To leave your homeland is to achieve half of the dharma – Milarepa



Leaving all places like walking out of an empty house.

Long  years of the dark-eyed lens

     obscuring sight    losing focus on what’s been lost

                inland seas of tears

              opened    unburdened

         a humming jet-plane moving empty-faced

across Antipodes desert and drift

                  sheer Himalaya ridge of mind’s eye

                                         breaking through

                                                     unknown space.
Is that what all exiles are:

                     every morning meeting

                               ‘the air of another planet’

knowing that freedom comes out

                         of a cupful of silent water

         where bodies everywhere seek their own weight

in another                            wait in abeyance

                    to inner-city street-grit worlds

stories dried-up           books forgotten

              love       sex    dissolved in

film-frame all 24 maps of ecstasy

                                  gone in a second

of wheels lifting from earth

                 the end-click of a long-distance line.
In buses        trains       planes

           rickshaw   oxcart    cargo-ship

                            moving through still earth

without the Original Ticket

                   the next stop-point only

                            half a destination

to take flight           flutter

            unfurl      get cast down    -out

from nectar places       unravel in fever-beds of

          hunger or

                        the deafening suburbs – 
where does everything go?
*
In India passing alone by Ganges steps

         the ghats frantic with Shivaratri

  mania of bells        didgeridoo

              among the flames      Brahmin dead

satellite-enshrouded       beamed-out from Krishna’s vast maw

           kaleidoscope of all the worlds turning there:

                Wall Street pretas      Fairfax demi-gods

         belly-dancing brokermen    flab-fool’d

            grasping at hours              champagne flute

   sewer-music         efflux of the spheres

before the rage of yuga’s turning

            CNN oraculars        World Cup finals

             bedtime benedictions of the BBC

                                       updates on the bombing raids

                       ‘keep the homefires burning’

                                                  terrorist cells inciting

domestic fissures      new cracks in the wall – 
stop in at Shiva’s druggy shrine

          make offerings to all the ghosts

    spirits            yakshas

crowded inside the Shadow of untold lives

            10,000 years gathered in this town

someone wants to sell you opium someone else enlightenment

           drumbeats bloodletting Varanasi arteries

bhanged-out in the night

                     time-blown in the year 2012

       on Dasaswamedh Ghat the aarti

                         hums an open-tuning on the air

all beings with the dead           turning Shiva blue

        by dawn chillum-smokers rouse

                                Ganges lapping bank

                   pale blue boat

    drifting loose           vulture hovering above

                                 smoke-stained roof…
Syndicated News in Economy       can’t show the burning

        of Rohingya Muslim     Syrian inferno

              Abraham’s brothers-in-blood

                     Kurdish no-man’s land

        Tibetan genocide unsung

                           Hutu plains of bone-bleached soil

lost peoples      every one        where do they all go

silent as                old Buddhas of Afghanistan

                    blown up into ten-thousand pieces

        each pregnant with Kasyapa’s smile

lying in dust to ask of silence

         if the great matter of life and death

                 sphinx-riddle that refuses answer

world’s perpetual will to suffer            is the only will to tame her

                    the hungers the horror of self-willed hells

the only proof to convince us

         of death’s provisional night

                          the steady grace of pain

           evaded    misread   unheeded

under stratosphere sonorities      rustled newspapers

           static over the intercom           all the dappled Way

from some God to here…
*
Dawn come

                  birthing inbetween the blinds

someone else’s motherland      yielding beneath the wheels

         breasts of coastal hills

                           nervous system of Los Angeles grid

vast                          serpentine.
Milarepa was wrong

                there is no homeland         other than this mind

                      though its relinquishing give us dreams

no choice

       though filmic narrations

                demand heroes and ill-histories

      succour of war

           refugee-plagues

  knocking at democracy’s

Janus-faced door

                         another crusade against

apostate        the meek

                                Earth’s poor.
Coming to every unknown shore

            an innocent and a fool

     stepping-down     touching earth

history’s weight uncaught

                    flies      breathless

          away from you

    unyoked       it seems        always

                              unsought – 
this life the only life to bring breath to.