Doshi - A God at the Door

The stormtroopers of my country love their wives but are okay to burn what needs to be burnt for the good of the republic often doing so in brown pleated shorts and cute black hats with sticks and tear gas and manifestos of love for cows for heritage for hard Hindu burning devotion for motherland tongue its all good their pants are buckled unbuckled brown shut up this is serious this country will stick it to infiltrators imprison traitors love neighbours with the right papers you know burn baby imagine a country a house on fire good gen z millennial kids good upstarts brown denizens whove discovered their rights are sticks are legs to walk the streets dearly beloved we are gathered here as effigies to burn standing up so take your anti-citizen laws good sir good government ha ha off-colour joke brown out shit I wish we had the internet because sticks may break us but this is a revolution of love like the 60s gauchistes hate me but dont burn public property really sir you promised us good governance but the evidence is mounting of brown soldiers massacring brown shops mosques stick with the pogrom atrocity death march love march no such thing as a clean termite to burn is to purify oh our culture so ancient so good were in the thick of the swastika now no brow beating will divide us together we must stick

My loneliness is not the same as your loneliness, although they send each other postcards and when they meet they relax enough to nap on each others sofas.

Ive never felt more alone than when I was being burgled, our bodies facing one another, the burglar and I. Can I help, I asked but really, what I was saying was, stay, dont leave. You say youre sometimes jolted awake by the horror of eating animals, how most mornings it passes, but once, you walked downstairs to find a watermelon had exploded on your table, all that rotten red froth seeped through the tablecloth and even though I understood this explosion exploded something in you, that it has to do with bodies yours and mine, the animals, the watermelon, the burglar, the thread between us, I could not reach for your hand, could not say, dont live among strangers. They say it starts in childhood, or being alive in a large country where all the roads are empty and lead in. They say go east, go west, go somewhere, start something, but where can you go if you dont know how to manage thirsty buffaloes, if the past is a birdcage that grows larger the farther away from home you get? I left town, hit a patch of feeling blue, called you. Funny story, you said, Puppy just shredded eighteen volumes of the Mahabharata.

Whats happening with you? I say, you know, Im on the road, its the underground guerilla life for me, dirt and celibacy. All I can hear are birds and sirens, and sometimes, birds imitating sirens. Were quick to tell each other its okay, its okay, we cant all be preceded or followed by something. We cant all carry around tanks of oxygen or storm through doors reeking of whiskey and Pernod. Theres no known cure. It isnt true about daily B-12 shots or living in a commune.

In wars there are almost always the same number dead from starving as from combat. Whatever it is, it lives in the body and will stay till the body runs aground. Singers say they hear the next note before they sing it. My loneliness is something like that. I know not just what it is, but how it will sound. Theres a child screaming in the playground below, a refrain so shrill it scrapes a layer off the air.