Monsoon Station
Let us wait at the monsoon station and speak wet clichés.
Not five hundred metres away, muscular torrents unseen
Since 1978-when they unlocked water and flooded plains-
Take over the paddies and make everything look like gray-blue
Battlefield fabric mingling with damp colours on drawing paper.
Let us smoke Dunhills at the monsoon station and shake the chills
Watching night-shift workers trudge slick rail, helmets in hand
Their dry quarters unreachable without crossing an ocean of mud.
Let us clench our nethers at the monsoon station, the refuse is strong
Flavoured by dry smoke of tobacco leaves, coal fires, unwashed armpits
We may find ourselves in a Flanders state and pray this is not Warsaw.