From the clear-paned windows of the café, I watch it all pass by:

                the chain-smoking grandfathers, white tank tops pushed above their bellies

                the street food stalls painted in tropical gradients

                the children squatting on the dust-covered curbs

By the time my tea comes, sweating alongside the rest of the country,

it has changed again.

it metamorphoses before my eyes, an everlasting architect caught in a

dressing room between time

How to explain that even as it breathes,

humid and alive, down my neck, I miss it already?

That enigmatic though it was, knowable only in its ceaseless evolution,

it was anything but stranger?

City that it is, it gives me no answers.

I am left to soul-search among its rhythmic rituals:

spitting watermelon seeds in the seams of the blocky sidewalks,

licking salt from my upper lip amongst the cicada white noise.

befriending, as it creeps up on me softly, this life that

is lived on the back of an electric scooter, around the spoke of a bicycle wheel

these streets that have been boiled in the scent of petrichor,

a failed reprieve from steel-hemmed humidity 

It’s a dangerous familiar, the lived-in body of this foreign homeland;

it could drown you

Sometime later, on days like these when the sharp-tongued wind and repetition

fall on the gentle side of dying, I’ll imagine that it does