The Indian Guesthouse
| August 17th, 2010The Indian guesthouse
Claustrophobic, homophobic.
First left from yesterday,
The 3rd building on Melancholy Street.
Full of topless cloth merchants,
Leather merchants, spice merchants,
Salesmen, pimps. All rolled into one.
Running around in a mad frenzy,
Clutching their clean towels,
Hiding the dirty brains between
Hairy thighs.
Cheap whiskey and navy cuts,
Card games and temporary freedom,
Neatly stacked in a grey briefcase,
That was black once, like the hair.
Clutching tightly on the lux bar and
A trade secret, they queue outside
The common bathroom.
Undress self and her,
The young girl from train, who wore jeans,
Her round butt, pressed in their minds.
Masturbating in strange bathrooms,
Grimacing in strange, stained mirrors.
The Indian guesthouse with tiring long dormitory,
Rooms on both sides stinking of morality,
And the walls weakened by obscene laughter.
The half dead, old man with the bell,
Gnawing at the desk, at the cash counter,
At the shameful acts on the ancient floors.
Indifferent to new faces, to old faces.
Indifferent to all but keys and cash.
A half open door reveals an old couple,
Caught in thee act of died romance, died attraction,
Tied together with fine hopelessness.
The woman with all beauty lost to marriage,
combs her hair, drowned in shikakai odour.
The kids running up and down the aisle,
On the cocaine high of a new building, new city,
The high that will soon be a childhood memory,
Thought about from an office cubicle,
Or under a sweating husband, a few years hence.
The father worrying,
About buses, monies, tickets,
Mistress and thinking.
To say
‘I leave you. You gave me nothing but dinner and kids,
She gave me love and manhood’
Decides against. Hides behind the newsprint.
The Indian guesthouse,
Stripped of all glamour and gloss,
Stripped down to naked bricks
and Naked passions.
Of the rickshaw driver,
Smoking chillum full of anxiety and cheap hashish.
Staining the sheets with the waiter.
Their passion that smells wrong,
like burning hashish.
I too lie there,
behind a pale yellow door,
With spit stains and decorated with empty bottles,
Whiskey replaced by slurring abuses.
I mingle in the scenery of a lost toothbrush, a lost cell phone charger,
And a forgotten jug of water.
Clutching like sand on to the sunset on tar,
Last chai of the day, soft backache,
Another day lost or gained,
Clutching to all, like a mother,
Twirling my fingers
Around the neck of an ashen dream,
Lived every night in an Indian guesthouse.
