Epitaphic

what starts to flicker
            shall soon begin to fade
a dwindling will to live:
            a sombre, minimalist serenade


the wind that gives life
            persuades death to pervade:
the horror of an ending,
            and the beauty of being afraid.
           

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W. B. Yeats"

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Just One Sentence (A Mini-stream of Consciousness)

Often curving through the misery of the world we see a hope in smoke billowing out of a rest house and we decide to stop, knowing not who will welcome the presence of an entity from the cold snowy blizzard and that who would be brave enough to console you and subjugate your sorrows with the flick of a matchstick that burns brighter than a thousand suns of joy to evacuate the cold blizzard from your slowly colding heart, and yet the heart gets warmed as your future seems full of promise once more and life has seen you again through the foggy sunset, just in time.



(One or two errors, yes, deliberate though
Grammar only restricts creativity's flow.)

Poem Language

Still await a time, an optimistic I
When poetry will be the language new,
Speech vague, yet clear like a cloudless sky,
Words quivering on lips like evanescent dew.


(The time will never come, I bow my head and cry,
Weary vocabulary shall keep permeating our air
With reason but no rhyme, wings to show but not to fly,
Useless mumbo jumbo; words escaping without flair.)

Joy in Madness. The

I sat on an apple to eat a star, when I saw how my thoughts were dripping out of a leaking, torn sky. I smiled, and my dreams showed on my teeth like diamonds polished with an oyster's spit. Wings grew from my ears, and I dived into the ocean of my future memories. Music played out of a dumb man's lips, and it painted a golden arch that only the blind could see. There were flavors on my skin, and textures rubbed into my eyes. I saw the bottle of joy, uncapped and leaking profusely.

And then, a hand came and grasped me from my back, and dragged me back to boring sanity.

“I became insane, with long
intervals of horrible sanity.”
- Edgar Allan Poe

Loneliness and I

Sometimes I envy the lonely, because they have become accustomed to loneliness, and their yearning for company has withered away as a desire of the distant past. I on the other hand, am a social animal like most of us, and when loneliness befalls me, sporadically, I am left with hours of emotionlessness and with periods of diminished joyfulness. I am not accustomed to loneliness, so in those few moments lasting days when I sometimes have to bear loneliness, time seems cruel and life seems empty. Truly, "boredom's not a burden anyone should bear" (Tool).

I need angels, and I need dust
A union: pure flesh with a soul to trust

What Makes Your Heart, Beat?

Often, we reject what we cannot define. Anything that fits not into the four corners of common Man's thought cube, is naturally, viewed with skepticism and an uncalled for scorn. People need things they can understand, because they are afraid to think beyond what they know they can understand. We have been brought up by our societies that way; the wretched, materialistic, animal-instinct infused society where Man is cattle, and its mind is pushed to yearn for wealth and individual glory. We have forgotten how to watch the Sun set on a beach, or how to write a letter with a fountain pen that travels all over the world (in every meaning of the word) till it reaches its destination, and you can smell the seven seas in its writing. We have forgotten our goals. We have forgotten that there are other ways too that lead to happiness; ways simpler and ways more beautiful. Because at the end of a long, tiring, weary day, isn't that what we all seek? The undefineable? The abstract? Things like happiness, satisfaction, love?- but we seek these abstractions through things as solid as a brick. We seek joy through wealth, because we have forgotten the joy that the sunset gave us, the joy that holding a letter in one's hand gave us. Can anyone remind us how we loved all these things? Because we have drifted too far into a vortex that may be good for our body, but is poison for our soul. And the person who has felt true happiness, knows that it is a feeling not of the body and not derive-able from materialism, but it is a feeling of the soul, reproducible only from what "feeds the soul". And once you've been there, everything else seems so distant and so useless, and you never ever want to return to "here". Can someone take us there, again?

"Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"from the works of Ibn e Arabi (1165 - 1240)"

"Questioner: How do you know God? Abu Asa'id al-Kharraz: By the fact that He is the coincidentia oppositorum. Corbin's commentary: . . . the entire universe of worlds is at once He and not-He (huwa la huwa). The God manifested in forms is at once Himself and other than Himself, for since He is manifested, He is the limited which has no limit, the visible which cannot be seen. This manifestation is neither perceptible nor verifiable by the sensory faculties; discursive reason rejects it. It is perceptible only by the Active Imagination (Hadrat al-Khayal...) at times when it dominates man's sense perceptions, in dreams or better still in the waking state (in the state characteristic of the gnostic when he departs from the consciousness of sensuous things). In short, a mystic perception (dhawq) is required. To perceive all forms as epiphanic forms (mazahir), that is, to perceive through the figures which they manifest and which are the eternal hexeities, that they are other than the Creator and nevertheless that they are He, is precisely to effect the encounter, the coincidence, between God's descent toward the creature and the creature's ascent toward the Creator. The "place" of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it which corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river. The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols, a method of understanding which transmutes sensory data and rational concepts into symbols (mazahir) by making them effect this crossing."

- from the works of Ibn e Arabi (1165 - 1240)

To perceive God, one has to forego his five senses. These senses have been
given to perceive the world around us,
but God is above this world, not in a
sense of height, but in a perceptual
sense. In order to identify the higher
... stimulus that is God, one has to let go of the five
'primitive' senses that are only useful to
perceive the stimuli of this world. There
are planes other than this world:
existence of places which can only be
reached if one is able to dissociate himself from
the five senses WHICH ONLY SERVE TO
DISTRACT MAN by putting his focus on
this world, and Man is unable to reach
the ground reachable solely by spiritual
ascension (gnosis/'kashf'). Hence, 'Evil is
whatever distracts' - Franz Kafka. Man lives life as an animal, pursuing the basest of the desires in this world, whereas a whole sea of the Truth inside him remains unexplored.

Materialism and the Worlds

I have a world inside me. There is a world outside me. Will the exposure of my world to the world outside, adulterate it? I open slowly, watching for snipers as i walk, holding my white night gown up from the muddy grounds of the enlightened land. My soul is alive, and the world is dead. The world is materialism but my soul is not materialistic. I want to shield myself from the materialism that the world's population is after. I want to be able stand at the top of a hill and see at everyone else, in their meandering pursuits of the things that will die. I can only reach the top of the hill if my soul is alive and has not died in pursuit of the dead world. I want my soul to live. To be able to appreciate the sound of nature and the touch of a falling leaf. I don't want to identify myself with the dead world. I want to be the people; i want to be the life; i want to be the soul that broke apart from God's Existence. I want to go in the direction of living; into the direction of the truth, and away from what seems to be reality but is not. Life is not a closed barrel. It is a vast, endless ocean that laps on the shore of truth, and that is what helps to keep it alive...

Questions that hold answers many

Who can give a clear, objective, non-judgemental and an unbiased assessment of what the human kind is doing?- an opinion, an assessment, that is unaffected by his own past personal experiences or by his vested interests. There is no higher authority than Man except God, and no lower authority, in terms of mental capabilities, can be given the privilege to assess Man. So, can the circumstances in which Man is, be the result of how God feels about Man's actions? Can turmoil and turbulence be a way of God's expression of anger and dissatisfaction? Can prosperity of Man be a measure of God's joy and satisfaction? Can the situations that befall a man, be the result of what God feels about him? - and thus, do our previous actions affect the future situations we are in BY MAKING God feel satisfied or discontent with our previous actions? If I do evil, will I be punished with evil situations befalling me in the future? And how far into the future?- in this world, or the next?

Mute Cry

Watching a child crying in the far, so far that you can see him cry, but cannot hear it. Or you are inside a car with music playing in the background. A morbid and terrifying moment to see a mute cry.

(Footnote: For example, the mute cry in the movie, The Shining)

Dreams; the mystery of their essence

What is reality? How much can we rely on our senses? What if our awakened moments of reality are just a dream, and we sleep to enter reality? What if we have mis-identified reality and dreams? And maybe the doorway between the two gets opened on occasions other than our sleep. We dream of people. People dream of us. Two persons, miles apart, can dream the same dream and meet each other in their dreams, and upon waking can tell each other how they met in the dream - shared dreaming. Often, the reality of dreams scares us and therefore we choose not to explore into the secrets of their reality.