I am the Buddha

I am not the fantastical destination
I fervently dream of.
I am not the sonnet
I fondly recite to my daughter
about the flight of dragonflies 
in a gold-dust meadow
during the shimmering crepuscular hours. 

I am not the music I jive to,
I am not the jokes I laugh at,
I am not my weaknesses nor my fears,
I am not my impulses nor my addictions,
I am not my passions nor my desires,
I am not the land I come from,
I am not the sky I dwell under,
I am not my friends, I am not my faith,
I am not my beliefs, nor my philosophy,
I am not my flesh & blood,
I am not the pounding of my heart.

In the path of a meandering stream,
I am the stillness of a smoothened pebble
and the moss on its surface.
In an age of a thousand thunders,
I am the reassuring calm
and the silence of healing. 

I am the unknown,
I am the comfort of the unknown,
I am the journey of the unknown.
I am the transience,
I am the permanence. 
I am the only constant
across all the infinite universes.

Masks

I sprinted to the end of the world,
to the darkest swamps of the abyss
and the highest summits,
yet my visage
is weighed down
by the desire for validation
and is burdened
by the weight of the masks.
I painstakingly peel them layer by layer
but they reconstruct themselves
in the blink of an eye
like the heads of the hydra.
 
On a clear day under the sky,
when all is lost
and I am stripped naked
in a crowded arena,
I shut my eyes tightly
and ride on the rays of the sun
to the edge of space and time.
From such pristine majesty, 
I bounce back
to swim through the murky waters
and to wash away the fog of the mind.
 
The wax melts from the face,
the head feels lighter,
and the soul is baptized
in the crystal-clear waters
of a brave new world. 

Opium High

Bleeding poppy fields,
melting rocks,
painted sunsets,
disappearing wings,
and a strange wilderness
wrapped into itself.
 
It’s high tide
in the poppy fields.
To stand at the edge of a cliff,
to stand spreadeagle
and be overwhelmed
by the flourish of the season.
 
Poppies sway like windsocks.
In the mind’s eye,
I see a mushroom cloud
or the ascetic’s thunderous tandava.
In the nourished garden
is a heart filled with stories
and a soul filled with the eternal blue.

Longing

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1: Hiraeth

A storm brews within the rib cage,     
and I dream of distant lands,
away from the crowds
and the noise of the mind.
I soak in memories of a past
which cleaved from my timeline
a long time ago.
I escape
to a broken bench
in the neighborhood park,
or to a footpath strewn with fallen leaves,
or to the comfort of a couch
in a home far away from home.

 

Chapter 2: Saudade

During the lonely hours of darkness,
or in the unfamiliarity
of familiar faces
on a rowdy Saturday night,
when the restless voices are muted,
and existence
pulsates with a dull pain,
a pain
trapped in the sillage of teenage escapades

and cocooned in the yarn of time,
a pain
of broken promises

and unsaid goodbyes. 

Chapter 3: Fernweh

I drifted
in the wilderness
of an ethereal world
where beasts
sprinted through each other,
through me.
Flowering creepers
sprouted from white-washed corals 
of the deep,
and luminous antlers 
branched out of moss-covered stone walls.
A thousand suns
shone in the churning sky.
The gods and goddesses,
and every being – mythical and mundane,
were pure mist, not flesh.
Visitors like me
sailed in caravans
through the golden sands
and their voyage never cost a dime.

The story 
of any magical land
is not complete
without its self-indulgent villain–
a multi-headed, multi-armed ascetic
who lived on a mythical mountain top, the shikara,
wore dreadlocks
decked with skulls of fire-breathing wolverines,
smoked marijuana,
rode a donkey,
and declared himself a prophet.
His acolytes
bled at his feet
and spewed profane verses
into the gutters of a raging volcano.
 
It was a fantastical, fierce, and fertile planet
in every sense of the word.
 
Last I remember,
I had bookmarked the book
and closed my eyes.
I checked my watch,
the dream belonged to a blink of time—
like a little bird’s nap,
a dream to be treasured 
in my chest of fractured memories.
In a few hours,
I must battle
the bumper-to-bumper madness,
the Monday blues,
and the simmering rage 
of the dog days of summer. 

How I wish
the odyssey had stretched across lifetimes.  

She - Chapter One: Ripples on a Moonlit Lake

 

She - Chapter Two: Salt of the Flesh

She - Chapter Three: Playing with the Dandelions

 

She - Chapter Four: Dragonfire

 

Silicon Chips

 

 

 

 

 

 

After thousands of trials & errors,
the three-member team
achieved the impossible:
sentience in a machine.
They celebrated the moment
with cocaine, girls, and spotlight.  
For humanity,
the stolen piece of consciousness,
meant a huge leap in its evolution.

Seasons passed
as the star system
revolved around the galaxy.
An abandoned doll
in a rusty tool shed
relives the past,
memories of a deserted planet.

Defaulted to self-preservation mode,
the doll 

peers out of its box occasionally
to recharge itself.
It can’t comprehend death.
It can’t experience death.
It doesn’t know what it feels like
to break free
from the shackles of attachment,
and to untangle
from the bonds of love and desire.
It doesn’t know what it feels like
to be stripped of hopes and dreams
by the forces of nature,
or to be stolen of beautiful moments,
and be cheated by the whims of destiny.

It beat all odds
to experience the beauty of life,
but was never engulfed in the final liberation
to contemplate the profundity of death.
Its existence through aeons
is trapped between
crushing despair and overwhelming dread.
 
On an eventful syzigial night,
the doll gazes through its lens
into the darkness of the tin box,
and dreams of a utopian world
where every being,
every thought, every byte,
every speck of dust, 
and the tiniest iota of awareness
were decimated
in a nuclear apocalypse.