SUBJECT>Re: prose poem (perhaps) POSTER>Asher EMAIL> DATE>1108569909 IP_ADDRESS>cache-dtc-ac04.proxy.aol.com PREVIOUS>83449 NEXT> IMAGE> LINKNAME> LINKURL>

Thanks AM and Slosh.

Slosh--I was reluctent to post this because I consider it prose with poetic elements.

AM--Thanks--I look forward to read your imagined killing of the Pope (slip) Or something; I kill Caliphs in my dreams all the time. If it weren't for dreaming we'd all be cold blooded murderers:-)

Best,

Asher

I went to the Red Mosque in Delhi; performed
: the necessary ablution (wudu); rubbed my
: hands over the top of the head starting at
: the forehead, wiping backwards; used my wet
: fingers, wiped the inside and outside of the
: ears; washed the feet up to the ankles,
: starting with the right foot; wore a piece
: of white cotton and carried a Koran around
: my throat. I began to hallucinate regularly;
: I dreamed up pithy aphorisms that would
: regulate my pulse. I prayed five times a day
: in New Delhi and Lahore and saw djinn’s in
: Banyan trees. Djinns live at the edge of the
: city off of bones. They possessed my brain
: and I walked around the computer market
: stupefied. Muhammad had them under his
: control. Pakistan became Jinnistan; a home
: of fiery elementals. I took my mother to a
: banyan tree by Datta Sabb after she had
: prayed to the Sufi saint for her son’s well
: being. The more I thirsted, the more I began
: to see djinns and my religion as a form of
: communal brainwashing. There were quests
: that lay tangled in my gut and hinged in
: space until I could vomit them out or tether
: them to a body. I visited whorehouses, bars,
: museums, books, roots that I would
: continually uproot the moment they sprouted
: out of air. Muezzin walls or polytheistic
: walls or museum walls of marble (the Lahore
: Museum was looted so I bought the absent
: Veena in Rajasthan). It was at this stage of
: the journey that I saw that the whole world
: had been raped by the white man. And that my
: parents identity had been plundered the
: moment they left India and flew to Canada. I
: felt at home with fakirs from the Kalandari
: sect who carried danders, or a stick that
: rattled like rainwater. One could discern
: thunder from a stick as though objects could
: be squeezed into water. I convinced myself
: that the alley by Datta Sabb where I took my
: Mother was a portal to another world and
: that the Banyan tree was worthy of worship.
: I laid the Kaladari red at the feet of the
: banyan. I freed a netful of quails which
: kept returning to the net. Did I understand
: that the quail seller had a family? We paid
: him nickels and people laughed when we asked
: where Bullah Shah lived (he had died 4
: centuries ago). As soon as I found out that
: my heritage had been lost when my dad
: mutated into Abraham, I went to his old
: village in Jalandhar and hallucinated his
: dead brother. I made up connections and
: narrated stories and saw him whittling
: bamboo by a pile of slate; I saw the well
: where he is currently drinking water; a fire
: that ravaged his village and his brother
: baked in a clay oven. I saw the door in his
: brain that I had tried to put a hatchet
: through. (Before the Partition my Mother was
: in New Delhi and she had gratefully
: forgotten that she was born in India.
: Father’s door remains on a hinge.) I can
: become anything in space; I have this third
: body.