chaos you embrace

Among one hundred million billboards

in Mumbai, a teenage girl wore two

sentences—breast to belly—that might

be missed in passing (so read fast):

          TODAY I’M

          IN CHARGE.

          MY CHOICE

          IS TO MAKE

          YOU HAPPY.

Tomorrow I surmised her t-shirt choice

to be EMBRACE YOUR CHAOS –“’cuz

that is all anyone not in charge can do.”

At least I had her reason in my head.

Traffic everywhere in Mumbai is sheer:

on foot and bikes with hand cranks,

with trucks that bid ‘HORN OK PLEASE’

as auto rickshaws beep and buzz by

complying to a freakish common sense,

sliding in and out and perpendicular,

and the motorcycles mostly helmetless,

never on the side-saddle kids behind.

They stream by endless games of cricket

in alleyways and any semi-open space;

girls play other games: blind man’s buff,

musical chairs, plying who’s in charge.

More than one dream weaver in the slum

is happy, past the fun and games. What

misery exists is also left and right, for life

extorts an everything and nothing to do.

At Sanjay Gandhi sanctuary, macaques

stuff their jowls with slow-dissolving pits

and sift the garbage for further harvest.

Their blackface kin, the langur, commands

the top of trees with no such agrarian pull.

Heaven may gather its plan and provide

in the way Buddhist monks here carved out

caves, joining in the crepuscular prayer.

          TODAY I’M

          CASTING U

          IN CHARGE.

          UR CHOICE

          MAY MAKE

…the shirt runs out of room. The fragment

is on you to fill out like a form, to steer

through on your journey home, your own

slum if you will, the chaos you embrace.