The Screen

Then they raised a diaphanous screen
in front of the dying man,
separating him from the others.
While he still could see through the film,
they were only moving shadows:
wan figures trudging along
in broken, abrupt gaits —
as one who walks by
tending a colic-screaming baby.
When they touched his skin,
their hands were tight in
transparent gloves
to ward off the germs
of his impending death.

Yet he was glad to be there.
A condemned man is still a living man.
But the exhaustion — God!
Pain arrived as long pikes.
Like some stubborn child
refusing sleep,
he hung on by a thinning thread.
As for the relatives,
they were on the edge:
fed, cleaned, and watched over the man,
but they also wanted him to go —
as only the living can:
fussing over and failing
him at the same time.

New Post - March

If Love Is

I know you as the shadow
knows its flesh.
In evidence, the object —
a lingering state.
If light is a permanent thing,
if love is?

Lie on the ground, squander
yourself,
as darkness wears darkness —
such is its autonomy.
If longing is a permanent thing,
if silence —

Red Bus

Should we grieve each other?
We’re both still alive.

Our sadness feeds on bitter fumes,
and memories ride a red bus.

Are you leaving?
My peace of mind takes the window seat.

What little’s left
belongs to neither you nor me.

I’ll give this misery another name.
Please — give me back mine.

Keep your grievance, and my forgetting —
but travel on a red bus.

This forgetting, too, is a long halt.
Let’s stretch our legs awhile.

Let’s imagine we never loved each other:
just rode together on the red bus. 

This Garden, This Day

A splotch of the sun’s yolk. An azure maze of sky.
Flower to fruit. Seed to vine.
Silently everything blooms,
silently everything dies.

Tracing the immortal road —
who knows how far off rest is?
The sun doesn’t know.
The sunflower doesn’t.

But he, playing hide-and-seek
with himself, looks to the horizon,
sees someone coming,
not knowing who it is.

He won’t hazard a guess.
Won’t ask, Who are you, emptying my days —
folding one moment into a moment less,
raking the dry leaves of time?

I’ll wait in my garden, gather blind fruits
in the shadow of ridged bark,
bearing the palpitant heart
of the south wind.

I’ll keep watch
(an eager house cat)
listening to the lust song of a parakeet.
I’ll echo that song.

But the stranger says, Remember
this garden, this day —
How we were lost, and will be again
when light leans on red pots

of summer: guavas ripen,
pomegranates swell with heat.
The bland taste of dust 
on the old tongue of rain.

Then, through barely lit autumn,
a wake into winter —
a pale ghost
of moonlight

on this tired bench.
When we outlast 
the seasons,
but forget our names.

Cigars with God

If there is a God, He’d better be a friendly man.

On the starry benches of the sky,
He and I sit side by side in our high boots,
cigars in hand, gazing down at Earth,
nodding in quiet agreement.

“Full of life. Full of life — that plucky little planet.
But life… ah, so troublesome. God!”

After

Imagine a line breaking out from your past —
ripping through your back,
passing through you,
exiting ahead to meet the future.

Imagine it as the beam of a laser,
the trace of a bullet,
an X-ray
penetrating flesh.

Whatever it is —
you will not survive this wound.

Adrift

Henceforth, weigh happiness by the distance
from the oxygen vent;
peace of mind by the reek of a phenyl floor.

Mouth agape, fallen mutely
into dull pain
on a blue-white low Fowler bed,
wires sprouting from her chest,
a sunburnt flower’s stem.
How utterly still she is now!

If one could wake her for a moment more
with purer breath and restore her 
to spit at mortality —
But heaven’s boat has sailed,
hull heavy, the last weight of the heart
upon the blinking monitor.

Adrift on the wheezing bed,
she is floating afar — without a word,
without making the faintest move.

Another Day, Another Hour

This day,

this hour,

will return

as long-lost children, migratory birds —

older, soft on wings —

We will name it another day,

we will call it another hour.

A Night like This Night

It will be just like a night like this one. The light will go out, even the darkness will evaporate. Between memories and the body’s amnesia; dream and wakefulness; without fear, desire, or guilt — nothing will remain.

Being, only being.

No sense of time, not an inch of space or distance, without feeling or knowing anything. It’s as it happens, waking in a hospital bed after hours under general anaesthesia, and someone asks, “Where were you all this time?” And you don’t know how to respond.

“It was just like a night like this night. I began to lose my senses. Then, there was nothing. I remember nothing. Weird dreams. Then a void. A void of senses, meaning, experience. Suddenly the dreams came back. Now there’s wooziness and a dull pain in my stomach. I guess I was lost to myself.”

“But you were here all the time. In this bed. We saw it.”

“Yes.”

“To whom were you lost then?”

“To myself.”

“Who was this ‘myself’? You were lost!”

“Perhaps it was lost, too — my ‘myself’. I don’t know. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was always there with me. Or somewhere. Or nowhere. Maybe I wasn’t lost at all. Please, don’t bug me anymore.”

Irritation creeps in. The exhaustion, the confusion that usually precedes a blackout. You have no memory of the anaesthetic experience, except for a few scenes from vivid dreams. You don’t know yet how to place yourself on the unbroken line we call time, or the unbroken distance that is space.

Yet an important question remains: who experienced that lack of experience under anaesthesia? The confusion you felt afterwards, upon waking — was it only a confusion of cognition, or did it arise from language? Do “I” and “myself” signify the same person, or are they somehow split?

Are the records of your experiences – thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations – are like the iron bars of a railway track: joined or disjointed easily? Or, are they never-ending, continuous, unobtrusive, if of nothing else then of your being itself, though you’re not aware of such a sensation, such a presence.

Perhaps no feeling arises out of such experience — the experience of your own being. No thoughts, no memories. No word is capable of describing it.

If the body is only a body, material and nothing more, a paradox arises: the paradox of self, of subjectiveness. How does it emerge from matter?

Yet if it’s the opposite; if there is only self, no body, no material; although the idea seems logically consistent, there is no evidence for it, except in that logic.