i walked the rutted road in failing daylight & wondered what I might find when it turned to night & milky moonlight would be the only means to see & i hear the relentless chirp of a bullfrog that can't be seen because it's everywhere to my non-directional ears but still i look for it & i step into a puddle & my sock is squishy with each left step & i go home
Ganesha: Obstacles removed & Good luck brought All yields to the elephantine forehead & elephantine learning Seemingly immovable when seated, but I've seen you swing; hoisted by a crane & dangled out over the water But the pendulum arc was short & stiff & precarious: as if it might flip the crane -- every remover of obstacles must leave a detritus of past obstacles in its wake
They claimed theft, but what was stolen? They could not name it, but said they felt its loss. They demanded recompense, but weren't sure to whom they should send the bill, and so they just shouted the demand out to the universe. This thing which could not be named or described could be missed; its loss felt deep within. They would rage for it (if in vague terms) by violent means if necessary.
The mirror lies,
pretending to be a window.
Through the looking-glass?
My ass!
It presents a prison
in fine detail
&
with a glossy coating,
but it can’t be escaped.
Its truth is overbearing.
That’s how it lies.
Rain is coming. I can smell its sweet whiff on the breeze. A storm prowls out there beyond my eyes power to see. But dark clouds hunker in the fore: the storm's vanguard. The birds know it's coming. They've vacated the skies to... I know not where.
Fictional cities pile upon each other, spreading like blood puddles until they spill into yet others at their amorphous edges. And distinction is lost -- homogeneity wins -- but that lysergic sadness remains.
Put the sun at your back and run headlong toward the darkness. Killing days at record speed, leaning into the terminus, and you wake up in the light and prepare for another westward run.
Possibility. That which is not, but could be: in the future, or in a world as feasible as our own. (perhaps more so?) When is a possibility a reality? It may not be a reality unless - and until - it comes to be, and, yet, might be a basis of reality, decisions are made on assumptions that a possibility has high probability of becoming reality. I see kids playing and feel the expanding field of possibility, and wonder when it starts to shrink, to collapse? When & why does possibility die?
It's called Hatiyan-ka-Jhad because it looks like a huddled herd of elephants -- not only in its corpulence but also with its rough, gray skin. So rotund at its base that it's hard to figure how its slowly slimming upward taper can come to twiggy ends, and not be a mile tall. The branches are overly muscular, like a bodybuilder who got carried away, moving from strong and vigorous into the domain of science fiction mishap. It has its own mythology -- multiple creation tales about how its seed got from Madagascar to the middle of India half a millennium ago: tales of fakirs and royal envoys. It's even been said that the Forty Thieves, the ones who tormented Ali Baba, used its hollow as their cache cave. But it refuses to respond to "Open Sesame" -- so I guess we'll never know.
When monsoon rains soaked the soil, that old tree toppled. They cut it out of the roadway, & I went out to count its rings, but found it not with hundreds of rings, but hundreds of trunks -- many no more than twigs. What a mighty tree a pile of twigs pressed together can make, & now it's gone.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 