India *3

At 3am faint music tiptoed through my mosquito screened windows...the sounds of an errie carnivalesque parade...comming from blocks away, or maybe another pocket of time which likes to stretch its wings when everyone is asleep??? It re-merged with the night as I fell back into my anti-maleria medication dreams. And this waking dream of India, full of cows tied to barbedwire fences eating piles of garbage, little childern bundled in neon zipping by as motorbike prow pinochio figureheads, buses wide as streets plowing by with king kong trumpet horns deafening all stray dogs, wandering monks, and western tourists in sight... Days spill into each other here, washing back upon themselves like motorcar oil rainbows on parking-lot scalps after rainfall... I climbed to the top of the holy mountain barefoot a few days ago to watch the lighting of the masive torch that can be seen for miles...the top was black and slippery from burned holy ghee, drugging my tenderized feet...monkeys having sex in the sunset as the black smoke is carried off by the wind like an infinite flock of incense crows....dissipating into the night...and then descending in the blackness, buffered by shouts of indian children "carefull, carefull," "slowly, slowly"... We needed their feet's experience, and they our flashlights. Somehow we all made it back down from the peace and magesty into the christmass tree light spider web and hearbeat of car horns of Tiruvannamali below.