No one will recognize your plight.
With a glance that they will afford you, they would cavil that you’re not naked but just clumsily dressed, that you somehow manage to be reasonably fed even without a dietician’s quirky diet charts and meal plans, and you look like you’ve just been through every town up this hill that falls by the edge of the river that slits through these mountains like a circumfluous, surgical tool. Not because you seem to have traveled, but because of the unmistakable stench of stale beds arguably placed in sodden corners of unsophisticated shelters mushroomed along the way. They will know so from the storied, heathen dankness that the river bestows on those who stem on its shunned banks, an odor of a catch of fishes that lie on a watery deck of a dory, who are asphyxiating but haven’t died yet.
But because it’s a choice, it always is, that brings a man haplessly on the feral mountains just as it does to the clueless lot caving in a state-of-the-art, flourishing circus.
No one will ever recognize your plight, and rightly so, for your tired eyes gleam still, from the benevolence that suggests that they mirror the most modest of hearts. They explicitly evince that they have found respite underneath a cataractous layer of hope that yet is fruitless but bears the seeds that patiently sit among the piles of decaying leaves, waiting for the coming of spring. The spring, like winter, is undeniable while everything along a trodden circle is largely foreordained.
Untitled- II
He usually walks slowly, trudging listlessly, as if he was dragging a weight that was more than just his body, as if he had come up against a turbid wind and was struggling to sieve against it even though he had straightened himself to its order, leaning a shoulder toward it because his jacket was missing buttons, like a mast-less cutter without anchors, and from the loss of those buttons it would open up against the wind, flaring up like half a parachute.
But when he would see her, he would run. And even the wind would suddenly veer and push against his back thrusting him forward. And as he would swiftly begin to leave the ground for a little longer between his leaps, he would feel the wind coming upon his face again, but gently this time. Even gravity would perpetrate kindly, as he would begin to float like those men in spacesuits on the Moon.
He would grin slightly underneath the opaque space helmet.
That’s not true. A grin cannot be slight. Therefore, he would grin, but speak of it passively as if it were a result of how the wind worked over his face and nothing else.
He liked what he became when he was with her. But there was something else, something elemental: It changed how he perceived the wind.
SURRIPERE
What if an eturnal return (sic) was strung through the core of every secret truth of the universe?
Could its bleak, stark, changeless stagnation be more comfortable than this ever erupting, ruinously dancing Chaos?
NEGATIVE
You surely wouldn’t want to read a poem called Negative, now would you?
But look closely, fellow traveler. That has to be a paradox.
Although poetry travels the same circles as sorrow and has the same friends as melancholy, poetry still ascends like the Sun out of the leaden ocean, only to speak of Hope.
Apropos
I think I know
Why the trees
with red leaves
do not flower.
But I wonder
why does the boy
on the unicycle
want another wheel.
ARC EN CIEL
How did you imagine it moved?
Does it cling to your skin, all glued?
Was it more you that the rest of the world,
or was it more you when you loved?
Did it seek the fleeting else in return?
Or was it you who was always on the run?
Was it one from the palette,
or in the iridescence of the wash bowl,
What did you imagine
was the color of your soul?
The Weaver
God was a humble man. He had no religion.
He would walk over the gliding waves as naturally as he would walk on earth.
I was once told so, among other things, by a believer in his sequined description of the Divine. He praised the Lord for hours, most of which sounded like they were treacly passages recited from a book he had memorized like a morning owl. He only broke off his persuasive warble, almost suddenly, as if a river had run into a placid lake to attend to something. It was almost as if the departing light had whispered a timely reminder into his ears. I would later learn that he had returned to his hut to offer his evening prayers. These prayers were offered each day and done before the purple dusk could stitch the telling constellations onto the night sky, perhaps a prayer for the stars to remain steadfast, stitched just as they were stitched yesterday, and the day before that, changeless since the time immemorial.
I found myself alone after he left, sitting idly by the fire, affording a feign quietude to an encompassing silence that had managed to drown the sniping crackle of the firewood. I could see the cinders flying more rapidly than before, the fire burning more avidly, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I watched as a gentle, yellow light illuminated the modest home from within. I noticed that since he left, the tepid flames of the fire had grown more lambent as if it had emancipated. And I knew that it was the gentle breeze that blew into it from the distant fetches that caused it to happen, or so was my belief, backed by a firm scientific supposition.
Most of my thoughts were otherwise latched to what he had said, proclaimed rather, about the Lord. He said a great many things about him, and he did so with the lucidness of a believer, not with the singeing fervor of a bigot. Moreover, I was amazed by the passion in his eyes when he spoke of Him. The refulgence in his eyes could have at times begotten the satiated fire envious; how those eyes that should have thirsted against the radiance of the flames, had welled.
And with similar passion, I remember him claiming that he, the man of miracles, could walk on water.
He repeated it, and much slower the second time as if there was something in it for me to understand, something in the mold of an open-ended riddle.
It almost felt like he wished to share with me, that what he had, for he had plenty. And that perhaps was his only guided, good-willed madness. His imaginings had the comfort of a warm bath in an igloo built on a frigid landscape if that at all was possible. And that was the point.
And so I had begun to witness what he meant, what it all meant, about closed doors that would swing open without a touch, about winds that would carry a cutter safely onto the beach. About miracles, their inherent nature.
But when I gathered myself from my share of fretful imaginings, I arrived at one trivial question. Why would one delve into adjunct details about someone who could raise the dead and resurrect himself by furnishing details as trivial as the faculty to walk on water?
And I thought that it was a sort of adornment that added to his legend in a small way or caused to engage the human imagination copiously, so that it may appear to him that there was nothing that he could not do.
Perhaps it was attributed to him with a considerably sound knowledge for those days, that walking on water was something that wasn’t humanly possible, either now or in any scenario in the perceivable future.
But what if someone devised a piece of equipment that would allow a man to balance himself and walk a few paces over water. What would happen then? How would that affect these stories that define a time bygone, a way of life, a relic left in ruins waiting to be disinterred and interpreted searchingly by our posterity?
I had eventually arrived at the most urgent question in this progression:
Would the folktales a century after such an invention still enumerate those faculties of the Lord that would be humanly possible then, as the ‘miracle’ of him being able to walk on water?
And of other similar things that eluded the imaginations of our forefathers?
Through this understanding, I somehow realized, how men became Gods. I recognized the necessity and importance, the relevance of the fact that he used to walk among us, on water or solid ground like the mortals, as one of us.
I became wary of half stories, the stories that lack wholeness. Those stories that weren’t rounded. But I also felt an exhumed love for those stories that were haphazard, earthy and uncured, and yet somehow hallowed.
The fire was dying down as the night was growing colder. I watched as the wind occasionally carried a dry leaf into the flame that would burn brightly for a brief moment and then almost immediately turn to feathery ashes, and glide down from the sable chunk of the firewood among other parched leaves, harmlessly.
The man came out from his hut, hugging himself to keep warm against the cold wind. He invited me in for dinner. Another prayer was made, and this time I joined in with a newfound veneration. The meal was warm and wholesome. I thanked them, his wife and him, with all my heart.
As I bade them farewell early the following morning and before I set out on the road, the man handed me half a loaf of bread and some olives for the journey.
I was humbled. I accepted it with all humility and walked down the hill for another day of destined wandering.
Back then, and even now, I have nothing to offer to them in return for their kindness.
But, I believe I could play my part and tell their story.
I can tell stories about him and others like him, anonymously, for He seeks no reverence.
Maybe I could leave behind a tiny relic that delineates a benevolent world.
And if I could,
I would tell them how God is a humble man. He has no religion.
SUB LUCERNA
We learn to treat our souls like shadows, and then we are led into a white room.
Postage Stamps
Some postage stamps exact
a part of your soul,
ergo one can only send so many,
or none at all:
since someday, for Love,
the stamps will exact its whole.
Silver Lining Passenger
When you linger somewhere without wanting to be a part of that place, aimlessly, almost carelessly, with no other intent but to ‘just Be’, you notice how the surrounding slowly begins to drown into a complicit strangeness, into a maze of crowded streets, desultory temples, impassive faces, and empty houses, and you begin to notice an inherent inadequacy in yourself that you had countless other times. Still, there is an unexplainable urge to escape again, like that could mend things, and you eventually realize that this exercise in its entirety has only resulted in the discovery of that one more place where you don’t belong.
Corpus Catharsis 