I would call it rain,
but it’s just a drop,
that slithers through
the contours of the
heartbeat.
I suddenly
become still,
like a branch
suddenly strapped
to a shaft of sunlight.
If I could peek
inside
to witness
a constellation of twigs,
flickering and shudders,
after each clinch,
as the hungry drop
tunnels through
the expanse of feeling.
At that moment,
language tangles up
into a yarn of illusion.
It falls still wet with joy.
I am planet
eroded by pleasure,
a hard knot of memory.
But everything is quiet,
only for a chime
every time
the drop clinks
against an organ
or a thought.
I – waiting
in an unknown corner –
will have a shepherd’s role.
Heartlessly shall I pick up
an empty bucket and bang
it with drops of dew.
Flocks of words that have
broken skin will gather
around me like tiny shadows
of morning or soul.
If a window opens then
temples grateful with dust
from beginning to despair.
I will love the gaps in sound
when every word, world
after world, tightens into
a raceme and leaves its scent
plummet as – tar of transcendence,
foam of formlessness, empire of
impermanence, depth of delusion –
to the ground.
I intend, through endless pages
of misery and category,
to leave a trail for posterity
to meander through the truth
of resemblance in a metaphor.
Here, is the clamor.
Totality crackling.
I gather every seed of noise
as grains of rice
inside my cupped hands.
A nomad hymn has travelled
as a fantastic bird
through an atmosphere of time.
Its reflection is a worn
anatomy of ripples:
moving slowly like a full
moon pulsating on a lake’s surface.
The song and the silence
have become animals
savagely wrestling for
a piece of creation. I’m
watching their pristine
movements from a land
where gods sit next to
man, woman and child;
where we all sit
rapt and perplexed
by the howl of the light
and the course of silence.
This is a land where even the gods
confess not knowing their origin;
much less the nest
from which the primal rhythm took flight.
I see a man praying.
He’s begging, worshiping,
believing. I see a man that wants
to disappear from this world of weight;
I see a man that pleads to blend,
to unite, to be one with the absolute
meaninglessness. I see a man praying
inside a Hindu temple – speaking words
that only he hears and yet he is able
to convert this sight of flesh to fragrance,
from bone to beatitude, from blood to blossom.
I see a man waving to his idol and I keep walking
towards the heart of the jungle.
You now must know what it is to crave a glass of water or to sip a kiss; to be so reckless as to flood the heart because it is a crater of chalk and you’re tired of its empty dusty frame.
I don’t remember what kind of day it was. Full of sun with musky winds, dark with impalpable clouds, perhaps flat and drunk in sapphire.
I don’t care what kind of day it was; a day to forget like all the rest had I not begun to count the breaths I’ve taken in despair.
I began stooping like an imbecile twig that bends with every paddle of the wind as if an essence had broken into milliard tiny mirrors on the sidewalk, and I had to count and sew them back into a remembrance.
I plead for the pallid crust of light that envelopes me like a bulky perfume to melt into a song of shadow or even for a single mindless mote of dust to land catastrophically on me and pierce this ferrous mold, I want to watch my holy skin fall away and leave a naked and unwashed soul standing erect like a pagan odalisque.
But don’t show her mercy, kick her out of this world drama, let her run barefoot back to her incomprehensible origin.
It could have been a year ago, while getting on a bus that I conceived of grabbing silence by its throat and squeezing out a peep; I had been so innocently prone to believing that the world was a gigantic bird suffocating me with its kaleidoscopic feathers but now I feel at home because suffering sets as a sun behind the panorama of knowledge and even if it is reborn every day I dream at night of being a thin echo of fiction.
Beyond Language 
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