CULTURE IS ANOTHER SMELL

I want to be a part of the larger culture
Where the things have rotton smells
And children play in the streets with running noses
And women give birth under abnormal circumstances
With healthy babies who grow up on their own
With God's blessing and hardly any food
They crawl and then they walk and then they run
And then they grow up and look for a job
And jobs are hard to find
And they sit and chat and imagine dreams
And create with broken objects from the streets and make art
And write poems about their dreams in foreign lands
Where they think all their dreams will come true and they will be sitting
At the pool side watching curvacious women taking a dip in the bluest of the blue pools
And some of them will get to those lands where they will be janitors and cleaners and construction workers
And no pool or a curvy Alabaster skin woman in site
They don't hang out at the construction sites
They are at the sea in Bahamas...
And they will think of the street back home with lots of noise and dirt and the smells of greasy food
In their snowy Iciness
The slush and the wind and their rough hands dying to slide on their Imaginary Juliet's
But feel lucky to come back to the one room flat where other ten cleaners or janitors or construction
Workers from their lands cooking Daal and chapati to feed themselves for the job tomorrow
In the land of their feverish past's imagination...

I want to be part of that culture not here but there
There, where all of them came from
With the dream of returning one day with the fist clenched with gold
With which they will buy a nice house in their own land
But they had a house in their own lands which they left behind...
A house in the street under the stars and a clear sky where the children played and the smell of fried food
Filled the air....
And the people fought over not having enough food and who ever had extra
Gave it to the other to make them not feel hungry ...
And the music all night which people made under the warm sky
Thinking of cold lands abroad and the curvatious women and the swimming pools
And a life of comfort
But they were lucky if they found a janitor's job or rotted in a kitchen cooking for some one else
While they were not allowed what they cooked for others...

I want to take a journey into that culture where I would be able to sleep under a clear sky
Without being murdered in the middle of the night or shot dead with a stray bullet.....

It sounds abnormal
But I want to be abnormal
I am abnormal

I want to keep this long, narrow, dark room in this city from where I depart often
for adventure into new atmosphere of sound, smell, noise and learning.