How engaging it is-
To occupy the mind
With a full spectrum of affections
From the basest desires
To the highest virtues.
How intelligent it is-
To draw up the warp and weft
Of random events
And to weave a rich tapestry
With my very own patterns of thought and imagination.
How gratifying it is-
To believe in ‘my person’
As being native to an undiscovered Being
And to proceed therefrom
On a lifelong journey towards self-discovery.
Long after you left…
Your pointed words stayed with me
Often acting as effective antidotes
To the excesses of my own mind
All of my wild leaps of imagination
Swiftly cut down to size
By your pre-emptive acts of concern
Had it not been for you
I may’ve been lying fallen somewhere
Ditched by default of my own design.
Yes, the credit for my salvation
Must be rightly accorded to you
And to the corrective power of sarcasm
For what could’ve otherwise been brutal
And left me hurt and wounded
is now only a persistent dull ache…
I continue to exist- corrected, but wronged
Alive, but dead; breathing in a coffin
Shrouded in a symbolic spotless white.
It’s pitiful that I should try every cheap trick
To appear larger, more accomplished than you.
We, who are riding on the tides of Time
Must instead surrender to its power and mercy
Now, no matter what fancy threads you wear
Or how compelling a yarn I spin
You and I will fail to live up to
All the expectations we set from our self-constructed greatness.
You appear phony to me
And I, to you, insignificant.
Our greatness if any, doesn’t lie in appearances
But in our every effort to step away from them.
Appearances after all, it must be remembered
Arise from the imagination, and not from reality.
Time, will eventually, strip us off our masks
Freed from our caricatured existence, we will fall from our castles in the air.
So today, even though I co-exist with you
I am contemptuous of your insignificant life
You annoy me, and I disappoint you
You seek acceptance, and I see you as being worthy of rejection
But remember, we’re not made to relay reactions
We have the power to send forth powerful action
That powerful action is unconditioned by appearances
It may be mined from your heart
It’s in the lap of time we must seek our nurturing
As it is time that will render our rhetoric in pantomimes.
How great is life
In the possibilities it holds!
Enabled alike in blindness and vision
Or in richness and poverty
Even so in vice and virtue
And in love and hate.
Life is not a road
It’s a vast presence
A space within which we stand
Blindfolded, but supported
Allowed only to imagine
And live out the absurdities
Of our own ideas.
It was a three-hour drive that drove us.
A six-pack
inert
Silent in thought
and throbbing in pulse
Each of us immersed
in a reality of our own
Wombed together
in a pregnant pause
We each emerged a little
in clumsy attempts to connect
Islands adrift
In a sea of consciousness
Aware
but unknowing
Too close for comfort
Yet far away…
None of us had anything to say.
3:15pm:
I lie down for a nap.
Thoughts are racing in my head.
They fight each other
One must emerge as the winner-
The most powerful thought-
The one endowed with most reason…
The fight in mind should settle it
Once and for all.
I shut my eyes
I consciously step away from the arena.
Their argument becomes dimmer as I walk away…
When the noises become faint
I slip into bliss…
4:20pm:
I’m up…
The thoughts are now a memory.
Time transported me into the future.
Having left thought behind
I feel older, wiser
more mature.
This is the way to grow:
This is the way to win:
Yes, thoughts will enter
And claim your space
Allow them to fight out their dialectical destiny.
Stand up
Walk away
Realize that
The attainment you seek
Doesn’t depend on a thought’s victory.
“Does love exist,” she asked
“Expectations unmet
And feelings are held on to closely
On a short leash…
And what about love?
Love stays in my head
Not my heart
It lives on as a concept
It seldom, if ever
Enters my aching heart
Does it exist? Anywhere?
And should it exist?
My relationships are but a transaction
Held together precariously
By a concept called ‘duty’.
What makes ‘duty’ more dear than love?
Perhaps because I sees that everybody else thinks so…
Love is this fluid, uncontrollable ache
Love knows no partiality
It reveals all
And that’s the scary part
That in love
I will be seen in my nakedness
My skin will lie before you
In all its blemishes
My aching heart will
with innate gravity and force
Drop me to unimaginable lows
I will long for you and your deliverance
With no certainty ever
That I shall be received by the open arms of your own longing
Love can just about assure me of two mercies:
Hope and Faith.
But it is duty that’s more prudent,
more pragmatic
It helps me float over the ache
And it is Duty that pays the bills
For all those distractions
That fill up my space and time
And love continues to live on
In my head
As a concept.
And because it does
there are expectations unmet
And feelings restrained.”
Ignorance has a wide circle of friends
Ignorance has tremendous influence
It draws me to people
And people to me
Our common pretense, our common act
We come together in what we lack
Or so we say always believing
It’s through another’s eyes I may understand my seeing
There’s no place among friends for him who knows
It’s your ignorance, your inadequacy that opens up doors
It’s Understanding though that has afforded me this insight
That Ignorance need not be wrong, it can be very right
Especially when you need some friends
Understand that you’re better of with Ignorance.
Our economic system is flawed.
Our political system is flawed.
Our education system is flawed.
Our society is flawed.
Because they thrive on falsehood
They need lies for profit, for leverage
And in and through their design
All work is sacrilegious and a curse.
Poverty is immanent in wealth
We only graduate in degrees of ignorance
And man is bound to man in a wretched dependency.
The root of all this is the individual
Fallen from Grace
He seeks his Self
He tries to know who he is
By being who he’s not (a sum of different parts).
Filled with deluded notions of grandeur
He procures. He makes. He sells.
And he is celebrated for the profit he makes.
In this blinding business of generating profit
He is left with sight, but loses his power to perceive.
With such an impairment
He can find worldly sustenance only through profit
He woos gain
And fears loss
He is wide in mirth
But shrivelled in sorrow
He wants only part of what life has to offer
He has no faith in the whole.
And the Truth cannot be anything but whole
The Truth Is.
It need not be created
The Truth cannot be measured by numbers or degrees
It is all-pervading and all-embracing.
Truth does not grow
It does not favour
the rich over the poor
the strong over the weak
the haves over the have-nots.
Infallible in its system
It awaits our homecoming
If only man could find solace
in the knowledge that it’s okay to not know…
And simply accept his being
Forego the contrivances of “who” or “what”.
And celebrate am-ness…
Then Truth would speak
And Truth would need
That which only Truth can give
Truth would ask
And Truth would answer
And Truth would accept
What Truth had made.
Wit. Wisdom. Wonder... 