The hand-rickshaw may soon disappear from the streets of Calcutta but not everyone will be sad to see them go, as Judy Swallow reports…
At the Sweet and Tart Cafe a waitress accidentally stepped on a little white mouse beside our table. The mouse had the most horrible expression on its face. In slow convulsions it tried to will itself back to life— a life insignificant by our standards.
Steven wanted to leave because he couldn’t stomach the idea of mice running around the café. I wanted to leave because I couldn’t stomach the mouse’s expression as it lay there with its last measure of strength trying to will itself back to life, clinging on desperately.
‘The passion of all living things to live,’ I thought.
A waiter walked over with a broom and dust pan and swept the mouse away.
Everything seems rich and strange, transmogrified, holy.
∆ Appeared in Wild Poets: Magazine No. 5 “Arson” (Seattle)
∆ Appeared in Wild Poets: ‘best of’ (Seattle)
A Poem Lost
After climaxing for the first time three times in quick succession and learning that lovemaking can really be the sweaty primal holy blessing of trashy romance novels and exalted DH Lawrence poems, and after the fourth, which began as successively and seemed to move in infinite awesome strides beyond measure, in a hypnotic give and take, a pitter and patter of exultation and disbelief, illumination and death
I lay face down in a sheen of sweat in the cool world outside the blanket as she stroked my back in the most delicate sweeping gestures with slight fingers that till this day the thought of makes me tremble
I thought of the last solemn day of my journey across America after college: San Diego: the inexplicable old western town on the city’s edge where Mexican blankets in red yellow and white flare in the sun and the smells of dust, dried wood, tobacco and hot peppers pleasantly commingle, where I held on to my solitude while it pained and lashed out, like the adolescence of man, or the first throes of springtime, and everyone seemed as distant and inexplicable as the gestures of pacing speaking adults to a child, yet holy and dear
I thought of those solitary moments that seemed graceful and simple then, and now in a tunnel of nostalgia acquire an even fonder and more cherished quality: purchasing rolling papers, two bags of tobacco and a corn cob pipe from the infinitely distant and dear sales clerk with the antiquated visor and striped shirt in the oldtime tobacco shop unchanged since the days of DH Lawrence, sitting on the bench in the dust outside in the sun, rolling a cigarette while two Texan businessmen with large belt buckles on the bench beside strike up a conversation about how they, too, in youth rolled cigarettes like these, fine tobacco, and now in their old age have grown to smoking cigars: and Ah! how lonely I was, and how I marveled and exulted in my loneliness, and how one can so enjoy, can suffuse oneself in so much untainted pleasure from the simple act of rolling cigarettes in the sun, or watching a bird and eating an ice cream cone, or walking among the dust of the alleys of the antiquated western shops on the outskirts of San Diego, reading dubious passages from a Charles Bukowski collection, about Hemingway, and DH Lawrence, and thinking, that Bukowski! sometimes he’s full of shit, but you gotta hand it to him, simultaneously watching the red of the women’s scarves flash in the sun
I might have made a poem of this
but her touch was
too much
The past is a dream, the future a fantasy.
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