Mother earth says:
O ye children, give me all
your blood,
gore, filth, garbage,
poison, chemicals,
I’d still give you
flowers, trees, pastures.
A mother can’t stop
giving,
She has to keep giving,
Till her last breath,
Till she perishes.
When the last flower on
earth will die
along with the mother’s
last breath’s sigh,
Her children would then
be replaced by a new
species,--
the humanoid machines
that’ll infest her rotten
corpse,
It’ll be a global grave
swarming with metallic
maggots.
Sometimes apparent luck
is leading us into bad
luck
further on the way.
Then you realize you have
a mountainously bulky
foolishness
inside your little shallow
brain.
The more he came to know,
the more he realized
how little he knew her,
It was all there to see
now,
Her pointless rambling
pride,
Concisely pointed
narcissism,
Habitually despondent
demeanor,
Her efficient effrontery,
Swift certain selfishness,
Extensively ornamented
body
covering a poor soul,
Her manners laced with
coquetries and jealousies,
All this he saw now.
Earlier, the whirlpool’s
vortex
sucking, pulling him into
soft languor and pleasure
swoons,
Shaken, swirled by the
eddying currents
now he got spewed out of
the vortex’s pointed base,
Gasping for breath,
he came to the surface
from the edifying depths,
Looked at her with a
frigidly disagreeing look
on his face.
Falling out of love is perhaps
just to know more about a
person,
Maybe we are addicted to
the fall,
And fly just for its sake,
Because, however high a
kite flies,
it still survives by
constantly eyeing earth,
Maybe love also flies
to enjoy its habitual
crash-landing.
When you steal
and nobody is watching,
Remember You are there
as the judge and police.
When you tell a lie,
And all believe you with
an ‘aye’,
Remember You are there
standing mute with a cold
sigh.
When you are angry at your
enemy,
And find the cause in your
foe,
Remember You are there
looking at the enemy
within.
There will be a day
when this You in you
will come forward
and make you stand
in the witness box
to turn witness against
yourself.
Don’t meet in the court as
enemies,
Meet You in you
before it’s too late
and die as your own enemy.
Go to some little shrine
of love
where even eagles turn
dove,
And light a lamp,
Carry it to your life’s
camp,
Hold it
from the wind’s hit,
Keep it safe, the glow,
The joyous flow,
Walk slow,
Rejoice
this lovely choice.
Life is a throw of dice,
You have the choice
to aim, roll and throw
with all focus on your
brow,
But the outcome is open
to many probabilities
beyond your control.
Then why should one throw
with so much determination
furrowed on one’s brow?
One should do it,
Because if you just sit
without creating chances
the least bit,
Even the probabilities will
die,
Left you’ll be with a cold
sigh,
When you put your effort’s
stake
that's where all probabilities
and chances
lie in a creative lake.
Your effort is the mother
of the myriads of
outcomes,
They may look beyond your
control,
But you’re in the central
role,--
the shining pole
around which creations
flow
and chancy stars shine,
sizzle and glow.
Mankind’s truth
is a weathercock,
It will swing
to the direction of his
winds of desire, ambition,
greed, hate, anger,
It’ll suitably point to
where it’s desired.
There is a point
when one has to change
from a spectator to a
participant,
And jump onto the stage,
Play, act and sing,
Perform one’s part well.
Not that earlier was no
part,
It was,
But it was too small
for a big character,--
like a spaceship
locked and docked
in its hanger on earth.
Sometimes misery sneaks
into
such a secretive corner in
us
that even we can’t see it,
And thinking it to be
gone,
we take a torch
and go seeking happiness
outside,
But we fail,
Wherever we arrive
with our tiny puddle of
light,
darkness jumps one step ahead,
keeping happiness at bay,
It’ll remain so
because we carry
that bubble of misery inside
us
and try to light the
outside world.
Go within,
Look inwards,
Hunt that hiding darkness;
that hidden corner,
The moment
the light of your
awareness
falls on it,
it vanishes,
Darkness bows out,
Then you needn’t run
around
to annihilate the gloom.
The weighing scale doesn’t
differentiate
between gold and iron,
But the human heart does,
In the human heart
a gram of gold is worth
thousands of green trees,
It’s more valuable than
even many other human
hearts,
The trees can be cut,
Trust broken,
Air polluted,
Earth poisoned,
And souls singed,
All this can be done
to uphold the value of
gold;
to maintain its ruling
crown;
its authority and
superiority
over life, love and smile.
A screw-shaped swirl of
life
taking you in its eddying
grip,
The tourbillion pool of
adversities,
The maelstrom ring of trap
in the stream of your
life,
The ghoulish outfall,
The mouth of misery
pouting to chuck you up,
The overpowering vortex of
uncontrollable
taking you in its
whirlpool.
Fight it on the surface
and it’ll eat your
energies,
Swaying, splashing you
as you try to stay afloat,
It gets a sadistic
pleasure
watching you tossed like
a twig on its eddying
surface,
Don’t allow yourself to be
kicked like a ball on the
surface,
Cooperate with its
screwing drill into its innards,
Dive without resistance,
Its own fury is its
undoing,
You go into its guts,
Your acceptance and faith
it can’t digest,
Your unresisting flow
eats its stomach,
Then it spews you out
of its pointed base in the
depths,
You are delivered
with your energies intact.
Charred , shredded, scattered
pieces of love,
The heart would always retain
them
and discard them not,
even if they cut and lacerate,
Because even though broken,
they still reflect its soul,
Like Phoenix they will flower,
The raging fires of hate,
anger and fears will scorch
them,
But the crop of love
will rise from the ashes.
A heart would be no heart
if not for its essential core—love,
The latter might be broken
and shredded to pieces,
But it’ll triumph
and rise from fury and fire
to smile with refreshed ‘love’.
There are times when
your heart gets shrunk,
wrung dry
and dejuiced by pain.
It becomes small
and darkness swallows it.
Accept it.
Fight it
and darkness becomes a demon.
Accept it.
Allow it to squeeze you more.
All this breaking
is in fact making,
It will push you
to the breaking limit,
You have to stop it
just a step before that
with your faith in life,
It’ll hold you in its womb,--
in that creative pitch black
cocoon,
And deliver you,
Open you again
to life, light and love.
In the icy cold,
the frozen seed of pain,
waiting for the spring thaw,
warmer days, brighter sun.
It then blooms into love,--
a dewy fresh blossom
on a new day.
We live our life
like changing seasons:
spring’s youthful love blossoms;
summer’s hot sweating passion;
autumnal shedding and surrender
to the inevitable;
lying frozen
buried under icy layers of pain;
to bloom in spring again.
The wintertime frozen dream-self
now warms up to be an awake-self,
The icy clods melt and trickle of life starts,
Aha, sizzling bright February sun
going like a knife through the cold wind,--
an interplay of fire and ice,
Spring flowers taking birth under dew-showers,
Soul brimming with joy
under clear blue sky,
Life triumphant to come abloom
after death came within an inch of life.
In tune with coquettish cooing,
you take a refreshing plunge
into the pool of love,
Excitement hooks you,
making you a not-so-elegant reveler,
But forget it not o thou journeyman
going boastfully on the path of love,
Remember that by falling in love
you have simply booked
a round-trip ticket
with an open return date,
Return you’ll with a reversed fate,
It’s just a stamp of limited visa
on the passport of your heart,
You will have to come back
and squirm like an irascible caterpillar
once the adventure fever is gone.
You might be embracing someone
but still that person
might be miles away from you in heart.
And someone might be miles away
yet be there right in heart’s center.
With its impish quirks
the darkness that was seeking
the silvery rivulets of shape
from its shapeless mass,
Now it finds a form
in his heart.
Never forget that
even light is seeking
shape, form, embodiment,
Allow it,
Open up,
It will sneak in,
Filling you up
A fish’s drowning is on the land
where you stand
safe on the lovely sand,
And you drown
like a miserly pathetic clown
where she swims,
We are kings in our zone safe
but paupers in other’s territory.
A sweltering tropical night,
The electric saw of her heartlessness,
cutting my dead heart’s woods,
I salvage a fragment of myself
from the slaughter house,
I carry the cutting like a treasure,
The melody is still alive
in its wooden fibers,
That’s where my tapasya lies,
I’ve to work like a passionate artist
and shape the flute
to bring it closer to life,
Then like a flautist
touch my lips to the flute
to come still closer to life,--
to love, to hope, to smile.
Among the clatter and chatter,
Shifting specks and pulsating ripples,
Wavy swirls and mournful elegy of emotions
in the vast recesses of heart,
the generous dimensions of her presence
give me a differently abled self,
Wherein I measure my time differently,--
the heart pierced by the arrows of linear time dies
and its spirit flies in loops of cyclical time:
past pushing into the present;
the present barging into the future;
the future stabbing the past from behind,
It’s a grand collision,
A marvelous crash.
Serrated with the pain of survival,
a man cuts a tree,
Resin and sap oozing from the
cut on the tree’s bark,--
coagulated tears,
It’s a tiny stream of pain
that started in a human heart
and changed to the tree’s tears,
The stream of pain proceeds further,
It now becomes
the sad words of a poet
on the paper made of tree’s flesh,
The sad verse then chimes
with the inaudible whisper of pain
in some reader’s heart.
Enclosed in the fencing
of my ignorance, darkness and misery,
Standing like a poor, meek lamb,
I saw two worlds,--
a joyless me in the circle;
and the other one outside the circle,
full of lush green,
rippling streams of freedom.
The chasm between the two worlds
seemed insurmountable,
The happy they and the sad me.
I moved along the fence
trying to find a way out,
There I came across a locked gate,
The lock rusted and the key missing,
And whatever resources were left
I used in searching for the missing key.
A folly it was,
Just like seeking a cap
that one already wears on the head,
Because the key was always there,
Like it’s with all of us,
It was there
in the safe chest of my heart,
The golden key,
The key of small love—self-love,
The key to open the box
and retrieve another key,
the key to bigger love.
Everyone is
beautiful, pretty, handsome,
gorgeous, attractive, exquisite,
magnificent, brilliant, bewitching, dazzling,
enticing, alluring, graceful,
divine, delightful, elegant,
captivating, fascinating, sublime,
charming, glamorous, aesthetic
in his/her own way.
The spots of dislike
that we see on them
aren’t actually
the dark markings on them,
These are the spots
on the retina of our own being,
preventing, obstructing full vision,
Making us partially blind
to the beauty around.
Clean the eyes of your existence,
Then all you see is just
beauty, love and grace.
Yanked off the hinges,
Torn away and blown to pieces,
Buried under the rubble,
Cut off from the rays of hope,
Dark clouds of locusts
devouring the crop of my effort.
Shame-stabbed,
Pacing the room like a caged animal,
Destiny’s chainsaws
cutting, clawing and gnawing
through the fibers of my existence.
Carrying autumnal colors in spring,
The serrated edges of memories
cutting the structure of my world,
The ghosts of sadness outside
always ready to barge into me.
That was how I set out
to kill the demons outside,
Went far and wide,
forgetting those that I carried
in the safe secrecy of my own self.
It was like a dust collector
carrying a huge burlap sack,
Needlessly carting dust
oblivious to gems hidden in heart.
I went too far away
from my own self,
Got lost, cried, felt orphaned,
That’s when I felt Her touch,
Mother nature’s touch,
The furrows on my forehead
smoothened with Her touch,
It was then a slow crawl to recovery,
I felt the chirring, buzzing mystery
of emptiness around a rainbow.
There I stood in a wooded corner,
The time brewed a heady spirit
mixing tears and laughter,--
the potion to mend broken hearts,
The trees smiled among
the twisting vines of triumphs and travails,
Juicy, plentiful harmony pervading the air,
The birds with effervescent chorus of hope,
Each moment extending its realm of
harmony, ease, joy, lightness.
I felt in communion with vastness,
Vast stretches invaded with peace,
I was no longer a lonely lighthouse
struggling against the dark,
I felt like sun during the day
and like moon during the night.
It’s very easy to fall prey to sadness
and become a rock,
But it’s still easier to turn a happy soul
who chats with trees
and sings to flowers.
Far away in the solitude of a forest
I felt closer to humanity
than I ever felt even in a crowded bazaar
rubbing shoulders with human bodies,
There I was lonely, distanced,
Here I was alone
but so-so near to humanity in my heart.
Sharing the unsaid mixed in the silence,
I saw, felt, touched, tasted, heard holy scriptures
in forests, flowers, streams, blue skies, birds,
My religion became life itself,
God and godliness pervading humanly
and non-humanly on this vast canvas.
Reinvigorated, refurbished, renovated,
I then return to the busy streets,
The streets carrying the same old clatter,
But all has changed,
The shield of silence enveloped around
keeps me wired
to that far-flung harmony.
The return of the native
who is in tune with
the undertone of silence
even in a clattering bazaar.
Now I don’t close my eyes
to meditate,
I open them
to see this endless magic,
this infinite beauty.
