the finger branches of the rose tree stand upright, 15 feet tall, watching
mother give her child khathingla the last red biscuit. pigs and fowl/watch
too. for days they had worked for the festival. at best she would survive
four more hours.she bends over, a-tip in her delirium, kissing her little daughter.
the daughter in her sleep pushes her away. one last short fairy tale has made her eyelid heavy in motion. somewhere the prisoner is happy,/ and the rice plants stout and heavy

poem-

kombat kamba


headless warriors dance wordlessly / through the night- their trunk still pierced by arrows.

large jackals stalk the streets with saliva monkeys overrun the palaces and groves/ prattling advice and victory

outside the ocean brims with lotus and swans sport with their loves. the fisherwomen gaze into night’s glare over ocean/ eyes and hope blurred with a still waiting.

the full moon floats out of the mouth of the stippled serpent. the sea is a sacrificial pit, the shark and snake the grass and ghee.


the water god’s tresses trail fire

rigged veda

a body carrying a body suggests fire carrying a body—dawn’s race-horse lies bled

uncollapsed the powers enter the gods-to-be each creature bound to their own only body

the begetting of children is debt to the upside down crow ancestors – all sages and gods and fathers are debts

funerary, o immolated horse, translate this ritual into winning a heaven. day changes form as light changes the tree-leaf. in the halogen of the chamber of the dead, the watch passes from the body in heaven to the child’s eye-light-

its spine straight, a velakku holds in its branches each minor god and serpent. even the hours long for you, for your flight. the child establishes the parent, stretching its thread backward through generations

the ship reaches each horizon in its turn, weathers each storm—even storms have their turns the child sits in her heart-line of time, a petal on the wide ocean water

poem-coimbatore pastoral !-

he shook his head for the warm tea did not stop the fever’s violent shaking.


outside the dark birds flew in the sky arranging themselves like the very alphabet of his thought


his auto idle, there had been no income for three days. He looked down at his lungi folded up to above his skinny hairy thinning legs. like an insect, his mother had often said-


he owed money for ten days worth of drinks. it will come it must come don’t make such a loud fuss.


his only daughter, squatting by the roadside, smoking ganja. she had stolen his bicycle. now on the back seat of her bicycle sat her quack doctor with her baby-killing pills.


Did you come to mock me? he stared long at his unshaven reflection in the mirror.


he thought he must go to a movie tomorrow.

When he had returned home early that day, his wife had said surely its going to rain!


He fingered the envelope with his name typed in english (and english inside everywhere too) calling him for the interview. His name in inglis filled him with pride as if he already had the job

Where are all my certificates?- getting a government job is not a joke. he must pray. he remembered his father. he must have to take the train from the central station. he looked at his certificates a long time.

You have so many certificates, his wife said proudly, dhanapal has nothing.

Only when he was drunk did he realize that he could not live without her, nobody could set up a house for him quite like her.

but when she abused him, the entire village gathered to listen and watch the joke--

a backward prayer

(or, an upside down prayer- to exercise your breathing diaphragm- or, a semi-pseudo-semi mystical poem etc)






wish you if-

stretch your eyes and open can you


you around the people

room into a back awareness, your bringing gently into moments few

meeting our experience. need you what experience?

now and here present be.


have you effort for yourself? congratulate and here be. your yourself within affirm.

you bring energy and fill with breath. allow the breath as your are now.

pause longer. another for breath should be your focus.

judge your release and compassion. with feelings do acknowledge your heart. be gentle with emotions if you are strong.

pause and breathe release. discomfit all tension. allow the body a place in breath. focus and befriend sensation. let the body think what may.

pause attention. bring the sky in the clouds like floating thoughts. let just be. wander your mind.

attend with judgment. mind your cross. face your muscle, drop your jaw, unclench your shoulder. slowly breathe to continue you as now.

breathe your sound. out and in passes it as air cool of sense.

Itself breathing, know your changing body. breathe your change, breathe your watching.

have you nothing else? go nowhere. nothing is there.

out and in goes it as breathing. follow, allow your attention now.

exhale each with falling. Inhale with each expanding belly. a still chest on your hand.

breath of falling, rising, falling chest on belly. seat and floor support your body’s weighty feel.

Across the wall a spot focuses your closed eyes. the floor is flat on your feet. remove want. everything falls off your lap.

exercise relaxation. the hard confusion, the stone in the desert.

hearing-

wonder if the supposed schizoid "hearing voices" is more likely to be a sort of "quick reading", rather as one might in a split second glance catch a tag in a billboard while zipping past it- so the "voice" is more to do with a reading( hence language areas of the brain?- or even script as "image" commandment) than the auditory-

to be human-

is to be contentedly, compassionately mediocre-