Ode To Bombay

I had promised you a poem before I died Diamonds storming out of the blackness of a piano Piece by piece I fall at my own dead feet Releasing you like a concerto from my silence I unfasten your bridges from my insistent bones Free your railway lines from my desperate veins Dismantle your crowded tenements and meditating machines Remove your temples and brothels pinned in my skull You go out of me in a pure spiral of stars A funeral progressing towards the end of time Innumerable petals of flame undress your dark Continuous stem of growing I walk out of murders and riots I fall out of smouldering biographies I sleep on a bed of burning languages Sending you up in your essential fire and smoke Piece by piece at my own feet I fall Diamonds storm out of a black piano Once I promised you an epic And now you have robbed me You have reduced me to rubble This concerto ends.