i could fry an egg on my eye today – oh, would you imagine –
iris and yolk pooling into one globular gold! – glaring, 
eyeliner all cracked into desert veins on equatorial land,
what a breakfast – oozing blindly with my sunny side up… 

spray. pray. smile, and young muscles erode. 

– pray to whom? to the city, the first idea i melted for, its rays
raking through our thick hair the way butter rives bread, and
in the strokes of an eternal summer, see history aerate itself:

this is the bombay sun the colonisers grew thin in,
now we delight and dehydrate in its rims!

wipe. splay. smile, and strung muscles flinch. 

my lungs are roasted rare, rarer than love, in the arid heat of irony. 
(soon big tobacco will be out of a job!) so this smoke is all mine – 
it’s mine, and the afternoon’s, and my idol idle friends. even the 
dream of taking a drag is drenched in sweat, we settle for a tan instead. 

smile, as we shun the aching plains, 
smile, we rise from the ripped bricks like steam
with tanks for intestines and sleeveless shoulders ablaze –
i think, and i crave. i bake, and i brave. 

it is so nice to be on fire and yet unkilled,
to be the ant still riotous under the magnifying glass. 
with a sundress scalding the sticky toast –
my yolk splits into a summeria of extremes.