Our thoughts are pure without any body
Or clothes hiding one, in the trees or sky
Or by wall peg to hang its tale thereby.
Our body is cloth cast off and away.

No tail hangs by this body perfect pure.
Its meaning burns as food in intestine
Its light envelops trees and hills for sure
But in the end, is just sloughed off skin.

Beyond hills of clouds we wear another
To hide nakedness of skin from our thoughts
There we emerge from all-knowing mother,
Entangled in philosophical knots.

Our body is earth of dust seeking sky
Looking for soul that leaves it high and dry.

Tail wagging


His tails wagging is no barking
Balking at wind, at passing car
Just body friends of wet sniffing
Two pant legs to be followed
Only to be shaken off in a vile
Basement of dark shadows
And sleeping cars in their veils.


Pant legs have no steel in them
And a  soft bite is afraid of  pain
By four ****** just below navel
Here love ferments but festers.


Lame dogs


Plenty of action is in the street
A dog leg is gone  to child's pleasure
By  a boy's stone at its whelping
But three legged dogs still bark
At passing  cars, their shadows.


You cannot straighten his tail**


His tail is like  a crescent moon
Its flies like  stars buzzing around
Or like a scythe the  farmer uses
To bring  his crop under control
And cannot be straightened ever
Like a crescent moon or a scythe.

The sounds had come in before dawn
From a glimmer over buildings, spread
Hiding some distinctive cuckoo throats
Trying to break free, from future and  rain.
There was breeze , mostly from darkness
That seems to have come from  the vapors
Of a few ghosts of clouds in a tainted sky.

As the hours grew large to sounds of fury
I am turned to a Brecht's stone fisherman
Holding this stone up a banner of triumph
To less fortunate hours of no fish or  stone.

(Reference is to Brecht's  poem about old Stone Fisherman
who displays his prized catch of a stone each time his net
comes up with another stone to the less fortunate ones)

We had left  early morning for sight of the phallus stone
Dragging our feet through the stones of ice mountains
Our horses plodded on with us some times and without,
Our behinds   aching with their  bony backs in contact.
Old men sat hunched up in two feet long wooden boxes
On young men's shoulders , latter feet dragging stones
The boxes felt like our old men's journey of no return
To  a stone phallus to be bathed in tears in the snow hills
Where they will join a mountain stream and flow as river
To return to  plains and land in the seas of their villages.

The mountains were cruel and beautiful to our tired feet
The horses zigzagged their way up with their droppings
Filling the cold  air with a warm smell mixed with bodies
Their tails swished unending imaginary flies in  behinds
As they were lost to their green dreams of the mountains.

Old men paddled  all the way up in their wooden boxes
Crouched as in their mother's stomachs,with eyes shut
From their lips came muttering sounds like buzzing bees
That filled the empty silence of the hills in the morning.
It felt  as if  it was  a return to where they had started out
Where this  thing had begun, the sea of their first floating.

In Randy Pausch’s last lecture there is space
Left briefly to be occupied en bloc-
The space that will exist, lacking, always,
In substance like quarry in a hillock.


You imagine a quarry filled with dark space
Stand on the rim of the hole that exists
In presence of time and absence of space.
Follow the last lecture to clear its mists.


You don’t get into his circle really
Of an inspiring cancer death suffering
The circle of dark humour surreally
But as a tangent on its outer ring.


Stand on the rim and into the dark lean
Strain  eyes to see own reflection keen.

I still hear the world in my ears.
I hear the whoosh of the west wind,
The noise of the empty word
And clatter of senses rubbing
Against the body of the wind
As if they are my very bones
That move lazily in my knee.
As I walk in my defunct dreams
I do not need the hearing aid.

At two this midnight the little dark one
Became a poem, her all-knowing smile
The first stanza and her baby bird- glance
Became the next one as she pranced there
On the floor up and down like pendulum
Swinging in the free air, a full fall of force,
A pout of sarcasm from tiny baby lips.

I at midnight wanted to round it off
With a cool third stanza, of epigram
A last line well said, to the deep night.
But she wouldn’t let me, the little one
That squirmed in my hands like a worm
Full of bones that pushed against mine
In my withered palms and finger bones.
It is life which pushed against my death.
As the night creeps I once again go into
My epigrammatic mode of the old poet
With the bally irony thing barely broached.


The curl on my lips that briefly occurred
Vanished without trace in my confusion
As my eye followed her moving in circles.
I thought I had seen the curl on her lips.