These days
I don't wish to hear any stories at all.
These intrusive guests simply interrupt idleness
before they fall prey to life's impossible convulsions.
One feels one has heard enough of those tales
people have been telling one another since one was a child.
For example, of that story of a rich man
who climbed the holy mountains to ask
the naked guru the ultimate questions on life.
And how the guru told him
life was a mysterious tree, and that God
has a claim on your life
whether you are aware of it or not.

These days
I rarely look into my own eyes.
I just allow things to happen gently.
Like allowing the awareness of another's existence
to beat out the passage of time,
and not to force my instinctive rancor into the mirror and trap myself in my nakedness.
Or let the whole day sit on my walls
and breathe the boundless distance that drifts
between each one's coming and going.
Or let the tales of starved children
with their distended bellies and enormous dulled eyes to perforate our worn silence and excite
those friendly gestures of chaste tenderness.

These days
I move into the shadow of myself,
not trying to understand
the words others try to weigh me with.
I accept what I see through the open window
and between its rigid iron bars,
not the man who for years desired a country in vain and then fell in love with the first puppet land they gave him,even if it failed to correspond exactly with the promised land.

Somewhere
lies the perimeter I have not been able to extend,
the haunting lamp I've been looking for in the dark,the flowers of raintrees with their wild hair dancing about us, as I hold on to that ambiguous heart that remains as effective
as running a chain of beads through the fingers.