Postponed Flight
I’m the one
Without a book to read,
Without a compelling reason
To talk with someone.
Stranded
I keep lonely in the crowd,
Waiting for a schedule
To rise from the dead;
I’m the one willing to be
Diverted to another destination
Stranger than Kathmandu,
More mysterious than Thimphu.
It doesn’t matter.
Just give me a window seat
From where I can cultivate
Mushrooms and cumulus.
Give me a sound excuse
To fold mountains into origami,
Assign water-dragons to guard
The lacework of streams and rivers
Where desire drains into delta.
Allow me to track down
The sources of hurt and pain,
To interrogate shadows
That slay the mind
Inside pressurized cabin.
Sooner or later I’ll uncover
Ardent reasons why guilt
Tends to sleep with shame,
Or why honor demands
To be defended by aggression.
My imagination, believe me,
Longs desperately to go home.
(Calcutta, India)
Unfold Delicately
Find me a sad lover playing a guitar,
Her back turned against the sea
Her voice bruised with moonlight.
Find me a fisher who can read clouds,
Someone who inhabits silence
While casting his net at night
To gather lights mysterious
Roaming beneath his fragile boat.
Find me the avowed nomad
In the city of learned helplessness,
One who has abandoned the panic
Of work for sympathetic magic.
If you find the task bittersweet
Return to me with haste,
With deep urgency of the moment.
Unfold me delicately like the universe,
A horizon dreaming of quantum verse
The tribeless unlocked in my body.
And should you drift again to adventure
I shall kneel and kiss your shores.
Cagayan de Oro
3 October 2008
Illustration: Origami crane from the Elevation from Terror Workshops
