"Ice people." by me. Inspired by maggie gee's book of the same name.

So today someone shouted at you from a rock
You turned the other cheek reluctantly
Because he was a kid
I was not as interested as you
wanted me to be
I wasn't sure you wanted me to be
Outraged
Or impressed.
I'm wearing a new autumn pink
Like the tips of the leaves
On my lips
And you barely notice
Because the fight is on
Some Siberian giant or other
This time I'm not even curious
This is segregated living
Where east meets west
There were lines drawn in the sand
when we met
Never crossed except in truce
You Tony, I, cleo.
I think we may have met
on the Mongolian steps
Just after the ice age
Now you are more interested in
Creatures of your own construction
And I'm watching you through a veil of
Ice.
A

"death of Kali" by jess inspired by dan simmonds book of the same name

Hey Amrita
I'm stoked on Tagore
With wind lapped saris and all that
Janna ganna nanna
And all those exotic Sanskrit words
What's Sanskrit for cool?

Belowlow and swaying
Big choke
Herman Hesse said
Calcutta was a city buit on a dung heap
I never said
I was just milling about the Kali ghat
Looking at the dried goat blood
Thinking of that bit in levicitus
That talks about sin offerings and blood
And goats
Funny how religions involve goats
And the Brahmin pushed me against the wall
Said incantations
Ask for rupees
And then I was
In a scrum
Sweat smelling incense pulsing crush
And an invisible kick pushed me into
To see her
The goddess
She was a lump of dark matter with kholed eyes

This is not your city
She said
It's the shit that makes the mulch
Of your life
So you can grow
Something
Now go

And that was my darshan

So I am reborn
From poetry and shit.
Shitala (that's Sanskrit for cool)

John Christopher 's "the death of grass"

WE live in an age of epidemics.
I would like to meet a virus as charismatic as you
Our lives can follow fiction when we stand on grass
Our lives are fiction when I stand on glass
My life is a poem when I'm in postmodern past
We are the perishable
The English
Leaves and teeth
You wanted me to come to be safe in your Northumberland
Wilderness
At the end of the world
I was to come , walking most likely
Take perhaps thirty five days from Kent
Death held us together in the future past
Some weird place you invented
Now in this outbreak
In the outback
These scientists havnt failed us yet.

And I'm on the radio
Warning you of the contagion
The past is catching
Up with me again
While I chew on Chinese grass
They will fly the royal family to Greenland
And the ghosts
Of my decedents are painted in woad
Go where you are going
In this new pattern.

What is Past is Prologue