There are page-empty days
that I do not wish to draw you,
in charcoal or yellow
or write of you,
or kiss you, or make love to you;
or to sing beside you about lost treasure,
or to hear you, or to speak English to you…
these are days when I do not know myself.
I only slip on loose-laced shoes,
throw my cloak over my shoulders,
grab my grandfather’s walking stick,
and wander down into the mysterious depths
of loving you.
Planet earth is a garden forest skyline.
I stick my face in its bosom often.
It is a sea of foaming white caps, and a
buzzing hive of fuzzy bodied bees;
a pile of empty paint cans and
half buried abandoned car tires.
It is the tipping sleeping tea tree,
filled with the susurrus of singing birds.
Below the silver mist
is a percussion of clicking heals
and pavement-scuffers.
Etching paths on a celestial-sized magnetic sphere
to which the metal of all mankind sticks.
The earth is the sweet creamy filling
between chocolate wafers.
The mantle surface is teaming
with a tangle of connective nerve fibers
that defibrillates the heart.
Everything is conjoined through the senses,
so that life seems to be just a country road
between dusty towns.
Electric hissing dendrites
attach the hollows of my chest
to every single vibrating thing –
I am nothing but a gossamer thread
scintillating in sunlight.
The earth ensnared in me,
we are waiting for the spider to return.
I wonder what else have we bred out of the domestic house cat over all these centuries? I look at my cat Tiger and see the ancestry of vicious animals, vicious not out of malice, but nature. We sifted this from their feline-ness, and now they are docile. But what else was the cost of this sieving – what wheat was lost in the discard of chaff?
And of humans… who has domesticated us? What master, keeper, benefactor has culled us? Are we of a finer nature… or worse off? What if we left it solely up to the Lion to domesticate itself… could this be possible? Yet we believe it is so with us… perhaps our consciousness makes us fools.
In nature, what loves should be left to love; what hates should be left to hate… Perhaps, we try to interfere with ourselves and wild animals when we should bow to the master of compassion.
A lion will never eat me because it hates me.
Sometimes we are only organisms among organisms – we respond through both willful and involuntary action to primal instincts and desires, triggered by external causes. We covet and protect and hunt and gather. Other times, we are more complex than this, we are – more esoteric.
Sometimes, we listen to music and recite memorized lines and dance with our extremities flailing about ecstatically. Other times, we look out from our waiting morning window to investigate a noise and are struck by a sky filled with streaks of pink carnation and rose on gradations of blue – and we are compelled to be still and hypnotized. And upon stepping outside or doors, we catch the attar of sweet winter flowers in the shrubbery; and this reminds us of long ago seasons as children. Back then, I didn’t bother myself with these ponderings.
There is something that is greater than a thought, a word, an object. Something that makes it deeply and characteristically what it is – or seems to be. That which “makes it so” is a “that” which makes all the universe deeply and characteristically (and uncharacteristically) what it is. I call this this essence of being its “ness.”
The –ness of all things is the single “a priori” to all cosmic existence. The -ness is an equally shared essence among all we know or could be known by man or not by man. In fact, because it is a single “essence” there can be no “sharing” per se for this would imply multiplicities of truth in which to share and there is only One. Hatred, fear, and love are attributes of human attention that depend not on object or recipient for their existence, but rather are both causal and caused by the shared essence; an Essence that “knows only/only knows” that it is not fear but “fear-ness;” not love, but “love-ness.”
The wind simply is an invisible, quiet current, only detectable through instruments of limited capacity; these instruments deserve our attention, nourishment and cultivating. And watch out the window and there goes autumn in the parade of loosed leaves, whistling tree limbs, and swaying landscapes. What do we know of the stealthy wind other than these minute effects? How the leaves blow before my vision, so goes God.
We are deeply committed to what we know, yet we know not the capacity of that –ness. In the Marvel box office movie, “Doctor Strange,” the main character Steven Strange asks, “You follow her, but you do not know her?”
We can close our eyes and lower our finger into the ocean, or a glass of water – if I didn’t tell you which is which, you’d not know their difference. For all you know, you could drink down both, having no sense of their volume… just water-ness. Why become muddled with particularity? Knowledge is never ending in the cosmic world, compassionate understanding in the spiritual world is the mastery of our station.
What lies just “beyond” is fractured by the foreground of the “cosmic present”…were it not for the moon’s compacted sphere of dust “galactically” suspended there, what would we know of the solar light just beyond that. And so, if not for the moons reflection of (recast) light, what would we know of the foreground of simple tree branches. Each owes its detected existence to the previous. From this position, we see the silhouette, from the moons perspective, she see’s its face most clearly.
All in this world owes existence (as we know it) through our awareness… and that awareness, through our esoteric senses. We know of truth (of light) through its “impedance” not its absolute actuality… for its essence (light-ness) exists quietly and hidden, and still until it bounces off of something. It is like the wind that is invisible and quiet until it collides with tree branches. All persists this way until there is “compassionate interference” which quickens interpretation through our consciousness.
The true Beauty of our observations, the Reality of knowledge, depends not on the object of knowledge nor its cognitive recipient… rather, it is the clarity of the human soul that reflects the essence (the -ness) of divine existence. Perception is a replica; understanding is its interpretation. Yet, we couldn’t be further from the truth, and still the truth depends on us from within us.
It is wise to be “individually” clear, if we are to “compassionately interfere” (understand) in the collective, single universe, which is wholly contained within the multitude of each of us. And all this from a super moon.
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I came to draw You,
and with my own eyes,
You painted all the cosmos between us,
and then You opened my eyes,
and with the illusion of vision,
I imagined myself, imagining You.
You, Who we cannot see,
You, who requires us to be seen.
Every leaf in flight,
a finger of the invisible wind,
a metaphor to be interpreted.
We follow the invisible through it effects.
I encompass You,
Yet You are hidden within me.
A universe of beauty
slipped through my eyes
a parsec in a fraction of a second,
I dare not blink.
The less I know,
the more I know,
the more I long.
Fleeting failures
along Escher’s steps.
Tender steps
of whispered hope
Ascending toward a timeless state
Returning home,
returning home,
Where the awaited wait.
God has blessed the words I hold silent
Those whose truth is betrayed by a breath
Those that nest in these still lips
Frozen in an imagined press.
We ascend upon descending stairs
For in the end the heart will lead
to placeless places
where the mind wouldn’t dare.
My heart holds vigil
While the pen’s away
As the mind settles
Along the edge of day
At my horizon’s melting
there,
Your stars appear
where
I’ve gone dark
With nothing to say,
Aye, my heart holds vigil
With its candle bright
flickering thrum
you, a quiet moon
in my thinking night
my ink is dry,
my heart alight.
There is love at the edge
and on either steep side
below the scintillating surface
and ocean’s lost depths
and boundless sky.
I am the ocean’s thin edge
step thee nearer to me
step far into this sea foam
you are always becoming
something
and fading
like flittering stars.
You are the lone prairie’s edge
I lie softly in your placeless places
and the sun rises here
then it falls there
all life sleeps in the palms of your nexus.
I am the center of your turning carrousel
while the azure sky chases about
I’m circled by love’s ornate clouds
reigns and bridles of many hues
beyond my grasp
and adrift within you.
I am encircled where the wind is still
where the wind takes shape
I am browned by your eyes
brindled by the warmth of your face
Fallen over the edge of your sigh.
T’was the tears from 
morning dew
shed for Autumn’s fate,
gathered on a weary leaf
loosened under season’s weight.
And it is here my story originates.
That leaf, whose trip
began at the tip
of a dry and barren branch
afloat gusty winds,
and boreal rains
down to my patio,
where again,
it smiles
with nostalgic recognition.
That leaf I lifted
whose tears I dried,
Then off to my room
we both did fly
and there with love
and a quiet brush
against my cheek
a kiss, a touch.
Concerned for its fragility
that it may crumble
in my hands,
with caress I placed it lovingly
between the pages of Diwan e Ghalib,
as if his words were threads of silk
tenderly wrapped around the leaf.
This one Spring day
in Autumn went,
as the book was closed
and I reflected when
I found this leaf,
or it found me
deeply drawn
to its intricacy.
Thereafter,
many seasons passed
over trails it tread
through the hearts terrain
A thousand climates adorned this expanse,
not one had shown the same.
A deluge of complaints
shattered by spells of love,
rejuvenating rays of sunshine
torrent nights of intimacy,
flowing in warm red wine.
Then by day embracing
our besotted awareness,
the maundering hours of braided madness,
the draught of thirsting
loneliness…
All this gone, now
returns the fall.
That one last leaf
I’d kept my own,
Which I imagined
I’d always known,
wasn’t mine, after all.
And so,
in an effort to appease,
I settled my debts
with destiny,
and handed it back
to the waiting breeze.
Candle… artwork by Arshia Qasim
Hauntings in the tiny hours,
When you wake in the morning darkness
Surrounded by the sparks and sputters of the world,
But yet quite alone in its starkness.
Ghosts of things you wished you had said
To visages and voices of the past
Disappearing on a passing ship,
In a vast
Ocean. And you watch its light,
Pointed in a new direction,
Sink slowly below the dark curve
Of the silhouetted horizon,
Leaving only you and your introspection
And life
Runs
On.
Turn to look at what seeks you.
That which follows those who flee
In chase of the chimera of destiny
Which unfolds unbeknownst,
Beneath our feet
Where night shadow lovers struggle to see
That our path itself is the palpable longing
For a splendid love, replete.
