The brightness of arms

 

The brightness of arms

What more is there to love
Than I have loved, that we have loved?
The lips of creation are bright

Time floods with senseless syllables
Images, identities, centuries full of
The lust of all approaching feeling
A haunted youth of this world’s
Agony of moisture, and trembling of suns

A blur of archives and smiles
Deaths and glories and forests burning
And this first clear pure canto

Of all we have ever felt, is it glittering now
A memory renacted, an augmented reality?
Earth is more than that, bathed in a body
Of oxygen and water, a blanket of snow
She’s the leaping of lakes and the dreaming of clouds

And the impersonal cities towering
Above the people, how they nameless walk
Naked into their fate, blind as circuits

What more is there to do
Than I have done, than we do by habit?
Burying ourselves in raising children
Escaping the world in our work.
We’ve called this living, but I am not sure

I am not sure we compose,
That we compose enough peace in peace time
And altruism in prosperity time

And art in dream time
And hope in harsh times.
I guess we’ll see, I guess on wings more subtle
Than mercy and compassion, I’ll find
Identity naked again, ahead of spirituality.

I Loved the Illusion

The only legend I have ever
Truly and sincerely loved
For the span of my lifetime
Is the future, like the story
My metaphoric daughter would grow

Up to see, I would prepare
An environment for her of strange consonants
And hope the world delivered her
To some kind of star-lit narrative
Worth living, empowering, fully alive

And the best thing about the legend is
Is I can practice it anywhere, at any time
Hope is for a better future, where and when
Time does not own us and profit is not mandatory
And we are not slaves to an outdated system

But whitebeams, creative and free
In the glowing night, waiting for the stars
To show themselves after winter
And, I’ve waited all these years
I will say nothing significant until then

Poetry begins where language communes
With the shadows and rare software that
Can encapsulate the meaning of a person’s life
We who have sleepwalked this world
Long enough, know our place

Our brief conviction of desire were hardly
Stepping stones for others, though
I loved the illusion and the sense
That legends mattered and stories were personal.

To take us lands away

(Prayers of Jivatma)

The sky is the content
The trees are the content
The people, they’re just visitors

Who will go extinct like any species
Who may attempt to fly from
Star to planet to planet-star

As a dragonfly might fly from one
End of the summer backyard to the other
There is no special season

To be whisked away, no passage
Like a book, no counselor like a page
From the frugal reality we live

To the grand impression of the human soul
Encapsulated in a few novels
That transformed the way we perceive

Events and our cognition of how
The world works, and what is possible
That’s philosophy of memes

That we project what we invest in
A chariot at play forever learning
With a mind that can barley keep up

To the new speed of information
The stars are the content
The birds are the believers
We are just authors of a human story.

While Summits Crash the polluted seas

While Summits Crash the polluted seas

The silver hope that gathers God at dawn
On spent days of long-scattered faith
I to the sacrifice of my hour have come
In broken intervals and debts and canyons
That trace, where my visions used to run

Perhaps I was not gifted at prophecy
Or the unheard aches of my own life
I didn’t live for success or to consume

I ate and drank and loved, to create
And while my veins were steeped in the profound
My blood was the sap of poverty
My pulse could feel the identity of others
Moreover those minorities who had no voice

In this estranged world, where we are so
Desensitized to the suffering of others
So unenlightened regarding our differences

And naive to our shared history
The bell-rope of gold that lifts me up
At twilight to dispatch me into the night
Well it won’t hold forever, one day it will snap
And I will be nothing more than the whispers

I left behind in time will not hang, or whistle or gamble
I milk-bright will be left a flute note to the chiselled wind
And in the transparency of centuries that blur
On top of each other, what we were will be lost
In an echo of machine-learning that outsteps our biology.

Titled In Bold Below

Stay Tough Champ

There are algorithms that can predict
If you are a follower, or an innovator
They take your entire life and break it down
Into the analytics of your free-will

Urbanization is like an experiment
Where people are compressed
Into smaller places, trained
Where everyone is trying to be like

Everyone else, the same as being no one
We are taught to search for stability
Our parents remind us to start saving young
But what if, the entire system is unsustainable?

Economics like so many things, are the domain
Of dead white men from Europe
Old elite families who like to believe
They pull the puppets of the world

Social psychology can’t keep up with change
Neither can art, it just has its lucky super stars
Like some kid the New York times calls a prophet
Who appears to be some kind of junkie

There are algorithms that are trained on your data
What you buy, what you view on the internet
What kinds of people you are social with
What keywords you search, what kind of porn you watch

And it’s a disenchanting process to be reduced
To a trend, but experience is so inauthentic these days
There are these same internet sites everyone goes to
And we are raised to be strong, independent, alone

It’s elusive to be happy when we are disconnected
In our essential connectedness, like being
Surrounded by social media without true intimacy
So much for being a catalyst that turns misery into art.

In order to understand

In order to understand

It’s quarter after three, in my life
That’s a lot of life gone
That’s, a lot of life left

I’ve learned to listen
To the notes in the margin
Before the pages are
Completely erased
Everything lingers with me

In my heart, the world works
In mysterious ways, we are all
Perfect strangers, and perfectly familiar

The poets are eccentric and figures
I’ve rarely conversed with, sure
I’ve read dead ones and the like
Literature is after all

The most agreeable way of ignoring life
And it’s not, that I’m consciously
Trying to ignore my life
Life is beautiful and mixed up

While my past is everything I failed to be
My future makes my soul impatient
Everything interests me
But nothing holds me

Dreaming all the while
Both my soul and I
Keep our distance
I wake up early in the morning

Only to find it takes me
A long time getting
Ready to exist, so here we go

We never love anyone, no
We love the idea we have of someone
Strangely, it’s our own concepts
Our own imaginary ideas

That we love, intrinsically
We are dumb like that
And in order to understand
Ourselves, we have to die to ourselves

It’s philosophy existentially
And the experience of the
Soul’s hidden orchestra
I know the instruments
All I can hear now is symphony.

Ingredients for a Species to Survive

Ingredients for a Species to Survive

No, I am not happy for its own sake
I’m happy to be generous to the people in my life

Who I care about, who took the time
To nurture me even when I was being difficult

They cheer for my little victories
For they know my tenderness is waning

Like the white moon, turned to blood orange
I’m happy because the sun is out

I always forget what I am meant to say
Except that I’m a poet and I speak

On matters common to the days
The days that spell an end to gold

The days that cannot remember their history
Siblings, or if they should endure

Nights biting at their tails, wagging, lovely
The stars still know their place, distant, aloof

Austere, I am happy because the ocean
Still cares about the continents, even if we

Have changed her, have taunted her bad
No, I’m happy for humanity still has a chance

That we are not extinct yet, show no huge weakness
Only the ignorance of profit, short-term profit
That has no bearing on galactic reality.

Like a prayer

Like a prayer

It’s an unfortunate coincidence
That we end up with nothing
The moment we die

Only a last thought

A waking memory
On the border of this and that
Neither here or there

Shivering, anxious
In a cold sweat at the start
Of the greatest of endings

And there, in a note
Of the purest surrender
We find ourselves buried

Time flying into the future
Where we possess our
Spiritual necessity

It’s our naked privilege
Then, to be ourselves
Knowing, we are on
Our way to becoming
More ourselves every day

Every lifetime, it’s inevitable
And like, an aglorithm
Of soul training itself
On the Big Data of
A thousand lifetimes.

Before adversity

Before adversity

before the finite variables
conspired to bring us
twixt circumstance, fate
free-will and intelligence

before the whispers of
our wounded self faltered
into the light of adulthood
before we felt truly loved

by another outside of our family
before we found what
we were truly passionate about
before we learned the Earth

ii

was an algorithm headed for
probable disaster, ruin, early graves
before we learned that meritocracy
was a myth, a name, given and taken

away from the masses long ago
before we meditated on bliss
so transcendent as to make our
personal cares irrelevant

I did not know how to appreciate
What was given, the
quality of gratitude appreciated
with our share of struggle,

iii

tragedy, drama, impoverishment
before my mother died
and I became another motherless child
I had an improbable vision of

the world and life that repeated
encounters with reality
were to correct, slowly
my sample-learning size

wasn’t extraordinary, in fact
rural living made it rather dull
before my idealism could have
been beaten down and my innate

goodwill was numbed by
the homeless sleepers, competition
poverty, heart-break, bankruptcy
student-debts, firings, lost friends

IV

= I might have been someone
You would have missed, noticed
Who knew who he was
Who knew how to hope
Who kept a little faith

The progress algorithm

The progress algorithm

After death and dealings
Taxes and bankruptcy
Smiling is madness in its

Divinest sense, descendant divinity
Evolution of plurals
Oneness of connected missions

Assent, ascent, into enchantment
Time is straightway dangerous
But everything to be tamed

After the fall, after morning
What will become of us?
There is no time to hate

Only time to learn a bit
The grave would thus hinder me
When I need lifetimes to

Assimilate the ampler designs
Of industry and a little toil of love
For gains larger than myself

No time to profit, no time to reap
Only the hunger all these years
To dine at noon with algorithms

And by Big data’s decree
Look through windows of prosperity
Where information turns to

Nature’s dining rooms
To transpose a rose, is a rose
Is a golden rose of outsides
That hunger was a way
Of finding technological dynasty.

Ghost in the Machine

Why have the gods in their division
Severed us, from our heart of being?
From our soul, lured thee to wander
In techno-currency, o my lost lover?

While now I sojourn in sorrow
My biology made to remorse for
The artificial prosperity of corporate days
Nay, who could love as I once did,

Now Cortana and Siri must evolve
So that deity might become companion
And computer might become friend
Why has the future forsaken biology?

Because, because it was inevitable
To transcend, transform, evolve
Computers will pretend to be people
People will mask themselves into augmented reality

Bathed in information and duality
What will summer magic mean then?
Or the dream of other physical worlds…

Suicide of a Diwan

The streets are mute
And the downtrodden are cold
And the girl pretends she
Has many suitors
The handkerchief in my hands

Is nothing much more
Than a rag now
And the night only has one moon
And the fountains have
Ten thousand pennies

I carry the “No” that you gave me
Buried somewhere, as if
It was a part of me now
My love is spinning
The murmur of the masses

Grows loud and I tremble
At the greed of this society
That takes more than it gives
Until giving means giving
To those who would profit from you

The afternoon was something else
Sunlight had been forgotten
If I die like this, from regret
Leave the balcony open
The reaper will harvest

The soul of my art
In my study
Beneath my dirty sheets
From my balcony I can see him
He finds the weight of the snow

Annoying like a transparent shadow
The streets will still be mute
And the downtrodden will
Still beg at the metro of the church
And when I am gone

I will feel myself both like
The balcony, and the tower, and the skies
Moving up, in a stream of shadow-light
And there, I will
Pretend that God loved me.

The idea of order as a myth

We were crossing bridges
At every moment, like symbolic
Journeys made and left behind
Half-man, half-star

Just creatures half-aware
Through time, judging
With our sense of duality
How time and space and energy

Could interact in transience
Fate only lasted after all
Until we died, until moments
Became memories and acts

When the wind stops and the
Heart no longer beats, maybe then
We can say with some finality
That it is over, life was but a dream

A myth we perpetuated, like identity
Useful in its ability to give us
A sense of security and conformity
But somewhat misguided, calling

For pomp and drama at every turn
The ego was an incapable master
Of force, and full of fiction
Like the death of a soldier who was

Somebody’s pawn, it was all
Like a simulation, absurdity
Witness at the public square
The office room politics

And the stage, where we were
Like actors, unaware of our lines
Barren, regretful and hopelessly idealistic.

COMPASS HOME TO THE UTMOST

i

I’ve walked to sleep through
Velvet green, with only
An instinct to guide me home
I’ve been the better part
Of a biological simulation
An erotic country of desire
I’ve dreamed across youth
On the brief threshold of experience

ii

For a vacancy drenched in sunlight
And a heart spent wholly in solitude
I’ve hungered for a music
I never heard, and for ideals
That could not exist in this world

iii

I’ve tread water for pure transitions
To accompany my soul to her
Speed of light, to the ultimate
Expression of who I was:
A lack of satiety on the brisk Spring’s edge
A taster in the honeycomb of Summer

iv

I’ve held my own hand in destiny
All things are words of some strange tongue
And each symbol a fading picture
In my mind, all culture a gibberish
Of socialization, how obscure, bizarre
That I should know myself a diviner thing
And feel compassion for the history of the world.

FEELING FOLDED GOLD ON GOLD

Raw with feeling of the unearthly beautiful
I watched tomorrow move towards me
A sentimentalism of verbs with a life

Of their own, making their way
Through mysteries floating across
Distances, raw with another country

Inside of me, I stood with certain open letters
Forwarding the bitter origins
Of nostalgia for ordinary streets

Those that are no more streets to walk
That feel like home, and stressing the importance
Of identity, wonderful and bright –

Raw with feeling of the bell-struck air
I felt like a Tourist on my home-planet
When did I lose you? Whose have you become?

Children I never had, wife I never met
Friends that couldn’t find their way
To the destined meeting place.