaten with bread, or perhaps even roast paan (small, lightly roasted loaves) and spicy fish hodi, with the onion crunching it is indescribable. The savoury-ness of the dried fish adding depth to the chili. and the lime a slash of tartness, mixing in with the other flavours. The bread giving body and chewy-ness, the hodi an infusion of spicy liquid. Smooth, savory heat. (One of the joys of traveling in Sri Lanka is eating in dodgy places, or semi-dodgy places. Once on a long drive back from Yala, Nimalan, Anojan, S and I stopped at a “hotel”, half constructed, ordered food. I remember having the most amazing sambol. Fluffy, infused or rubbed with just enough chili, finely chopped onion, occasional, unexpected pleasure of Umbalakada.) I could eat it for hours. 

The Sinhalese name for eggplant is batu - but there are several other batus. Thalana batu, an almost-bitter vegetable the size of a billiard ball, but oval. There is a smaller batu, called thibbtatu. Tiny, as small as a blueberry, tough and green and it grows in a little bush. I think we had one in Wattala. When cooked the right way, with the little berries split open, (perhaps they open during cooking)  there is a salty, savoury weight of flavour, as if it were meat or fish. Another delicacy were the meaty chunks of madu-maalu, flat-fish. Eat, bites cleaving, viscous glide  of each morsel, cartilage crunched effortlessly. Saras akka used to make Iddli, in her iddli pan, like short, thick flying saucers, small doughy clouds that would disintegrate as you swirled them in Sambhar  (spicy vegetable gravy.) (I used love the way they served sambhar in grungy, dirty Saiver shops – ladling it out of stainless steel buckets).

In Hatton town they used to sell Umbalakada wadai. Small fried dough-cakes with a chunk of umbalakada on top. I walked into Uncle Sivalingam’s house one day, eating one. He said I was like my father, who would eat food sold anywhere on the street. I remember feeling vaguely proud, of being thought of as classless. And maybe more importantly, of being like my father.

Loft

At the very apex of Wattala House, accessed through a small spiral, iron staircase, is a small room with many windows. When we were desigining Wattala house together, we had meant it to be a loft room where you could close the rest of the world away with a trap door, and survey the land around the house. It looks interesting as you approach the house. Creates a long, narrow swathe of white wall  from roof to ground, smudged now here and there with the green of mould. Long windows, all round. Art-deco minaret. An atheist’s steeple. Silent pulpit where sermons can waft into the head. 

Like many a random childhood dream, it didn't exactly work out. The electrician didn't put in a connection for a fan (I remember him now, large and rotund, unruly hair and hirsute body like a somewhat gormless bear). I never did use it to hang out. Maybe it was too small a room to do anything with.  Now it is the Colombo version of Hatton's Lata Pata (junk) room full of odds and ends and bits of things that don't fit anywhere else Disassembled pieces of double beds. Now that I think of it, they're the skeleton's of trees  like bits of people, that survive over millenia. Bones. If I was there now, would the air smell different up there, if one stayed long enough?  Would birds come in and nest in the lattice-work above the windows if I didn’t make too much noise?

I wonder what I could do with the place. Fit in a table and a bean bag? Watch the back yard, watch who walks up and down Singha road. Watch uncle Bandula get drunk and start shouting at people on the road or at imaginary enemies.  Run my hands over the smooth ridges of the closed trapdoor, enjoy being away from the world, like when I’m wearing earphones.

Perhaps someday far off a child of mine

will explore, in the loft room, now that I am too old

too set in the matrix of adulthood

for play

Back from Home

The air and the cold is unfamiliar

upon my return.

The sameness of the houses

and the dull colours

remind me of my first trip to England.

The bike takes turns slowly and awkwardly

in my hands.

For a brief moment I wonder what side
I should ride on.

My face hurts with the cold,

All is dark and sharp and angular.

There has been no gradual fade from warm to cold,

from soft, muggy air to harsh and clear.

Only a jarring change.

(I prefer in-betweens, and slow fades

like how Christian Spain fades into

what used to be Muslim Spain and then to

Morocco, across the sea)

I try to remember Colombo,

the stickiness of sweat

 - between my fingers - in
a film across my face. Rain -
thunderous,
soporific thrum,
rustling impacts on wet,
glistening leaves,
saturated earth...
The trip home (home?) 

feels like a blur of memories

even when I was there I

had trouble grasping onto things

events happening so fast, so chaotic, so

without control

that I couldn't get a grip,

couldn't take a photograph
in my mind, put
things into any logical order or

into neat boxes
of wrong and right.
Ammi and Appa  are to the right of me, to

the left of me, below me and above
me, I try now to remember
moments of communication, 
common ground.

The conversations we had, the three of us
sitting in a solemn circle on the balcony,
(Appa tells me to be careful when I enter
because the parrots are feeding)
in the growing dark,
me slapping away mosquitoes, real and
imagined with one of appa's handkerchiefs
that I took off a rack

Appa tells me

how he had been brought down to Ragama

as a child

How his family came from Malaysia

the travels of his grand uncle

[censored]

ammi talks of how she and appa met, how her parents reacted, at first,
how they ended up in the same office,
just out of law college,

[censored]

Ammi is so apprehensive

about my impending

departure

About me being a ghost

That there is almost nothing that I can say

to help

Only inanities

Often I feel as if I have nothing to share
or maybe no time to share

no space for it in my head or theirs

The Colombo  lifestyle beckons seductively,

colours to see,

smells

to smell, not like 

this icy

city

(although, this early winter morning

in the Hague as I head to work, steam 

or smoke

rises slowly

from a building,

and the light is soft  

there is a spare, gentle beauty 

in the skeletons of trees

and the delicate sun.

Smell of manure slowly makes its way

through the cold, still air)

Insidious?

so many people, so poor, so
at beck and call, doormen who open doors,  people to

pack one's grocery bags, push one's elevator buttons  

drivers to drive....

(I remember looking at the way I was dressed, and looking at the way A was dressed,
how new my clothes were, how tattered his clothes were)

....cooks to cook.

The nostaligia and

displacement

(or at least the burning

edge of it)

will last only a few days

After which I will

re-submerge

into routine

back to the quotidian

out of the flow

of the jar and judder and sideways leap of

creative life

No warp no woof no deviation 

No colour no spark that does not fade

over the day

the teeth in the wind will drive away
all memory

of heat and dust
and moisture

(I

know

that some of this is man-

-made handmade by me the hand

maid of my own

dark mate) 
Its funny how I am two different men

in Colombo and The Hague

Back home my brain

is a storm

of multi-coloured sand

in my mouth and in the trees

the road and

in the sound of bees

here it is  

is a merry-go-round

faded grey

Is neither me?

Perhaps one place

throws into sharp relief the other.

Makes the cold keener on this side, thickens
the smoke and dust

on the other.

Trundling routine  vs chaos. Deafening silence vs cacophony.
Middle-class

mundane-
ity vs grotesque
disparity...

Perhaps
I’m just painting

two straw men

Perhaps being a stranger

in both places make me blind

to the gentle, pleasing

in-betweens 

(and oh the sky is beautiful

It reminds of those fleeting

moments at the edge of consciousness

drunk with music, alcohol, or emotion)

Perhaps instead of a dirge I need a love song

(I started reading Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return

to the Native Land and

was taken aback by his bitterness

did not feel like reading on)

Maybe be
like Frank McCourt who

could laugh

about his Limerick childhood

where his baby brother had to drink, instead of milk,

for lack of money, sugar water

given by a friendly barman.

Dip beneath the veil, feel

the face of everyday 

Enough Gemini.

Time to return,

Sagittarius.

Time to feel

the roundness of cobblestones. 
(A man in front whistles while

dragging a bag through sleet)

Through the hoof

on every cleat.