It’s midwinter and soon time for Losar / time also to cast aside our failures and regrets / and propitiate the deities for the New Year.

खिच्नोस् खिच्नोस् / कसरी बसम्? यसरी? / कि यसरी?

Broken stonework, sharp edges. I feel them / cutting my cheeks and chest. Maybe / someone took my legs?

Let’s sit beneath this sky
strung with nine hundred thousand lights
and drink bowls of this old chyāng

You – my bastard child, you have learnt to speak, after years

I have created –

a country for you where your fractured self

lives by multiple names

With not enough tomorrows to go round, and all yesterdays in short supply

Night closes in with its breath taking grip/ Night that walks in the guise of day.

The Kathmandu sky sliced with unlive wires. Highways broken like bread or a body.