Reed-scented morning,
and my beautiful bed is a rampaged sea,
while, closeby, a pigeon coos like a lovesick Hindoo.

A raga's glottal gulping is not so much
the thumping of my heart,
but the purple blood beating a pulp in my belly.
I can feel life plunging into my belly
and out again
with a dahl-grinder's rhythm,
the damp hands of the tabla-player disciplined and flat
and slightly splayed,
with the graceful thumbs poised
and hollowed at each tobacco'd snuff-box.

This deity is a musk-perfumed padding, a pulsation,
deep inside a taut fish-skin drum.
My heart struggles like a rodent
caught by the back legs from an oversweet pudding;
my mind is the street-vendor's rat
tightrope-walking a string strung
between sweetmeat stalls.

Dum-tek! Dum-tek! Dum tekka-tekka-dum-tek!
Pat me! pat me! pat-slap-me-o-pat-me!
your flattened fingers padding at my deepest,
my sweetest wells;
and I can hear the grit, the dirty pollen
of the sun bulging over the horizon,
over the cardamom-dust-filled morning,
rising like a fireball exploding
over the heaving belly of the sea
with her greased turmeric skin.

I slide naked on your oiled skin, fat mother!
Voluptuous and henna-tattooed mother life-
I suck greedily on you until my hollowed cheeks
are as slippery as ghee smears.
I suck on you, on your beautiful obese teats!
Greasy mother! my belly distends with your blue milk.

Holy cow, mother!
I am your beautiful son, your wayward daughter;
my honeysuckle-perfumed friend is my lover,
my barbarian lover is my friend,
stern father life is my sniffing animal mother...
Pat me! pat me! pat-slap-me-o-pat-me!

with your spatula fingers on my fish-skin drum,
my throbbing well-fed bovine belly
pungent and rippling in waves of heat:
a ruby and persimmon jelly.
Fatten me up on your spiced, your rosewater pudding,
ah! greasy, greedy, sweet-toothed mother life.