The Moon and the Mule

On a ploughed field of wasteland

All animals feed on darkness thinking it is pasture
I am an earthen clod dissolving in the night
Clouding my surroundings. But then my vision is
Cleansed by the sight of a bright
Moon and a mule mesmerised
By its own shadow
The tear scripted by moonlight weeping into the water
Become a line and a rippling fish
Swimming in the surroundings muddled by
The melting clod that I am… The time being such.
And thinking that the moonlight is grass
The mule continues to graze upon its own shadow
I become the soil that settles at the bottom of the night
The very hook of space catches the slithering
Wave that the fish’s become

Thinking it was the Moon itself I saw

The grazing moonlight of the mesmerized mule.

(From kavitenantarchya Kavita)

The Zebra

Jungle-shadows and a shimmering afternoon

Turned into a grazing zebra in a pasture’s dream
Our presence seeped into the shrubbery
From drunken eyes
Through streams of burning sunlight.
By the willows at the edge of
The green swamp
The African solitude contained in my body
Kissed you with the pleasing lips of a stinging wind
Painting leaf after leaf in the living colours of silence

Jungle-shadows and a shimmering afternoon

In a pasture’s dream
A zebra grazing upon losing grass
Through the bright yellow tussocks of dreaming bodies
The sky leant into you from me
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The Story of Karma

Those who walked street after street my friends got smashed on

reality’s illicit booze
Got scattered long since on their uncharted paths
The air smelt of petrol and of burnt smoke-scent
Though I wasn’t equal to the task it fell on me to bear the yoke
I was nobody’s hero the role of a saviour was not in my bones

Whatever was I looking for wherever I did I go

Looking for myself and seldom finding me
Except by some random hazardous accident
Got bonded wrought my experience the hard way
Reached my goal straight and fell down stunned by it all

I came to be snared on my own in life’s total trap

What difficult people to deal with what atrocities they inflicted
On one another how could one cope with their angry demands of
exacting love
Yet now one realizes that they seasoned this language alone

Make-believe

From ivory make an elephant; from the feather of a crow:

You just have to close the eyes--and lo!
All the chains break loose.

But what is this din

One hears in the distance?
Made by helpless people?

You just have to open your eyes

One poem is over and another begins
You should’ve been there forever.

In the opening and shutting of eyelids

I traversed the planet; lived its history:
Made love; experienced perversity.

Spent the Vaikhari ---my common tongue generously among people

As I reached Pashyanti ----the tongue that images, and can see Para
The tongue that illuminates the self from a distance.

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They Tell Me Your Colour Is Blue

They tell me your colour is blue

My life-breath feeds on your inspiring luminous pastures
All that stands still or moves has turned into grass
In celebration of your much extolled blueness

It is also said that you are unfathomable

Those who know your exact whereabouts say so on oath
I am happier to realize you in your lost but similar addresses
In your nature that spurns all limits

All awareness turns over

In a winking of your eyes
Your serpentine power looms throughout your being
It shows us our destined parts in your vast anatomy

You---from the number one to its zillionth decimal---are

A unique curvature unto yourself
That has no outer shell nor has any inner space.

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What I am Expressing Is Itself Love

What I am expressing is itself love.

That had no other choice but to be expressed
May I once again tell you the exact sutra
The self is the dancer
The inner self the stage
The senses the audience
We’ll just go on blinking our eyes
And as we blink we’ll forget
What we’re at is making love
As though touch
Has opened the whole sky of awareness
And it is like starlight gazing at stars and calculating stars

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