Mera Kismet

Do not be afraid to find yourself dead, you are.
You are gone from us now.
Let go.

You are a single note searching for The Song.
You are dead and you have broken free.
You can’t understand this with your mind, it’s too much.

The sea runs in your veins
your eyes are in the stars and
the cloak of heaven is upon you.

Today you went down to the sea, it swallowed you up.
I can’t understand this with my mind, it’s too much.
Your lunch is still sitting on the table.











We wait and minutes fade like long dead stars.

There is No Hope.
This is the beginning of Hope!
I am listening for you, are you listening to me?

I am a voice inside my head telling you goodbye.
You are a pair of eyes inside my mind,
I can see the world in your eyes.

My eyes are fixed on the straight blue line that moves
from that hill to this. The sea.
Come home.

Don’t cling to the shoreline Lover,
strike out towards the horizon.












Think of a stone dropped into the middle of a still pond
Are you on the outer ring
Or radiating out from the centre?

Each day is a slow ballet through water.











Shhh.The dawn rolls onto the beach.
There, there. Have him now.
Shh shh shh.


You looked so beautiful lying there.
You looked so beautiful with mussels in your hair.
The fishes took your face.

You will never be afraid or cold again.
Yes, sign the form, this is my husband, my lover.
Son and friend and brother.

I lied, of course.
My husband is the light in the crescent moon
My lover moves in waves through long grass in the paddock.







I wake and immediately I leap to standing.
My feet hit the floor simultaneously my brain registers that you are dead.
A shocking way to start the day.

But if I roll and drowse,
the same knowing comes seeping in like the harbour tide
gradually I wake to drowning in stinging salty tears.

You must eat, I am told.
I am not in the land of the living.
I am moving with you through the darkness.

We are hand in hand in the darkness between worlds.
You are chattering and excited, your dark eyes swim.
We are heading towards the light of a fire with the innocence of children.

Soon you will lift off into that light and be free.
I will turn to find my childs body gone and
tread like an old crone back into the world.


People are kind they come, their eyes an ocean.
How can it be, how can it happen
just like that, they ask?

This is how we die, just like that.
Running laughing breathing one minute,
then gone. God calls.

I don’t ask how can it be that you are dead,
although sometimes at odd moments
other questions surface.

Like how can it be that I will never run my fingers across your chest
to stop over your heart then
cup the beat of your life in my palm?

How can it be that I will never touch you again?

The ocean of tears that separates us
is what unites us also.
You become the ocean, I will be a tear your cheek.



People try to catch hold of me.
Anchor me with words. They gurgle.
I nod like a vacant lot, my ears are full of sand.

I am with you in this dark silent profound space.
We are inside a bell and the sound is a hint of a hint of an echo
of the sound that began the universe.

It’s the middle space that occupies my mind.
They call it a split second
but it’s more like a lifetime.

This is what we have left now.
Soon your innocence will be the light all around
and you will lift off.

I won’t even know the point of goodbye
so effortless will it be.









It’s raining.
The first rain since That Day
I watch the sea build.

The sea is not my enemy nor even yours
The brown frothing murky sea that took you
is the same saucer of blue ink lit by moonlight.

The sand that shifted beneath your feet That Day
is the same sand we rolled on laughing until we cried
a day before.

Something woke me this morning, a flash.
Did you take a photo of me with your heart?
Are your near the leaping off place, Lover?






Tonight, looking at the moon I saw
that her face was your face and your face was the moon.
You are gone. Gone from me you are.


My heart leapt! It wanted to catch you.
I wanted to say Too soon! Too soon!
But I knew it was time.

I felt almost jealous of you then.
What I do?
What I do now?












A butterfly is a butterfly being a butterfly
but if it dreams
does it see its face before it was born?

Or does it just have butterfly dreams?

















The thousand and one expressions of your face
flash before me at random moments
conversations and harsh words we have shared.

The pain that squeezes my heart, my stomach, my lungs
washes over me like a sudden spring tide at midnight.
I feel robbed and lost and violated.

My body has begun to feel this
It feels safer to stay inside my head
I am grief on a broomstick riding the empty night sky.

I don’t live in the house anymore
I live out here on the porch
Watching the sea.







People still come.
Every day is another version of your death.
Waves of huge sorrow wash over me.

Your life was a poem
God has perfect symphony
to bring you down this path.

Beyond this tragedy there is
your soul gone like a warrior or a bride
to God.


Only the very patient ask the right questions
Or sit long enough to hear about the me
You left behind.








The sand has shifted on the beach again.
Great pools have formed, warm in the afternoon sun.
They make me think of your eyes.

The infinite calculations of If Only don’t make it any easier
but like a carrion photographer I move from angle to angle,
freeze framing a nightmare.

In my minds eye I am roaming through the land of memory,
dwelling in pools of regret,
tip toeing around the silence.

Its the space you used to inhabit, I fall into it
like a pocket of air, like a sigh withheld.
Like forgetting to breathe.

Like a bird dropping into a thermal current.
The sky is bruised with disappointment today
It’s not a good day for flying.





A small brown bird flutters exhausted down to land.
I feel like a cancer patient - the living dead
or a mental patient - the dead living.


There is a fine line between a saint and a lunatic.
The saint sees her fellows in a state of ignorance and feels compassion
the lunatic shakes them by the throat!

The saint practises detachment, maintaining dignity.
The lunatic is attached to the madness of society.

What was us is now I.
What was we is now only me.

A society of One.






Every day we lived,
every turn we took on the road to here
was leading to That Day.

Every breath brought us closer.
Floating hand in hand, looking at the stars
thinking about Vishnu in the great cosmic ocean, rising and falling.

Meanwhile, far out to sea a wave began to gather.
There is no If Only, no Might Have Been. .
Innocence offers no protection. What is always was.


The water that laved the shore of our dreams
is the same water that filled your lungs.
Manawa kiore transmutes to a babies cry.

Tihea mauri ora.






Wherein lies the difference between great pain
and great joy?
The physical sensations are the same.

Whether the heart swells like or a red, red rose
or a mushroom cloud of doom,
is only a matter of opinion. It swells.

The surge springing from the belly to the mind of the heart
of the lover is a super nova
or a cluster bomb exploding.

Between Creation and Destruction
runs the thin blue line of our lives.
Epiphanies and desolations amount to nothing more than that.

What to do? This is Life.






Someone, meaning kindness,
talked about visiting a medium, a spirit guide.
That's like calling a plumber to re roof the heavens!

I know where you have gone.
Its where I am that worries me.

I watched myself from a distance yesterday
thinking about opening the car door
to tumble free.

My head was a black space
in the middle ground.
How close you are and how far away!

It is only time that separates us now.
Or is it?







Looking at your watch on the dresser
is the strangest thing,
my whole body becomes a question mark.

I am in a silent space then
with unspoken questions echoing inside.
Tick tick tick.

Ticking our life together away
marking seconds, minutes, hours and days that
you are gone from.

I think that if that ticking would stop
I might hear the sound of eternity
You are in that silence.






It is the New Year now.
Whatever that means.
I lit a fire outside and wore your watch at midnight .

It was a quiet night, the crickets sang in the grass
the sea in the distance, the house sat creaking
in the silence.

Just me sitting by the fire
with your watch
wondering about time.

Your friend came back from the beach
kissed me and wished for me the courage
to move into the new year.

You had a good year, he said.
It just ended badly.
Then we wept. For loosing you.




How many lifetimes have I lived?
It feels like a lot just lately
they weigh on me heavy like a winter coat.

All the time my vanity has been
peeping out
from the snugness of that interior world.

You took a shortcut to this.
One profound experience cracked open that shell
to reveal you as a god, all the time only taking the form of my Lover.

A painful process, peeling back the layers
to reveal absolute nothingness.
I wish I could shrug it off like a coat.

Like you did.




The panic sets in.
It hurts to sit here day after day
talking to you inside my head, forgetting to breathe.

In the meantime there is a physical life waiting.
Every day has been one long saturday since you went.
I need to pick up That Day, bring it forward into sunday, onward into life.

How can I change my life
when my days are impossible?
I let them wash over me like a wave.

My world is a grain of sand
on the shore of the infinite ocean.

Our moko turns one on Sunday.
That Day on the beach, amid our screams and tears
he laughed! Then back at the house he walked.

His first steps! O for the wisdom of a baby.





The evenings are the hardest to fill.
The companionable time,
playing chess or smoking on the porch.

In Goa we lay on the beach
counted stars beneath the coconut trees.
In Pushkar we watched bats from the rooftop.

I wish winter would come!
Night falls quicker then.
I feel better in the shadows.

My world shrinks to the size of candlelight
I can move around in the dark.
Nights soothe me.

These heavy humid days weigh me down.
I’m caught in the glare of the sun, too weighty to move
like a turtle in the noonday heat.



I am not angry that you died.
Not angry at you.
But I am angry.

Perhaps I am angry at others still living.
Its irrational, I know.
I am on a rocky roller coaster ride, excuse me if I scream.

My boat is a long way from shore
riding a high sea of rolling angry waves.
It demands my attention, I give over to it.

Towards others still living I have thoughts
callous and cruel, pompous and painful
wild and wicked.

Then I feel bad and sad and make an effort,
make coffee and small, small talk.
About good days and bad days.






The world passed by our gate, travelers rarely deviated.
From the sanctuary of this porch,
we tracked the lives of two spiders, observed life intinimately.


Summer has moved on
the sun slants viciously down
there is no sanctuary in daylight on this porch.

I have been out in the world
but scurry back to solitude and shadows,
the bees making love to the flowers.

The garden we planted has bloomed and died
the tide is still the tide
and always the sound of the sea.









Blue moon dawn
the mist in the valley as the day awoke.
The morning air sighs.

The first dew.
Soon the monarchs will float by
on their way to autumn days

The cows wind slowly up the hill
to be milked,
the sea imperceptibly changes colour.

You are dead
and I am still alive
What does this mean?









An earthquake in the middle of the night.
I woke
There was no one to tell.

It was only an earthquake
but it felt like death.













There is an island of peace
where the trees swoop and sway
and forest tendrils curl over your toes.

Where paths are lit by moonlight
where the breezes are silk
and bees die full of love and pollen.

All these places are alive inside of me
I hear them calling,
Let Go! We’ll catch you! Fall!

Although I am assured a safe landing
my hands refuse to unclench.
I am a rabbit frozen in the headlight of an oncoming car.

Its because of breathing
I keep forgetting to.





What do you know
now you are inside the mystery looking out,
and I am on the outside?

Alice stepped through the looking glass
through to the other side.
It was inside her own house.

I look at the mirror on the wall
I see only my Self.
Is there a way in?

Where is the point of entry
that time and tide deny to those of us
still breathing?

Within or without?





We are the ants working ceaselessly
the drone of the bees,
the fragile bones of a bird in flight.

We are a part of all those things and they a part of us
And yet
We don’t remember. So we suffer.
The sum combination of all that we see
all the unknown galaxies expanding eternally amount to a
mere speck of dust floating in the air of Gods dream.

Neither this nor this.
What a relief!











You have thrown off the interruption of this life.
I roam from east to west across the universal sky
searching for a point of entry.

This physical body is my only baggage
but it is too much,
it bars my entry at every door I knock.

I am beyond this society of pity and patience,
it bows me over.
I feel like the Ancient Mariner at a wedding feast.

Then I was turning your picture this way and that
in the candlelight, for a moment you
almost moved!

Everything dissolves!







The monsoon thunders down
the streets are rivers and the river
is a highway.

God is taking snapshots of us from heaven,
the light is blinding!

Ganga ji hungers and rumbles
the valley sweats in the torpor of her sighs.
Your ashes in one swift swirl became the hungering mother.

She took you home.






The jewelled green fields
have turned with the harvest
to a warm blanket of brown.

Who is it that bears the fruit of such labours?
The farmer or the rice itself
or the worm in the ground?

The small life in the soil,
the rain that falls
or is it the Lover?

One small grain of rice
yet even this cannot be separated
from the eternal round of existence.








Today in the mountains,
drunk from sharing the same air as God
speech returned to me momentarily,
Ram Ram!

This is why birds sing!

There was nothing but God dreaming us into existence.
A river of infinite life, rushing endlessly
tumbling down to the world below.

I trod carefully lest my footfalls awake The Dreamer.
Sleep on Beloved.
How I longed to turned and catch sight of Him!









The pregnant Indian sun gives birth
to me cycling alone in the early morning jungle
where Krishna has coloured the birds from his paintbox.

I am weeping and laughing
for joy
and sorrow.

Life is a circle a beautiful mysterious orb
of magic and delusion.
The clues are everywhere!


If all this beauty and wonder is as nothing,
What then is God?
Imagine that!

I was jealous of you, Lover.
Jealous that you went to God
but here He shows me again and again, He is everywhere.

Everywhere is Him.






I am thinking about Gods hand
and how he guides us always.

He deigns to notice
our own insignificant selves.

He’s dreaming us up!

Is this what you noticed about God?
Or was it his sense of humour?











If I think of the word courage
I know it is a word for the heart.
My heart is a lion sleeping in the long grass.

One day I will wake up and believe in the future
That will take courage.
At the moment it feels like the utmost arrogance to make plans.

But I suppose that eating toast in the morning is an act of faith
that your body will need the fuel until lunchtime.
Like buying a ticket and assuming you’ll get there.