Thoughts on leaving Tanzania for a long while to come:

I must have been almost crazy
to start out all alone like that on my bicycle
pedaling into the tropics carrying
a medicine for which no one had found
the disease and hoping
I would make it on time.

I passed through a paper village under glass
where the explorers first found
silence and taught it to speak
where old men were sitting in front
of their houses killing sand without mercy.

brothers I shouted to them
tell me who moved the river
where can I find a good place to drown?