In walked Bird

The loneliest monk I ever met
was a piebald slaphead who never
owned a Ferrari (not even a scale model),
who'd never heard of jazz, or American Idol,
or Michael Jackson's colourful exploits,
though his dimly lit monastic cell
was wallpapered floor-to-ceiling
with tabloid sheets from Ireland in
what passes today for the English language
and from Swaziland
in one of the Nguni languages
and from Finland
in several Finno-Ugric languages

He swore he could read them all
but chose not to, cos he didn't want to be
drawn into the murky depths of
hell on earth, where bacchanalia
is the order of the day and glossolalia
the curse of the werewolf's overbitten tongue

He liked to watch The Omen on his
Betamax video machine and asked if I knew
where he could find a copy of the original
version of Sholay in that quaint format

He'd seen it once before and suspected
that Gabbar Singh was the long lost
brother of the devil in a blue dress
to whom he'd lost virginity when
he was thirty-five (damn her to hell),
but couldn't be sure
without further investigation

I was able to help him find the film, but
didn't see him for months afterwards,
and when I did he looked as fit as a fiddle,
with a rosy glow to his cheeks (though this
might have been a trick of the light)
and when I asked about his investigations
he swore softly in his native dialect,
a mellifluous hybrid of Lepcha and Dzongkha,
then added dismissively, in English,
that he'd been too busy tossing off
to worry about such trivialities,
although I think he was lying
(about trivialities)

On reflection, perhaps he wasn't
as lonely as I have been
trained to expect

(minos - february 2007)