Running into an old gas station,
I found it but a thin facade.
I’d tripped into a simulation
coded by a tacky two-bit god.
I checked my watch, the world stood still.
Eternity lived on this back lot set?
Should’ve taken that damn red pill,
for this world has gone over-budget.
What are you free to do or be?
Can you set out across an endless sea?
What deserts can your mind go roam
from which your fears won’t send you home?
Epictetus asked, “Are you free?”
Can you stand, while others flee?
Can you escape the default mode
that’s locked into your mental code?
Can truth change your way of seeing?
Are you sectless in the art of disagreeing?
An old woman in a sari
weeps at the bus stop.
It’s 6am. Nobody out
but joggers and tired
telemarketers, heading
home from a night of
being Chad from Denver
to be Arjun of Bangalore
once more.
And this woman sitting
solo on a bench–weeping.
Shunning assistance,
her story feels clear.
There’s no space to
grieve in their home.
No instant free of
someone who wants to
fix the unfixable.
So she slips away
from a quiet house
to unburden her grief
at a distance from the
loved ones it might
rain down upon.
He was an old, soulless Zombie
I met in a diner out on Route 5.
He said he’d kill us all,
but I thought he was joshing.
Then when his music was over–
an ELO tune from the jukebox—
he lunged at the waitress and
bit her clean through the carotid.
It spurt like a shock therapy patient
had a ketchup squeeze bottle in hand.
The diner’s diners commented,
“Surely, that old, soulless Zombie
isn’t gnawing on that poor girl?”
“Poor child probably don’t make minimum wage—
even with tips—
and now an old, soulless Zombie has his chompers in her.”
It’s there.
Down deep
the dark deep
without at drip,
a drop,
or a peep.
Silent as a kingly tomb–
or a sleeping mother’s womb.
It sits as still as a blind mole rat–
but seething like a vampiric bat.
And if that door should open,
there is a truth unspoken.
It will go out to feed.
Spawning a terror stampede.
Gobbling, gobbling–no tasting, just killing.
No time to savor the fear it’s instilling.
It must feed.
Flat-topped tea shrubs
round over the contours
of ancient, eroded mountains
worn into low-lying lumps.
The army green plants
sport tight crew cuts–
the recently plucked.
The lime green plants
are slightly shaggy–
pickers will soon visit.
Tips will be tossed
over the shoulder
into conic, woven baskets.
Leaves to be dried in hot boxes
fired by crackling wood.
Crushed.
Bagged.
Steeped in boiling water.
Fusing into you.
That speck of sand
that you can barely see
is a planet to the particle
that sits on either side of it,
awaiting a wave form collapse.
Your mind can’t roam out
to the tip of the spiral arm–
let alone to the leading edge
of space as it accelerates into…
5 billion years or 5,000,
it’s all the same to you.
And anything less than
a microsecond isn’t worth
being called time–
[though it’s half a life time for muonium.]
Such a tiny window
through which to seek
the sum of all knowledge.
Sitting on the ghat,
folded legs
&
spine straight.
Gazing at the flowing river,
&
thinking that sacred waters
must answer sacred questions.
But they recoil from the answer.
From being shown that they are the river–
a river which forgets that which happened,
while remembering events that never did.
They crave a gift of clarity.
But the only path to understanding
is a backwards plunge into an abyss
in a moment of sacrificial madness.
It’s often thought that rationality and morality can’t coexist under the same roof,
but it’s rationalization and morality that are incendiary roommates.
Mid-monsoon Kolkata, when torrents back up the lines, is as noisome as ever,
but far less noisy as people seek shelter and an incessant spatter shushes.
Everybody gets crapulous on Thanksgiving, but no one will admit as much
because it sounds like one is bragging about one’s dietary roughage.
I’d like to think that I’m generally combobulated, sheveled, and gruntled,
but who could I tell.
Struggling to give birth to bliss,
the proud parent fears it’ll flee
–never to return.
He heard his guru chanted the
the mantra one thousand times
–pow, Enlightenment.
Chanting the mantra 999 times
he waits expectantly for his gift
–pow, Nothing.
They told him that it was a path.
A guru told him he had the map.
False analogy.
Teacher’s destination is not yours.
Don’t buy a map to the unknown.
Dead reckon it.
Be a scientist, leaving the detritus
of failed experiments in one’s wake.
Inching closer.
The rules of space do not apply here.
No seekers have the same beginning.
& destinations vary.
Seekers must make their own path.
Chasing footprints is a fool’s errand.
Step forward.
