two things

[glass_icarus]

before I leave for Boston today! (Last-minute day-trips FTW! :D)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, search_soleil! &hearts Also, have a poem:

ImageNation

“Britain is interesting from a dental standpoint.
They won the war, but they lost their teeth.”
— Mike Myers in April 1999 Vanity Fair: Hollywood Issue

When the empire disintegrated, the world
shattered like a glass Pepsi bottle, a fiasco
where the shards of former colonies flow

into a syrupy run, crashing and jostling
the other. The grand corporeal
vessel dissolves though corporations

rush to suture the lacerations, to coalesce
the bodies under a fortune flag. Perhaps

middle-aged women and beer-bellied
men ponder such concerns at yoga
class, stretching their souls alongside the throbbing
machines of physical enhancement. The pulleys burn
to and fro like a bad episode of the Industrial

Revolution while the surplus holy conduct
the journey from Home to Om. In our States,

the Spirit arrives imported, waits
for the cell phones to stop ringing, acts
the patient profit for global souls.

In the spill of national borders, the mystic
resides on the other edge of the waters,
or in Rumi’s case, the other side

of the grave. His flushed readers ruminate
through visions which translate death
into transitory celebration, poetry

into carnal knowledge. Amidst this carnival, posed
like a bharatanatyam beauty, Mike Myers palms
a personal organizer, Om legible like the cross

of lifelines on rough hand. Unlike the syrup turned

to sores, the dental to decay, infection
of cross-cultural contaminants
inciting the boundaries to fester,

we know Mike is healthy and wise
because he still possesses a proper set
of sparkling North American teeth.

-- Purvi Shah