Evening on New Road: A festival of Light

New Road has been swept and is outwardly clean;

Girls come and go in the dusk,

Khichapokhari gasps for breath

Amid the smoky sidestreet houses,

Dark and malodorous,

Like armpit hairs in a sleeveless blouse.

In the shops´ display windows,

Suzy Wong smiles, a Hong Kong beauty,

Madam Nylon, Miss Terylene,

Innocent virgins, virgins with loops,

Arms bearing prints of penicillin´s advance,

Stride toward the dark alleyways.

A flower-baby hippy walks down New Road

In the arms of her prince, engrossed in a trip

Half-naked in a saffron-blouse,

Her brassiere´s baskets lift the stale fruits of youth.

Every eye in New Road is fixed on her navel;

Adopted sons around the pipal tree

Stand seceretly thinking lewd thoughts;

They sprout up from behind benches.

The filth thrown up by P.S.K. Drainage

Regards the day with jaundiced eyes,

Opening a newspaper´s pages.

A beggar woman stands by the News Centre;

She X-rays a hard-up Nepali´s pocket,

And begs for five paisa.

Then the poor man puts up a ballon of abuse.

Up into the Kathmandu sky.

He turns to the lottery stall,

Whence his fortune might come,

And finally spits on himself.

I see no point in loitering Tound here

So, to give meaning to the word "home"

(home by day, bar by night),

I make the labour of a new verse into some beer,

And I drink.

Then I pace out New Road, Plotting a poem.

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