No Refusal

(A poem after Eliot)

Yellow Monologue

The sun flaked off the paint long ago—
now it stares like jaundice on a blistered wall.
Bricks bleed rust beneath their ochre veil,
and time drips,
slow oil,
under the hood.

He bends to speak with the engine—
language of groans and carbon—
his turban damp with years
and the sweat of neutral prayers.

In Calcutta, they burn time in silence,
and silence, too, smokes, and eats kisses …

Above him the rickshaw waits—
a reliquary of vertebrae,
collapsed like Sanskrit syllables on the kerb,
its handles stretching toward the future
no one dares harness again.

Interlude in Traffic

No Refusal, the steel flank insists,
but everything here refuses something—
refuses to move, to die, to mean.

Wheels speak in spokes:
clink crick tick trick —
and somewhere
a bell rings
for a fare who won’t come.

Between diesel and dharma,
the marrow of man is barter.

The Mechanic’s Sermon

I saw the rickshaw puller once—
his hands were maps, his feet
had the city tattooed in mud.
Now the taxi drinks his breath,
carburetor praying to the ghosts
of motion.

“What is tradition?” he asked,
tightening the bolt like a mantra—
“Weight that wheels forget.”