Curves, a poem…

Listen, Love…

Someday, a bright red pain
A red unlike any you’ve worn
May come searing through your heart
And sit inside you
Stunning the senses
Replacing your freedom to be.

I hope not, but I do, but I hope not
But that day
No matter what fairytales I tell you
I won’t be able to hush it away
Like I did your bruises and tears
The fevers and fogs all these years.

So, you need to know
I’ll be right outside the door
That we both shall build between us:
You, to be alone with your self
Me, to push you to it
And wait.

Learning has curves for a reason, my love
Once, we learn to let go for our own sake
Then, spiralling up, for the other’s.
So we’re freed, spiral by spiral
Alone but together, together but alone.

Art by Raghu Soman

The Guru…

Who Goes There? (Photo Credit: Rakhi Varma)

The guru’s mind is empty
Like the space revealed when the mist above a lake
Parts effortlessly at dawn…
His heart is the throb of all Existence, and
His body, dust blowing in the wind
Free of the four directions…
What he knows, knows no end, no beginning
And what he understands
Is the heart of silence.

Go, become that space, that heart, that dust
Don’t be worthy, be audacious, begin at the end:
Pretend, wear him, stand in front of the mirror
Like a child who wears his father’s shoes to
Become father – and he does.
On your way, you’ll need two things:
Faith, which means that you let go of
Everything that can be known or held or said
And longing, which means that all you
Know, hold or say is
Many ways of saying: “Who am I?
I am that. I am that. I am that.”

Red Herrings, a poem

Is The Gaze Blue (Photo Credit: Tove Ilher)

The common thing between this
dark descending slowly, and this winter bird
…and your melancholy
is that there’s no true reason behind any.
Don’t look for causes –
They are red herrings
meant to keep you from looking
at the answer behind:
The unchanging sky, where
all things come and go
in the folding and unfolding
of pure Emptiness.