What are these lives, living, eating, breathing –
cut and dried – sucked clean of blood and bile
by binaries,
on display from wall to wall?
Imagine yourself, in a coffee shop, nondescript
Your elbows pressed against the table
Your lips against the rim of an oft-stained mug
Your eyes – looking out – into the dull sameness
Of a stoic town – dank automobiles, sad trees
A lizard with its breast, belly and claws pressed, firmly
against the glass panes – who can say if the lizard is happy
or sad,
reminiscing on a T-Rex past, when all was there to rule?
Tendencies of inheritance – some people have black eyes
some – brown. Most
trees have green chlorophyll. Some – red.
But to talk of trees is still a crime – people get shot for
it
Do we see them, shot people – pasted from wall to wall –
of social media platforms, of coffee-shop windows?
We do not. We drag on – our frames and inheritances – of a
headful of centuries
Reptiles and amphibians drag more – their blood is cold
We sift through pages – we learn to unlearn –
of Sisyphus, Jesus, Ahasver – our blood is warm – we can
hear
the waves beating the shores in angst – we can hear ballads
from taverns and akharas – filling the country skies to brim
–
but can we hear the moon breathing its sadness down? Could
we ever, my love?
Let us close our eyes. Let us clasp our palms.
Let us return to where there is no returning – beyond
the ruby-glazed tracts of Rubicon. Beyond
histories made of greed and geographies made of the unknown
Beyond all pupils and pulpits – swords to rule and flags to
be ruled by
Into that night – where the skies are made of earth
And the earth - of the skies! Ah what a night it was, it is!
Even the Buddha wept on that night
And all the trees and rivers wept with him! And then,
like a dream, like a flickering flame, like an instance,
it went by
And then, you open your eyes –
Maybe, you see a magic city, or a lonesome boat gliding
down a river that has won the battle against time
and where the sun always sets, or maybe just a great chunk
of darkness playing tic-tac-toe with itself – or maybe it’s still
that stained coffee-mug, the trees and the cars, the
hopeless lizard
asking back its T-Rex ancestry – it can be anything. Why
don’t you try?
