The hostilities are over and truth rings a bell

A bell rings

The hostilities are over

The numbers 

Creep forward with veracity

Inside the smallest one

There's a clear acrylic ball

With thin walls

Cellophane like

Inside the ball there's a clear acrylic wall

Invisible, only extending a little way from the walls

Between that wall

Existent and nonexistent 

Bounces the truth

Existent and non existent 

Its songs are sung in Tamil 

Its timbre is a Tamil cadence

Its replies and responses are Tamil 

Its bony bounce is Tamil 

The ball and its wall can expand

Or contract or deform

And the keeping bouncing thing inside

Human lives I guess

Or a semblance of truth

Draws an energy

Unbidden, unprocured

From the light and sound

That hit the ball from without

And the sound of a bell

That the truth itself gives off 

In a dream I was interrogated with a strange sound

I've heard this strange mg sound 

Where "ama" turns to "ang or "ong"

As in sarama turning to sarong

And somewhere in between there's

That momentary mg

Just a hint for listening

In a dream I was interrogated 

Nothing new in that

But every word the judge asked me ended in the impossibility of mg

Could you write it down I asked

And every word still ended in mg

That conjugation supportive of a structure of inner appurtenances 

Keep that rag. I have to stop crying

Did they chase his mother

He can't remember

Don't throw out that empty valise

You can fill it with rags or pages

Don't throw out that rag 

You can find an odor in it or soak it with tears or breath

Don't throw out that piece of paper

You can fill it with the memories

You don't have

Or you can fill it with the words she tells you

Carefully 

Is that a conch or a train

In the dark morning

Does it matter

What it says is:

Alert!

A time is breaking

Did they round up his brother in one of their roundups?

What does he think?

No one to tell him

No one to tell him what his mother thought, running

Down into a ditch

Thorny? Sandy? 

Her rubber flipflops thin, coming undone, slipping off

Thinking of the hate she felt for his connections?

Did his father drown 

In that outhouse in Mullativu

Or some village his mother says they came from 

Because he was sick and fell?

He doesn't know

Or did they throw him in

And he fell into that hell

Or are his suspicions 

Suspicions he'll never answer true

That 

Father was beheaded first

And lasting tale that he was sick

Lost his balance

Fell in

How do you "fall" into a squatter so narrow so that you drown?

What did his mother think

On the six day flight to Wattala 

Refuge with Colombo family a last resort 

The sound of the crows can't answer

The roosters won't answer

The Murugam Temple can't answer

The Pilliyar Temple can't answer 

The Kali Kovil can't answer

The speeding buses won't answer

Your own breathing can't answer

How about the groaning of your mother at night, or this time in the morning

Or the moan of the ponsala monks

Those orange robed chanting patriots

Who storm your place with their ownership 

I have to stop crying

It's not my country

Not my people 

Not my tragedy 

Why is it I feel so close?

Pour water over me like Hanuman

Pour water over me

Douse me with camphor smoke like the emerging can't yet walk monkey god Hanuman

Put a tail on me

Douse me some more with smoke

Keep me from falling backward like that Hanuman, that monkey god

The offerings floor is wet

The steps are wet 

The reenactment of Hanuman

And a hundred more reenactments

Are going on inside

It's a spectacle like we're a spectacle

With our light skins

But we've started to belong here

Leaving hurts us

And it hits you 

Hours of waiting and counting 

Make it sad  

There's fresh still air around here 

And dusty air coming in here on an insistent fresh breeze

Stronger than fresh 

For me it carries threat 

Don't ask I can't tell 

The threat of danger and impermanence?

The threat of disease and intransigence?

What if it blocks the sun when you say goodbye?

Tomorrow I leave, packed, racked, abandoned, abandoning

Insinuation and installation, investment and attention. Done. 

How do I leave?

Soldiering on? Picking myself up? Detaching myself? Erasing my time here? Plucking? Dragging? Extricating? Extracting?

More like scouring. Scouring the place of my ownership. Scouring the place of my ownership by occupancy. Scouring me of my ownership, of my occupancy. Of my occupation.  

More like sucking up the bits of liquid where they fell in a porous matrix, a matrix of lava rock or sandstone, or just screening

How to make this finality happen?

It will. No matter what I do. 

But I'm too soft too melted

Too absorbed and too absorbing 

It doesn't feel like time to go

It doesn't feel right to go 

It doesn't feel good to go

How about don't go?

Even a princess pie could remove itself better With less self-absorption 

More fairly distributing its pieces

More triangulation Less messiness. 

More good humor

More roundness

More crustiness

Sweeter

Shards of fright

You are still getting in my way

You are still getting in my way

You are still getting in my way

You fell in the light and absorbed 

You are still getting in my way

You are still getting in my way

You fell in the light and absorbed

And changed the energy 

You are still getting in my way

You fell in the light and absorbed

And changed the energy

And brought shade to the sunny ride

You fell in the light and absorbed

And changed the energy 

And brought shade to the sunny ride

And got in my way

Numbness that you held above me like a sieve

Exhales and takes in the dust of paradise

Trampled in broken shoes and greasy spit

Forwarding my mind to listen deeper

Comparing my mind with a mind that listened deeper

Trailing the arcs of balls

White balls

Against a black field 

Perhaps it's not necessary to keep track

Perhaps it's just a necessary evil

Perhaps it all about the way we stack

Our wads and piles and moats and coats 

Our silver heralded plates and chalices

Our piles of brick and wood

And piles of gemstones periwinkle rose and white

In sublime misunderstanding overcoming the shards of fright

There are not always two sides to every story

There are not always two sides to 

Every story I can give you examples

Of where this holds some truth

Though you will disagree with

The viewpoint that I proffer where

One story must be based on hate

And anyway my story lacks 

The seal of approval of what we've 

Come to call political correctness 

Where political correctness 

Has somehow come to condone

You know what. Terror. 

Where terror is condoned by hate

And isn't that often or even usually

The case

Doesn't the hate have a life of its own

Outside the window of "story"

And in glorious 

Self rationalization may condone

Itself for rationalizing a "struggle"

To put it in the words of the 

Old revolutionaries 

Anyway the hating always hate 

You will not like the story I proffer

Or profess and you may hate me

For it 

And your disagreement may 

Outshine the small bit of truth

I try to present you with. 

It would be a present 

A presence 

A wholeness the story (or the two-sided story) Might lack. 

Why not give it a try?

For one thing 

It's a lot easier to say

There are always two sides 

To a story. 

There are not two sides to every story

There are not always two sides to 

Every story I can give you examples

Of where this holds some truth

Though you will disagree with

The viewpoint that I proffer where

One story must be based on hate

And anyway my story lacks 

The seal of approval of what we've 

Come to call political correctness 

Where political correctness 

Has somehow come to condone

You know what. Terror. 

Where terror is condoned by hate

And isn't that often or even usually

The case

Doesn't the hate have a life of its own

Outside the window of "story"

And in glorious 

Self rationalization may condone

Itself for rationalizing a "struggle"

To put it in the words of the 

Old revolutionaries 

Anyway the hating always hate 

You will not like the story I proffer

Or profess and you may hate me

For it 

And your disagreement may 

Outshine the small bit of truth

I try to present you with. 

It would be a present 

A presence 

A wholeness the story (or the two-sided story) Might lack. 

Why not give it a try?

For one thing 

It's a lot easier to say

There are always two sides 

To a story. 

The firebombing

After ringlets of fairest dew have frothed, then gushed, then flown, and then dissolved

Like a palm forest in balmy breezes, fairest breezes, its fronds giving an incandescent, incessant music, drone-like, shattering in glassy half notes and quarter notes 

You, becalmed, benign, relaxed tell me the most interesting story.

You went last night to the private hospital to see the neurosurgeon on a consult 

Why? Because you didn't trust our internet researches that said:

The half life of the sleeping pill you took too much of is "two hundred hours."

That is:

Half the juju from those pills you took a week ago is still floating around in you after approximately 8.33 days and nights

So eight days in you still feel like you have three full doses in you. Another week or so, one and a half sleeping pills worth of brain drain will still be hanging out in your fat cells, waiting to be metabolized. 

At least I had the possibility to live through it you whisper to me. Your thoughts these days are not yours. You're spacy and, more than usual, All Over The Place. 

I don't know what you told the neurosurgeon. 

He told you, and this is not what you'd go to a neurosurgeon to hear: That lower back pain is common in Sri Lankans. They squat, they sit on their haunches, and grandparents your age? They carry children in their arms. A heavy load. 

You carried some liters of water in your arm you told me. To water your precious plants. Maybe it was that, you thought in retrospect. Maybe some other too-heavy work gave you the backache. A pain you never had before. Had I ever experienced it? Anything so horrible? Hah! Count the times I was flat on my back. 

Keep this in mind. 

Your pain you called excruciating. Like a heart attack in your leg. You. In your seventies. Never had sciatica? It drove you so crazy you knowingly took six pills? You told me you knew you were taking them and you thought to spit them out but decided not to. 

Your neuro pal didn't bother, as we would in the West, to slip in a routine psych exam. Cuz they don't here. 

But he did approach the psychology of your pain, a pain like you'd never had before but like I said. We Get It All The Time. 

Excruciating, crucial, and here's the crux. 

We don't get our houses firebombed. At least not that often. You did. In 1981. The same summer as the Jaffna Library was burnt. I must memorialize here:

The small ghetto of Tamil public servants and professionals and business people, families whose houses in Bandarawela, upcountry, whose houses were firebombed that summer. 

You won't read about it anywhere. Ever. I must curate this fact like a diamond or a sapphire. In a velvet box. Because it is the rarest thing I own. 

That summer in Bandarawela? For the record:

Was

Two summers before "there are two sides to every story." Your innocent children were sleeping inside. 

You stayed with a doctor friend three months after the firebombing, then moved your family back to the relative safety, for the time being at least, of Batticaloa. 

Feel any pain after the firebombing? Or did you just soldier through? 

Who would think a backache could be so bad?

Is a glide enough to hide uncertainty?

Go to fill and fill up full

Barely coming to wander in fixed translations 

Park your bike at this railroad junction 

Barely aware of traffic on either side

Walk your fill in village lanes

Their berms and verges hidden 

Behind corrugation

Watch darkening porches shaded verandas

Setting up with seats for the afternoon's repose

Try me for telling. Try me for the truth. It isn't usual you'll receive my word. 

Tell me trying, why? Why watch a kingfisher on the lagoon? Is a glide enough to hide uncertainty?

Before their wives arise

Went onward

Into the land of the growing

Where so much sitting

Crossed my path 

Onward into the land of power

A set of mirrors strike the light

Onward where music's fables 

Guide a march of lift and effort

Struggling with impossibilities

Still unfound, still covered, still unspoken and unreflected

Under the territory of time's allusion 

Up past the Kali Kovil

Where destruction meets the watery waters

Lagoonish shade pleasant in its smell

Where early

Very early before their wives arise

The fat and skinny men, saronged but bare chested

Sweep sweep sweep sweep and rake their sandy verges

Less words

Extracting it seems was easier

When there were less words involved

It was the asphaltish odor that stopped them from talking

And so getting through and out of the day

Became a convenience instead of a burden 

Using coins that buried a wealth of stolen items

They found time. 

At railway bridges. 

At stops along the road where tables were greasy and covered with flies. 

At pauses in the music

That pelted, belted, besotted and trampled. 

This was good because of and in all this they uncovered secret chests and trysts that never would have been begotten 

Sandy places to do the ablutions

Dream, it's your dime

I'll keep writing till it makes me sick

I'll keep floating till they force me back to earth

I'll find water for washing 

And sandy places to do the ablutions

Until another bell rings

From another corner that says

Dreamtime done now

Find your moral compass

And act on it

The door of bravery

Tracing water when the flooding rains came 

We sloshed through sheets of water on the sand 

Braving serpents, snakes and insects

We followed contours of the land

It was short lived but violent, its force, its majesty, cliches that grow offhand

But seeing water gather from that streaming sky? Watching gutters burst? and downpour sounds? These are love earth gives, symbols we can follow to the door of bravery. 

Forcing soil to do your work

Forcing soil never seemed to be

The right thing in this part of the world 

Digging pits for rain or collecting moisture seemed to be a one way ticket to hell

Finding time to shore up your work 

In a climate that forced you, not the soil into indolence

Intolerance, irascibility, extenuating circumstances like exhaustion, heat rash, delicate skin

All these circumstances mitigated against calling to soil to do your will. 

With the state of orthodontia here, another story but the same, it was better to find beauty in that overbite

Than try to bear it away on your terms. This said, as they say, finding rest in times when you should rest, like midday? Is probably the best.  

What the poetess told him as they watched the village sun dim

I like to use poetry to capture, to loosen, to expand and to send to the remotest smallnesses, the poetess told him as an aside watching the village sun dim

I found it amusing she said to find people whose wading into this world found it like slippery tiles

It soothes me she said in a place where heated brains holding terribly bothersome thoughts, thoughts that upset their keepers keep bubbling up. They're a part of life. 

And he found the coolness of her words a softening, a repeated and repeating flow and flowering whose aroma was a balm

Roadside Witchstands

Entering

The 

Time 

Of 

Fullmoon

Rocks

So 

Round

They 

Stood 

As 

Faces

Painted

Dumped

And 

Doused

On

Roadside

Witchstands

Pooped dogs of Thiruchendur

Growing testy after verges, exploding open like the dead hard legs of crabs in a human maw

She wondered, when will this dust stop? Abate, conceal, assume proportions miniature, opaque

Fighting muggy sleep in the last hours before dark, her fan appropriated sounds of the outside

And forced its gently whirring symphony upon the restless ear it swung and shone in deepening distress

The morning horns and drums sounded and with them, the canned religious music, Tamil language

But indeterminate in timbre tone and topic. Falling birds and a salt in the air that stayed. Hot and caustic poring, suffusing

Arbitrary children's screams behind corrugated fences and outside in the sand? Dogs so pooped they curled in the heat. 

A Sangam poetess and a cloud of peace

Let a lucid breeze cover and convey

Let a cloud of ice settle in its verge

Let a can of music open in your heart

Let a leafy green follow wishing to go on

Let a motor sounding carry bobbing heads

Let a language tighten as it loosens its verbiage

Let a bell clang ringing from a kovil place

Let a bell clang ringing from a bovine face

Let a sangam poetess sing of village tanks

Let her pages rustle finding words that open chests

Let a graying sky find its beauty way

Let a swaying frond troop many with its kind

Let a forced exchange founder, filter, glowing in the deep

Let the information flow careless as a breeze

Let the lucid breeze follow, covering, conveying

Let a cloud of peace descend powerful and staying

To force even thoughts on a rocky pavement

Forcing even thoughts 

on rocky pavement 

Losing one concentration

not an acceptable outcome

in a situation where

Losing another concentration is the goal. 

Too much weighty stuff at stake

Too much worrying can break. 

In one day!

To see a baby eagle fall from the nest

To see a fat long rat snake sinuous in the sand

Breaking its cross across the crossing

Hiding low in the leafy bananas 

its tiny head terrifying 

Then later 

and far above

in the overheated sky

Paralyzed that snake

and caught by the eagle parent

And then far above still

And farther

the other eagle parent

Takes the other end gently

A space docking 

The snake is stretched like a line between parentheses these parents 

These parents pull on either end and

snake now a lifeless flesh enemy and meal for what eaglets lie still in the rough and twiggy nest

This aerie uneven

We can't see

This aerie

Floating in the tree

Above lagoon and shoreline waits

In sacred sun and torrid wastes

In fisher waters calm with fury

Tempered by the feathers furry 

To force even thoughts on a rocky pavement 

Curries concentration where concentration is to be had

Chicken sized problem

Preparing, promoting 

Isolating, balancing 

You wonder 

How this chicken-sized problem 

Wasn't solved before

Months or years earlier. 

How I embraced the Tamil lifestyle for my birthday

Begone money!

I want to be rid of these wads of rupees, whatever they're worth in USD

It's my birthday!

And I want to spend the day buying nice stuff for the people I love, no matter 

Lighten up!

I feel like lightening my load. Whatever it takes and whoever I have to pay

Send me flying!

Try holding me down with carats or grams on this sun spotted cloud spotted day

Change those rupees into gold

Into glam and bling

and things you can hold 

Change those rupees into charitable acts

Just do it. Don't ask 

I go and come on my bicycle

I celebrate with my own self

I trip through streets of traffic

I applaud the cows and taxis, the crows and dogs

The new kovil songs I haven't heard

The clank of weights at my gym

The sweat and subsequent strong

vibrations

of

harmony

There, I said it. I'm not ashamed to say it

vibrations

of

harmony 

If you don't like it tough. It's my birthday!

I wait I wait I wait I wait I wait

I'm so patient in my waiting

So eager in my waiting

So bathed with happiness in my waiting

So triumphal in my waiting

In sheds and behind sheds

On streets and on tracks

Barefoot and beslippered

I wait like I waited for this day

It's the day of gliding through

of playing through of smiling through of treating through

Treating my self

And treating my loved ones

And making pretense of surprise 

And making pretense of significance 

And making pretense of pretending 

And making a pretense of light and lightness 

And enjoying

Enjoying to the core

Enjoying fully and completely

Embracing 

Celebrating my world  

If you don't approve

And if you think there's too much

Too much ego

Too much weightedness

Too much making a big deal

Too much telling people days in advance 

Too much enjoyment when we live in such a hard world 

Begone. I don't care 

My job is done

I flared and fell and boisterously 

Reembodied 

My cheerful self 

Jaffna and its soil

I find that Jaffna

That is I think that Jaffna

Will create new mines of thinking

Mines of dreams

Mines of aromas

Mines of noises

Mines of effort

Bringing forth 

Always bringing forth

Bringing forth and forward

Moving up through waters

Murky waters of 

Murky waters of time and emotion 

A space like a candle

A Nallur-like entryway

Its open temple jaws

A maw of time travel

Trancelike

If you go barefoot 

Trancelike 

If you go bare chested

Like the waters 

Of a place 

With no rivers 

Only limestone beneath the surface

Limestone of ancient seas

Limestone of ancient coral reefs

Sunken

Then buried 

Then risen

Then finding light

Hosting plants and animals

Pretending in a very convincing manner 

To be soil

Holding, protecting, hosting 

Crustaceans 

And civilization 

I did taste that soil

Like I smelled those smells

And saw the weirs that men built

To breed prawns

In a light light

Halfway across the lagoon

Going to a near deserted island 

Dad taught me how to be a Man

It frustrates

to portray dust

just as crushed earth and bone 

It frustrates

to think of an egg

only as food

It frustrates 

to say

"Dad taught me how to be a man"

As it frustrates 

to believe

incense, when burnt, is just ash

Indian Ocean at Kallady, Batticaloa

Its flatness threatens and beckons

Its couplets roar and whisper

Its breakings are tidings 

Its distances are life dreams

Its greyness is character

Its blueness is reflection

Its greatness is individuality and spread

Its worry is staying in its container, its bounds 

These truths rediscovered 

Form a tablet to hunker down with