it’s just you and me now,
even if you are some kind of a minor god,
even if I am a nameless face in a horde,
alone, at this distance, at this proximity,
palms together, fingers touching,
my breath in your ear,
one unspoken prayer separating us,
it’s just you and me,
my existence as much a myth as yours;
we tell each other stories,
I improvise from things I’ve read and heard,
stories about you and me and others who were
once me or you, people, gods, each a fantasy
in the mind of the other;
I think of what you said the other night,
alone, the moon bright enough to wake the
sleeping flowers,
you told me how pain isn’t real,
even happiness isn’t real,
that if I could just loosen my grip, let go
of all that I was holding on to,
there would be just that moment
and the nothingness, and that nothingness
would fill everything it touched,
and even that moment wouldn’t really exist;
I laughed, I cried,
I told you I loved the things you
made up,
you told me I had made you up too,
how could both of us be real,
I pretended to understand,
and you smiled at that too;
it’s just you and me tonight
and that moon pretending it knows
it is unseen on its other side,
you and me, unbuttoning pain,
shedding skin, trading names,
what a shame it would be
if everything had to be real,
pain needs its gods to be untruths,
happiness needs a different story.
Maya
Form
But there is the manifest form with all its imperfections,
and an amorphous mind, soul you call it, consciousness,
being, a viscous cloud of fear and time and knowing; one
the sum of the past trapped in tired skin, the wind of millennia
beginning to erode its edges as it does mountains and earth,
the other still learning, still yearning, an aggregation of
everything wrong and something right. Yet what is your love
that arches its body and frees its limbs and lets its eyes fill with
the light of invisible suns, when I remember another that can’t
be held except by another emptiness, the edges dark with the
warmth of stars that must have once lived; who mourns these
dead stars, love, who knows that the absent, the unseen, is
accentuating the immediacy, the salted curves of the present?
What is my aching form but what your mind gives my body?
Maya
It rained then,
the land lurching upward
to grab the first answer
from a reluctant heaven.
‘Maya’ you called it.
Our limited senses gathering bits of the universe,
crafting a false reality.
A cocoon of complex sanity.
The subtle truth altogether too large and too simple
for our life-sodden minds.
Like love, I asked.
The beloved coloured by the eyes of the lover.
Interpreting word and touch,
weaving safety nets.
Gossamer veracity.
No absolutes, you said.
Your seeing changes the seen.
Your seeing amplifies the unseen.
Align the nested microcosms,
find the smallest integrity.
Quantum uncertainty.
A symphony beat uncaring
on the brick red Malabar tiles.
I stuck my hand out of the window
to collect the candour of the billowing storm.
A single raindrop ran down my finger,
containing the entire sky.
contained in the entire sky.
‘Maya’ you called it.
Uncertain truth.
The illusion of sanity.
THOUGHT PURGE 