Globetrotter

In Goa: palm fronds, hashish, melancholy,

a boutique in a village, where I sold clothes,

for a few rupees with which I bought seeds,

seeds I carried with me to Pondicherry,

to plant in the little garden, in the mansion,

with its columns on Rue Romain Rolland,

where I decided to go to Istanbul, someday,

so that I can sit by the Bosphorus, where else,

sipping Coke and swallowing kebabs, reading,

who else but Pamuk, wrapped in my huzun,

while actually thinking of London: grey, grey,

London, from where I would send postcards,

of pictures I will take like a tourist, grinning,

in that blue and white town of volcanic seas,

Santorini, to friends who have become acquaintances,

while I befriended those with whom I become acquainted,

like the Pakistani farmer with a law degree,

Daniyal, with whom I had tripe in Rome,

the city of Caesars, two of whom were poisoned by love,

love of the woman who was poisoned by an asp,

in the land of rivers and kings, which has so much,

yet nothing in common with Mexico,

a country I lost searching for a woman,

not unlike that queen, a seductress,

a Juanita who filled me like the Gulf,

and then parched me like the Sonoran,

a landscape of considerable ambiguity,

like my soul, choosing between the cliched and sublime,

mostly picking the cliched, like that time when I left,

left to go to Rishikesh looking for God,

then finding and losing him again,

in the eyes and ears of many women,

who taught me, somewhere in the middle,

of the desire and its resistance,

rising and ebbing like distance and proximity,

that there is no solace in sight, no home I can go to,

nothing as grand as happiness and sorrow,

only life itself.