From Issue 4.6 love bends / the mover: The Roy Miki Issue

Summer again –
Should I go out to the lake, one more time to the beach? 
Or should I go to a bar, to the pit of forgetfulness?

               The story lies –
I remember watching The Fifth Estate’s documentary:
how priests in business suits lured the red heifers
from Indian plains to green Canadian altars. Draped
in garlands and silk robes the bovines arrived: tired & dazed –
in this citadel. And who do you think I am, anyway?

Not the brown dirt I used to be in another life,
in a quaint little town in Butwal, snaking through the traffic
on a second-hand scooter, unafraid of sudden death
hiding in every corner, eyeing from makeshift roadside tea stalls.

I dreamed I was finally taken hostage while my Himalayan snow-
men toiled in the farm, breaking barley, wheat, rice, and their backs. 
The priests buzzed, business-like, with one ritual
after another. A marigold tucked in a poplar leaf, the cow was ready,
to be donated. You sprinkled holy water on my body,
took a congratulatory snap, and received handsome dakshina
from a private college in Ontario nobody in my town had heard of.

               It was a dream, after all –
full of primroses & petunias in the basement apartment,
with six other students, each blossoming on the brambles
of $30,000 international debt sprouting from the ashen fields
of Gangetic plains. Did you know Pythagoras said the world is ruled
by numbers? I count them, one by one, as they disappear
on the low-hanging ceiling – like rhododendrons
blooming & withering in a blink. Wherever I go people hand me 
orange & silver & gold cards that help me buy kilos
of salmon or frozen broccoli – sometimes it’s the twenty rolls
of bath tissue you need to wipe dirt & disease with equal vehemence.

You cannot be Canadian if you don’t go to the beach.
Or drink fruity IPAs. Or walk around the lake every evening
with a leash in one hand and a sandwich in the other. Canada wants me
to open a bag of Doritos and a can of Coke: sweet and savory
chemicals now course through my blood, aflame like tongues
of wildfires. What will save the brown dirt from crumbling?
In this replaceable little town in the Okanagan, a cold absence 
embraces me like a long-lost friend, now returning to the home-
land after years of exile and prepackaged certitude, the rooftops
of uncertain boxy buildings.