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.
Girls in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’,
plod along muddy roads–
colorful yet spatter-fearing–
trudging to Easter service
meticulously, yet carefree.
Some wedge their way into Tata Sumos
to jounce their way to mass.
Master wicker craftsmen
made their Easter baskets.
My Hoosier childhood Easters
featured injection-molded plastic baskets
–pretend woven–
but pressed from a blob of pastel plastic.
Even our grass was plastic–fake grass.
[Same as Christmas tinsel but for color.]
I bet they have real grass, too.
We had access to real grass
but no one wanted it
to touch their jelly bean.
I find so much reality to be alien and off-putting.
And I never learned
whether Meghalayans eat their
bunnies feet- or ears- first. 
I’m sick and tired of Gravity
telling me where I should go.
Why must I have more entropy?
And approaching c I must slow?
I’m all for conservation,
but electrical charge and mass?
What authoritarian nation
could get such laws to pass?
There is a tinge of sadness in anything that floats.
In the float is buried the seed of sinking.
There is a tinge of sadness in everyone who sleeps.
The seed of wakefulness lay dormant in a dream.
People think themselves fearless of Poe’s pit–sans the pendulum,
but underestimate the suffocating power of the void.
The pendulum is swift; the pit, relentless
Fear of the dark is fear of what is not.
In a sacred forest
a Rodent roamed
who owned a sword
it freely loaned.
This was no hacking
machete blade,
but made of metal
of unmatched grade.
One day Lightening
made a request:
To borrow the blade
believed the best.
Lightening zigged,
sliced, and zagged.
Claiming ownership
in its boastful brags.
The rightful owner
requested its return.
But the rodent’s
plea met only spurn.
So the critter devised
a clever, sensible plan
in order to bridge
the requisite span.
It needed to climb
from Earth to the sky
because it had no
wings with which to fly.
But it wasn’t just wings
which Rodent lacked.
It had only one item
to be skyward stacked.
So it piled its poop
as high as it could,
from the base of a tree
past the top of the woods.
Stacking and piling, the
poop nearly touched cloud.
When a thunder crack
struck ear-splitting loud.
Lightening saw rodent
would reclaim the sword
that Lightening had come
to so ardently adore.
Down fell the Rodent
to a pile of fried dung
that had once been its
steps and its ladder rungs.
You may think that
Lightening got its way.
But the Rodent piles
its poop to this very day.
Someday when Lightening
is momentarily distracted,
Rodent’s sword will be
surreptitiously extracted.
