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.