A lot of things up there I don’t like to talk about.
It’s a mess up there,
and it chases your life.
I’m an idiot for believing it.
There’s no hope on this runway.
I can’t even see my dogs.
I lost all the people who matter to me.
They’ve taken me out of India
for a visa violation.
Can you imagine Dylan?

I had several minutes to pack.
Nithish came and we talked.
Everybody was crying.
No appeal allowed.
They were stone-hearted men.
The immediacy of the situation derailed me.
I was not prepared to go.
No one would listen to my pleas
just a few days please.
It was heartbroken.
The dogs were so confused.
Bruno knew.
The pain in that dog’s eyes, can it kill you?

Who knows
the price you have to pay for poetry?
I made the Auroville Foundation mad,
and they promptly got rid of me
and didn’t even show their face.
Their lackeys did it.
I’m going to shoot them tomorrow,
not with guns with their guilt.
Douglas and I are on a plane to nowhere.
We’ve been kicked out of our home.
I am over skies now.
I don’t know where I am.
I don’t care to.
I will never see my dogs again.

A few minutes to pack
after a life of 20 years.
No international rights,
what do you do with that
when your life-blood is on the table,
all your hopes and dreams?
Even Nithish’s parents cried,
and we all forgave each other.
So many crying people came to see up off,
and it didn’t move a cop.

This is land’s lamb,
a spoken inner voice,
and it will even tell on itself.
It won’t leave you alone.
To trust it is to invite paradise,
but hell is its price.
Pain and suffering slam me now,
and I don’t know what to do with that.
More poetry please.
Look I gotta get out of this ride.
Most things have to be deleted anyway.
I’m sorry.
Look it’s over.

What happened?
The government has cancer.
It only has a gun.
It breaks people’s hearts,
is only concerned with its name,
can’t see past its own nose,
is a bear eating people.
No one can call it on it.
You get in trouble.
They won’t let you talk.
When you give them a divinely inspired poem they get mad,
shoot the messenger,
tear apart his family.

What’s the wasted gun,
where I meet the government,
or where it meets me?
Hand that over
a hide and seek.
Show dinner now
how much bullshit serves me on myself,
or am I worth the life of this poet?

Plenty of people
have no pride.
It’s part of the hardship of life.
Do we let then in?
Do we let the haphazard come in?
They’ll throw it open like they’re dying without it.
They are not sincere.
They’re trying to get over on you whatever they can.
They can’t look you in the eye and say they’re sorry.
They’re all over the place,
a dim a dozen.

I need to know what that man’s like.
Test him some.
Come to his house and sit at his table.
Is there anybody but himself in his banyan tree
who are not satellite I’s of his solar I?
Can he have compassion?
Will he sacrifice
for those around him?
Is he a hope in humanity’s heart?
Does he genuinely feel the presence of others?
What does it take to make him smile?
Can you count lighthouse in him?

I’m askin’ the right questions
say you find an illegal immigrant.
These are the criteria we live by,
and he needs to show that.
Can I get a horseman here please?
We’re blowin’ humanity out of the water
throwin’ somebody out of the country
such as these.
An immigrant’s status
give the immigrant’s worth?

Look at yesterday.
They pull a poet
out of his home.
Because I didn’t read his poetry.
I listened to the bossman.
We celebrate this.
You’re at 1 o’clock.
Put more tickets through.
It’s all good.
Put the police upon the table,
and this defends a society
of Indian spirituality?

Our family there were told that the Secretary of the Auroville Foundation, Jayanti Ravi, filed a police complaint against me for the past three poems on this blog, which are about Auroville. Four men came to our house, all in civilian clothes, and only one would show his ID, the one from immigration, whom it’s reasonable to assume that they brought just in case there was a visa violation, and there was. Later, since I was holding out in my house, the regular police came.

Recently Auroville News and Notes reported that the Auroville Foundation has brought 15 members of the special police who are crushing dissidence in Kashmir to do that in Auroville. I suspect at least two of the men who wouldn’t show ID were them.