Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

The monk, who’s been in silence 16 years, writes me a note

at a yak tea stall skirted by ragged prayer flags 

in a grey hiccuping wind on the road to Kailash.

His face is scarp and fissure and gleaming teeth.

He spends each day cleaning his shrine. 

It’s worth it, he laughs. I clean the shrine, it cleans me. 

He was a spare parts dealer in a time he barely remembers, 

before he was tripped up by something that felt like a granite mountain

in reverse. 

The deepest pothole he’s ever known. Too deep to be called love.

That turned him into a spare part himself. 

Utterly dispensable, wildly unemployed. 

And if there is another lifetime, this is what I’d ask for, he says.

And now he doesn’t laugh. 

Same silence, same cleaning.