Movement

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?