The Game of the Name

The pain of lost love is life's greatest curse;
The loss of a bhakta is a thousand times worse.
This is the price: by loving we invited the pain.
Now it has come, how can we complain?
Find the vestige of life left within Love's corpse
And offer the pain to its Divine Source.

The mundane heart knows not prema’s way,
it sees but the glitter of lila and play.
But the Sahaja path is a two-edged blade,
that is both of union and of madness made.

For nirvana, just keep away from thirst,
A mukti-vadi is by desire cursed.
Pleasure is desire’s fruit and so is pain,
Renounce the thirst for love or go insane.

But if you accept madness as the price of prem
Then love, for that is the game of the Name.

Love and emptiness

I wake up thinking of you.
I lie down thinking of you.
I wait for sleep thinking of you.

I walk on the forest path,
I feel your lips on mine as if they had never left,
plastered on them like some plastic mask.
I rip at it, pulling skin and flesh
to rid myself of it, but it still remains.

I feel your body, formless,
enveloping my frame, squeezing out the breath
from my lungs, squeezing my heart
and throat like a great weight.
I pull it away like a giant sucker
tearing with it it skin, flesh and marrow
to free my heart, but it is still there,
the memory of your lovemaking.

I have to stop and stand every few hundred feet,
to stop and hold fast to my life airs
that seem to be pressing on my rib cage
and racing around in attempt to escape.

I breathe slowly through my nose
embracing you with my breath,
getting a hold of myself and freeing myself
from the haunting, the possession of spirits
the madness of your absence.

I call out loudly Radhe Shyam Radhe Shyam
there are no passers by to frighten
with my watery eyes and thinning hair,
my toothless mouth and white shaggy beard,
and forlorn beggarly appearance.

I am down to nothing, a mere cypher
invisible, reduced to nothing by
love and emptiness.

I cannot accept it

If you say it's all over,

I accept it.

If you say that this was all to teach me a lesson

that I must suffer to expiate my sins,

I accept it.

If you tell me I must suffer

because I must learn how the gopis suffered

when Krishna left them in the rasa dance

or when he left for Mathura

or when they saw him in Kurukshetra

and realized he would never come back,

I accept it.

And if there is nothing more that I can do

no words I can say

no miracles within my reach that I can work

to soften your heart,

I accept it.

If you tell me the dream wasn't real

that I was in illusion,

that love in this world is not real

that men and women are attracted merely by lust

and must accept the consequences of their ignorance,

I accept it.

And if you say we're too old,

that time has run out

and there's no more room left in our lives

to chase after such ephemera as love,

yes, I accept it.

If you say my love was inadequate

unreal,

with my head bowed in shame

I accept it.

But if you say

the love by which you left scars on my heart,

the remnants of the touch of our breasts,

did not exist, was not real,

I cannot accept it.

And if you tell me the silent sonar that

pulses out of my chest

into infinite space, seeking you wherever you are,

has nothing to find, that there is nothing there,

no echo,

I cannot accept it.

I do not accept it.

I will never accept it.

She supports you like a good disciple should

Let me tell you about that evening.

It was cold, but not as steely cold

as your determination.

I saw as soon as I let you in the door,

the two of you were taking this seriously:

you were both afraid of something.

I tried to be avuncular, professional,

I should have worn tweed and held a pipe

and led you a table of wine and cheese.

I said something vague about community

all learned and a little puffed up from reading Scott Peck's book.

I may even have let slide the word, "vulnerability."

But you had made up your mind to be invulnerable.

Draupadi Ma did not want the Dragon Flower to come

and she was right: the two of you came prepared.

Your teeth were clenched, your strategy worked out.

First you would show how you were reformed;

because now you are okay, it was a momentary lapse

and your wife had forgiven you so why won't we?

And you had quotes from Jaiva Dharma

and from a commentary of a commentary

that you excitedly shared as you do with your disciples

exalting in the glory of the shastra,

where you so insightfully discover another,

yet more eloquent way of saying

that one should never find fault with Vaishnavas.

But I am not one of your disciples and

we were not there to indulge in idle gossip.

I was not there to put you on trial.

And here again, you are afraid of us,

your friends, who are just asking a simple question,

what is prem, and how do you get it?

And my request is there should be no bullshit,

no quoting shastra to lead your speech, no lecturing.

Only realization. Real life realization.

You are hiding, you are afraid.

ahaṁ cātmātmajāgāra-dārārtha-svajanādiṣu

bhramāmi svapna-kalpeṣu mūḍhaḥ satya-dhiyā vibho

You are afraid to abandon the walls of shastra and yukti

and face reality.

I've got them people here

these are good people

I need them to have someone to believe in

is that you?

Are you a charismatic who knows how to charm the ladies?

Who entertains with shlokas and sankirtan

and even occasionally permits himself

to dredge the bounds of his romantic memory,

very alarming indeed when speckled

with sweetly sung verses from Lalita Madhava or Ujjvala Nilamani.

When I said Rukmini Dwarkadhish

your mind was stirred.

It would have been a great subject

for discussion had we let down our guard,

but you couldn't,

the Dragon Flower was there.

You are involved

from the beginning; your shadow was there,

I am sorry to say.

You are not responsible for your shadow, you may say,

yet you cast it.

Your shadow's role may be greater than the real you.

You are afraid of magic because you use it.

The glance. At one point our eyes met

perhaps while the women argued,

we human beings keep our ocular intimacies brief.

It is rare that we have the innocence needed

to enter another soul through the eyes.

And the little smirk danced on your lips

as Draupadi blustered helplessly, uncontrolled.

And you gave me that knowing glance

of masculine intimacy and subtle victory

as she flailed helplessly and seethed

that I was going over to the enemy,

and that you were scoring all the points, not she.

Ah yes, the Dragon Flower

has forgiven you and now supports you

like a disciple should support a guru,

a true Vedic wife, a true Vedic husband.

Draupadi Ma was furious that I did not take her side

she began to take the form of Kali with numerous arms and heads

all spouting ferocity.

I wanted her to let it slide

but she wanted some goddamned effect

and she wasn't going to take no

extended sannyasi's authority trip

muttered by the sannyasi's frightened wife.

She was Draupadi in the assembly

abandoned by her protector.

Yes, I wanted to take a friendly

long range sweet path to union,

to speak intellectually, a little confessionally

if we could create a basis of friendship and trust

other things could eventually come forward.

But Draupadi Ma was in a different world

and she wanted to validate it.

“We are the seniors here,” she said.

And we are, it is true. We are the elders,

but we are also from the West, what do we care

about seniority? We pay it lip service

and don't approach it with gravity,

except where pecking orders are institutionalized.

“Don't tell us things are straight,”

she would scream. “It will happen again and here's why!”

But she could not speak out with the Dragon Flower

standing guard against the truth.

She will defend you like a lioness

because she is fully invested in you

and she craves your love.

And there you are, smirking sweetly

and oh so helplessly at her display

and then you restrain her,

holding her against you, controlling her like

a master with a trained pit bull hound.

It was Draupadi who hardened

the Pandavas' hearts

a conflagration for nothing more

than stupidity and hurt pride

that is the story of the lesser of two evils

winning because of a woman.

She was born for revenge

Her revenge was approved by God himself.

If you were a man married to Draupadi

which Pandava would you be?

She had failed in her dharma to love

the five of them equally,

by loving Arjuna a little more totally.

And what was Arjuna's game?

He was afraid to dominate her love

like a Krishna, of whom he was the second self

the husband in whom God is most fully manifest.

He was afraid that if he gave himself to her completely

if he gave his love to her too soon,

she would forget the others.

Arjuna, for all his heroics

and consummate mastery of the kshatriya dharma

was at heart a lover of poetry and dance

with a feminine side,

he lived among the Apsaras and taught them to dance

he was even a hijra for a year.

He took a twelve year hiatus

before he even lay with her,

being cast out by the agreement that

whosoever of the brothers should be present

when Draupadi was alone with her rotating spouse

was to be exiled for a dozen years.

She had to love them equally

each in the way that they needed it,

to perfect themselves in happiness

and humanity and all the graces

they could acquire and distribute to their people.

And yet there was to be a conflagration.

A man cannot help but be recreated by his woman,

and she will recreate him in her image.

And so there  we have our image,

the lioness pit bull seething with controlled rage

while her master soothes her with a calming hand

and looks about, proud of his mastery over such a beast.

And over here, who can fathom Draupadi's anger?

She has things she wants you to know,

but you have put a wall around your

desire to listen. You prefer the pit bull.

and I hear she has puppies.

No wonder Draupadi did not want the Dragon Flower there,

but you were afraid to come without her.

She keeps trying to give birth to me

And I keep fizzling out.

My Draupadi wants her Arjuna to get out there

and do a little sword-fighting.

Then she quietened down,

and we blathered pointlessly.

The the Dragon Flower was there,

she had raised the drawbridge, the moat was full.

Only the name of God is true!

They carried the corpse of love,
draped in white cotton, soft and new
trudging to the call and response:
"Only the name of God is true!"

"Who killed him?" Someone whispered.
"What will we do now that he is dead?"
Tears still gleaming on his cheeks,
"Love is immortal," one true believer said.

"Should it not be burned before the night?"
someone wondered out aloud.
Flies had already begun to alight
over the stench beneath the shroud.

Pupils enlarged, those with true belief
huddled and hoped for resurrection.
The saner ones just swallowed their grief
and marched to the ground of cremation.

They carried the corpse of love,
draped in white cotton, soft and new,
trudging in time to the eternal song:
"Only the name of God is true!"

Verses of Raghupati Upadhyaya

Verses from Padyāvalī by Raghupati Upādhyāya:

श्याममेव परं रूपं पुरी मधुपुरी वरा।
वयः कैशोरकं ध्येयमाद्य एव परो रसः॥८२॥

śyāmam eva paraṁ rūpaṁ purī madhupurī varā |
vayaḥ kaiśorakaṁ dhyeyam ādya eva paro rasaḥ ||82||

Black Shyama’s form of all is best;
Of his dhams, Braj outdoes the rest;
Contemplate Krishna in his youth;
his rasa of love’s the highest truth.

इह वत्सान् समचारयदिह नः स्वामी जगौ वंशीम्।
इति सास्रं गदतो मे यमुनातीरे दिनं यायात्॥८७॥

iha vatsān samacārayad iha naḥ svāmī jagau vaṁśīm|
iti sāsraṁ gadato me yamunātīre dinaṁ yāyāt ||87||

May my days pass on the Yamuna banks,
eyes wet with tears, stuttering words like these:
“Here did our master graze his calves,
and here played his flute upon the breeze.”

श्रुतयः पलालकल्पाः किमिह वयं साम्प्रतं चिनुमः।
आह्रियत पुरैव नयनैराभीरीभिः परं ब्रह्म॥९७॥

śrutayaḥ palāla-kalpāḥ
kim iha vayaṁ sāmprataṁ cinumaḥ |
āhriyata puraiva nayanair
ābhīrībhiḥ paraṁ brahma ||97||

The Shrutis are but a pile of husks,
what grains can we find rummaging through ’em?
Braja’s cowgirls have already with their eyes,
gathered up the Supreme Brahman.

कं प्रति कथयितुमीशे सम्प्रति को वा प्रतीतिमायातु
गोपतितनयाकुञ्जे गोपवधूटीविटं ब्रह्म॥९८॥

kaṁ prati kathayitum īśe
samprati ko vā pratītimāyātu
gopati-tanayā-kuñje
gopa-vadhūṭī-viṭaṁ brahma ||98||

To whom do I dare say these words
Who will believe me when I say 'em?
In the gardens of the gopi princess,
plays the playboy Supreme Brahman!

श्रुतिमपरे स्मृतिमितरे भारतमन्ये भजन्तु भवभीताः।
अहमिह नन्दं वन्दे यस्यालिन्दे परं ब्रह्म॥१२६॥।

śrutim apare smṛtim itare
bhāratam anye bhajantu bhava-bhītāḥ |
aham iha nandaṁ vande
yasyālinde paraṁ brahma ||126||.

Let others worship the Shrutis, Smritis,
or the epics – they fear the world, all of ’em!
But as for me, I bow down to Nanda,
in whose courtyard crawls the Supreme Brahman.

तप्तं तपोभिरन्यैः फलितं तद् गोपबालानाम्।
आसां यत् कुचकुम्भे नीलनिचोलयति ब्रह्म॥३००॥

taptaṁ tapobhir anyaiḥ phalitaṁ tad gopa-bālānām |
āsāṁ yat kuca-kumbhe nīla-nicolayati brahma ||300||

Whatever askesis others have performed,
‘tis the gopi girls who got all the benefits,
for 'tis around their ample breasts alone
that Brahman became the bright blue blouse that fits.

Jewels

We were jewels, you and I, not fools,
and we sought the highest love
in God and spirit, far above
the trivial amours of the mundane,
and yet together could not remain
upon that effervescent plane,

I don’t know if to wisely nod or weep,
but I always choose the latter,
and more tears flow when I pretend
that I don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

You and I are jewels, we are pearls
we are gifts of the Almighty;
We could have been empowering,
one another's Shakti.

That is not a role-playing game!
That is the way the dance is danced,
the way that Love is loved
and divine romance romanced.

But then perhaps we have been fools,
for not embracing such a gift
that promised so much, and let ourselves
fall in the well of doubt and drift.

Wounds to lick, lessons to learn,
separation to feel, union to yearn,
We still have Goloka’s perfect love for dhyan,
Vrindavan’s parakiya for our gyan.

Love is lost, better lost than never felt,
That's the way plans and theories just melt
in this the life that we were dealt.

Hot? Waiting for the rains in Vrindavan

Hot? Get up every four hours
to drink a glass or two of water.
Get five drops of urine in the morning,
dripping out as if from a squeezed lemon.

Hot?
At 6 a.m, the water in the rooftop tank is already
the temperature of a sauna.
And if you clean your butt with it,
expect to emit novel sounds.

Hot?
You fill the kettle from the room temp table top water container
and the kettle doesn't go on
because it thinks it has already done its work.

And when evening comes you throw the rooftop tank water
now as hot as the day has made it, onto the stones
to cool them off! Now that is hot!

We await the monsoon,
I was in Bengal, I saw her arrive.
On the train, I delighted in Jharkhand,
green where it had been khaki on the down trip,
luxuriant in its various ways,
it reminded me of Sanatan Goswami walking to Puri
to see the Lord at Rathayatra.

But when we awoke in Uttar Pradesh,
the lands looked parched dry and exhausted,
battered by the relentless, unrelenting sun,
truly tigmanshu.

Now we all await the monsoon. One counts the days
and listens to radio reports and meteorogical pundits
who promise the exact day and time the skies will break.
They tell us June 13, and just saying such a closeby date
brings smiles to people's lips.

One becomes so sensitive to the changes
in humidity and temperature that even a slight adjustment
makes one think the monsoon may finally be closing in.
Maybe this is it, maybe it finally is here.
Yeah, But not today.

Vrindavan Today

My life is up the creek
and I am seemingly indifferent.
I am in Vrindavan, today's Vrindavan today.
and only a few moments away
stares a trip to the West that I do not want.

I am in Vrindavan, today's Vrindavan today.
And it is a mess.
It seems the minute I got off the train
I was invited to a meeting.

One Gosai in his forties reminisced
about bathing in the clear Yamuna and the silky soft feel of the raj
on the Parikrama Marg on an early summer morning.

It is gone! And it can't be brought back!
Are some finally beginning to realize what it is that they have lost?

The closest we can imagine it now
is maybe in some Atlantic City, promenade fashion,
that will amuse German tourists who will wear Hawaiian shirts
and Tilley hats and sandals and smile
at the widows and emaciated sadhus on their way
to the Hotel Nidhivan, AC rooms. So many star hotel.

And for the less worldly, less sophisticated, the believer crowd,
there will be another, grotesque Disney vision of Krishnaworld,
with mechanical Bakasuras swallowing mechanical cowherd boys.
That is the kind of creative thinking
your great government thinks will bring in
the dough and the development.

The Green Temple Initiative wants you to put solar panels on the roof;
it wants you to conserve water and electricity, to plant trees.
Just look at what they are doing in Puri, Shrirangam, Bangaluru,
in Shirdi, in the Punjab! We too can have solar panels!
Oh glory day!

My dear young lady, you have not seen what Kali Yuga
has done to Vrindavan. You are fighting a herd of elephants
with a peacock feather.

Past and Present

It was a visit to a distant past,
my guru's ashram. Strangely unchanged,
though changes are coming, like everywhere,
like a cancer
they spread through every artery
in the shape of fallen trees
and piles of bricks in various shapes and forms,
usually square and shapeless, devoid of love or art.

The local trains are even more crowded
and there are clubs of fellow office workers
who gather and argue the topics of the day
for the two hours to Shealdah or Dumdum
or wherever they will descend, suddenly serious
as the next step in their crusade to find the office
begins. Their crisp shirts already showing the signs
of sweltering.

At other times, it is the endless parade
of hawkers and beggars, and now,
blind singers with portable loudspeakers and electronic keyboards.
Even Bengali begging comes limping into the 21st century.

But Dwadash Mandir sits in obliviousness to the norms
of the modern world. It is dangling with cobwebs
the spaces are just nooks, the women are just cooks.

And the bell rings and the gong chimes
and one or two voices sing the mangal arati
waking up the rest, who slowly drag themselves
into their daily routine of cooking and cleaning

the men are dragging long tubes or piles of wood,
or bringing in mangoes from the orchard
or bringing feed to the cows,
or just standing around in a gamcha
with a neem twig dangling from the mouth.

But now they have taken Prabhu's room
with its 19th century aura of poverty-stricken opulence
and sterilized it with marble floors and tiled walls.
And marble is sneaking in in the Shiva temples
and who knows where else it will end up,
bringing the new concept of mandir here.

Yet the damage is only just beginning
as the Bhaktivedanta Charity Trust
slowly begins to impose its modern vision
of what should be Bhaktivinoda Thakur's glory--
no doubt some kind of skyscraper spectacularness,
which who knows may require a 60-storey glass structure
rivaling the gaudy marvels of Abu Dhabi and Shanghai,
and will bring much needed economic development
and foreign tourist dollars to the region!

Yes, that was the other distant past,
I viewed from the optics of Gadai Gauranga Kunj,
Gadadhar's folly, a one-man diamond Neverneverland,
which stands like one last precarious sentinel
to another way of looking at things,
a crazy, fantastic, maybe even weird kind of
Gauranga prem, but which has been as persistent and
internally evolving as the Ganges itself,
as imagination itself.

And from there you can look out
like Bhaktivinoda Thakur himself
and see the skyline of a glorious spiritual city
the very living manifestation of Bhaktivinoda's prophetic vision,
where Sahebs and the sons of rishis dance together
in ecstatic glorification of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.
It can be done, it must be done!
Krishna West was Krishna West before it came west,
the karma yoga vision of bhakti,
a religion for doers and go-getters.
creating a new spiritual Kolkata where once there had only been rice fields,
Oh happy day!

Perhaps it is a bridge, but I don't think you get to the other side
until you scrape away at the palimpsest of history
to see what was below, what was Vrindavan,
what was Radha Kund, what was Nabadwip,
what was the Jaiva Dharma world of Lalita Prasad Thakur.
To find out exactly what it is that they had.
How can you have Lalita Prasad Thakur
-- or Sri Rupa or Sri Jiva or Chaitanya Mahaprabhu himself --
without having their world?

Two distant pasts, and both held out their hands
and said, we need you here.

And now the here and now makes a call
and says we need you here and now.
Vrindavan Today was yesterday,
and yet it is still needed today,
or will no one even try to stop the floods of Kali?

But I am one who does nothing, who barely sees at all
what is, much less what needs to be done.

And now, it seems that all these trips to the past
were just baby step preparations
for another even bigger step into the alternate realities
of older matrices, with their abandoned dreams and desires,
betrayals of affection, even bigger ones
than in all these other pasts that litter my present.

May I ever see the past in the present,
may I ever see their newness with new eyes
of experience and revelation.

Let me do nothing

Let me languish a little longer
in silence, in doing nothing,
just watching my breath
and savoring the occasional thought
as it comes flurrying in the wake
of the Name or the Mantra.

Let me do nothing for a few hours more
let me just sit and breathe
and watch my body from the inside
and create a soothing world within
this healthy body
this healthy mind.

Let me waste the day in nirjan bhajan,
contrived nothingness
letting the exhortations of Samuel Smiles
and the dramatic exemplifications of Horatio Alger
-- yeah, the commands of God-on-High to fight --
drift by like leaves in an invisible breeze.

Let me indulge my excentricity just a little longer,
for life itself will not tolerate one so indifferent to Work.

My house, like Gadadhar's, is also situated
precariously on a brief precipice to the
broad and muscular Ganga,
which even in the dry season
powers its way imperially towards the sea.

The house glimmers white in the sun
as you cross the river in a ferry,
seen from all quarters like a lighthouse,
but it is built on sand
and stands there awaiting the next
inevitable flood.

And here in Vrindavan, doom takes another form.
The new teachers of the Gita, teaching Karma-yoga and rajo-guna,
who wanted to turn the teeming, underachieving masses
into a billion worker bees, can now look down from their heavens
and marvel at how their experiment has worked.

And what has been lost as this Kali bursts in
and floods the town with honking horns and herculean hoardings;
another flood to wash away silence
the contemplation is to be erased
from the karma yoga paradise
of the interchangeable
"progress" party.

The fantasy castles are being washed away
the fantasies we cherish here today
are gone tomorrow, with no one to read the eulogy.

Black and white

It is said that prem is so pure a thing
that it can stand no blemish.
Like the whitest of white cloth
is sullied by even the smallest spot of ink.

As one whose white clothes
are always speckled with
spots of turmeric soggy dahl
and grease from bicycle chains,
and splashed mud from India's open drains,

I think I should have been a Tantrik
dressed in black.

Spinning out of control

Spinning out of control again.
You should know by now how not to let it happen,
but you don't want me to depend on you,
you want me to be the man
and live without needing you. Or you me.
It is too much tough love for me.
All I can do is give you what you want
and leave.

===

"What?" He said. "You can't see that it is over
and that you should forgive me,
because that is the Vaishnava thing to do?"

A real karma-yoga attitude --
pick yourself up and get on with it.
This is the show and it must go on.
No time for confessions
or fretting about inborn tendencies
or whether there was something to be learned
from the damned incident.

No, we just pick ourselves up and go on,
hell be it where we are going,
mindlessly stuffing our fantasies
like a football into our chests
and running hell bent to the goalpost
trampling the antiparty as we go.

Ah but we are going to Radha and Krishna, we think,
we are going towards prema we think,
and if we run, eyes closed, it is still better
than spinning out of control.

===

Truly I exceeded the bounds of good taste in love.
I whimpered. I cried.
I cried loud tears.
I shouted and screamed in angry frustration.
I banged the door with my bags packed.
I threw myself down in silent samadhi sashtanga pranams
and each time I looked up
I saw my seemingly emotionless ice queen
unmoved and talking of something else,
la belle dame sans merci.
To what masochistic fervor did I give myself?

And all to be told the truth
that for all the emotion
I was missing the point --
the point being you need to do something
Emotion on its own
cannot stand.

And I admire all of you
who in good, Anglo-Saxon stoicism
can stiff your upper lip
and go forth for God and England
taking up the White Man's burden
even while your insides fester
and your eyelids twitch.

Oh yes, you stoics are way ahead of me in this game.
I could not pass the test, the true test of love,
the prove-it, show-me part.
When the going got tough, I gave up.

The Dual

The inner path is the way of the singular.
The external is that of the plural.
Their meeting place is in the dual.

Like the lamp on the doorstep,
that sheds light both inside and out,
it reveals both the one and the many.

Know this and you know the path of Sahaja.

Work ethic

I am still living in the hope I can maybe get a work ethic,
as though working was everything.

Diving so deep
into some realm of human experience
that samadhi ensues.
The one and same pull as the pull of vairagya
and indifference to all
but the One Truth,
wherever It may pull us at the time.

And so, I chop my day like wood
and designate each moment:
here is this and here is that, and there is work --
but the ends, the ends are still so far away,
not even always clear.

So when I work I often just sit there in my work space,
If I sleep I sleep, if I feel the need to read something unrelated, I do.
Whatever else, just stay in the work space.

That's my theory and my practice -- ain't worked so far.

But keep banging your head and eventually something will crack.
Pray for inspiration when it is creative,
for patience when it is boring,
and for faith in the ends that God has put before you.

And do bhajan in your sacred bhajan place.
And do your bhajan at your sacred bhajan time.
And say to hell with the world,
we are going to this
one transcendental destination.

If we cannot have the fantasy within the world of reality,
then let us find Reality in the world of fantasy.
Perhaps in some different universe, a future life,
these worlds will collide, and like atom bombs
illumination will ensue.

The Lessons of Ananga Sukhada Kunj

The Vraja dust is not so dramatic,
just a thin film that covers everything.

I cleaned the house today.
It looks like a bachelor pad again.
The house is empty.
Not just of you, but of me also.
Any vestiges of me, other than Giridhari, gone.

We sat here, arguing, for five months,
each refusing to make this a home,
locked in a daredevil game of chicken,
negotiations never going anywhere.

This house, Ananga Sukhada Kunj,
on the auction block, the joy that was its name
fleeting, a shadow, a chimera, a dream
that no one had the energy to fulfill.

Ananga Sukhada Kunj, my guru sakhi's home
where she has told me how I cannot live in
the bower of the Bodiless's One's joy.

Times have changed, I have fallen behind;
no one listens to me any more. No one cares.
We can't be householders, we can't be vairagis,
We can't be lovers, we can't be free.
We can't be free of each other.

I crossed a law of nature as fatal as falling from a cliff.
A womanizer, who needs the energy that comes from
the admiration of the opposite sex.
Who finds fulfillment in the successful seduction of the spirit.

A gigolo. A man who looks to women as his meal ticket.
A child. Immature, with unresolved mother issues.
Must be that my mother ignored me as a child
for me to be so needy now. So needy.

And all I think about is sex.
I am under the illusion that sex is the source of love.
Long ago, I was fooled into thinking celibacy is a solution;
I repressed it for years, and now
I have bounced in the opposite direction,
as if making up for lost time,
in even more illusion than before.

The Kumaras wisely opted out of adolescence,
I chose adolescence as a way of being!
Lazy! I could have finished all my projects by now,
I could have written a book, ten books.
Ten years... ten years all for nought.

And do I think myself an expert in Rupa Goswami?
What do I know of Rupa Goswami,
or anything to do with the spiritual path,
just more and more smoke to put in people's eyes
as I grub for puja and pratishtha.

And moreover, a patriarch, a macho,
who thinks that his word is the law
and that a woman should follow it.
And who becomes abusive when she doesn't.

Vrindavan, how can anyone live here?
It is turning into just another crappy Indian city,
filled with crappy, grubby, sleazy Indians
pawing white women in the buses and trains.

Radha and Krishna, who believes any more?
Who believes in love any more?
You no longer believe in mine, nor I in yours.
So much for my Sahajiya nonsense.

For days, I sat like Winston Smith,
sipping gin and tonic in a café
that all good citizens studiously avoid,
staring into space, my shocked mind a vacuum,
slowly disintegrating into the dust,
all ambition crushed.

But today,
Ah, Vrindavan is so empty today,
the heat is oppressive,
why do I feel so free?

Cupid, New or Old?

Like a wil-o'-the-wisp, love came to me
and I tried to hold it. But it turned to mist;
the sylph turned into uncertainty,
like any creature of the mind, a myst.

But such it was that a shadow
hidden somewhere behind my mind,
took on form within the lingering
swirl of fragrant grayness:

It was the God called Love, the mystical Cupid,
who mocks his infinite mirror images
each reflecting but fragments of his splendor,
yet dazzling and dazing the wisest sages.

Now my mind has become an ascetic,
he has turned around to look behind him.
He has given up religion and irreligion.
He has taken the senses with him, his disciples.
He has pierced his ear and placed there a wooden peg,
and now, in selfish and forlorn neglect of the world
he wanders, lost in the desert of separation,
looking for that mirage, his grail, the Divine Cupid,

He has forgotten
the paltry suffering of the Kali Yuga,
for no one suffers like he does now.
How can he give succor?


He cannot hear the cries of communities,
of women and children calling for constancy and continuity?
What howling disorder has he left behind?
Is that what his renunciation does? Is that what love has done?
Is there no compassion for those whose futile search
for love in this world is the source of all misery?

This cannot be! Don't call this Cupid God!
It is against the law of God
to shake the foundations of the world,
to shatter man's dedication to duty,
so he forgets the world and its suffering creatures
so in need of stable steady loving guides!

Was Majnun not fair warning to us all?
What suffering jivas could he save, that madman?
If one love makes us mad,
what will the Whole of Love do?

Is the metaphor of wine not a warning to us fools,
to anticipate the inevitable
delirium tremens to come?

Did you really think that the gopis' suffering
was something other than real suffering,
and their story just a fairy tale?

It is normal

Women just use sex to get what they want from men, he said.

If it were not the truth, I would not know what to say.

But I say that no woman in whom faith in Radha lives

could ever give in to sex without love,

without herself having knowledge of love,

without the empowerment of self-knowledge,

and only when Love herself is the leader of the dance,

and where all that is wanted is love, Pure Love.

What is prema?

Someone asked, What is prema?

Big expert, I thought, what the hell do I know?

What is prema? I once thought I knew,

or at least thought I knew the general direction I was headed

some silicon love story, decorated with spiritual decorations,

a Brahman realization with sexual overtones,

the best of both worlds. It seemed like a slam dunk.

I am the big expert, I have been going from the trite to the triter.

All you need is love. It seems so easy, just love for God's sake.

But we hold a secret, some of us, me the most,

that we really think "love" means "being loved."

It gets lost in the translation. And once lost,

trapped in the forest of male ego,

it searches behind the ever burgeoning weeds of rationality,

and prepares for an epiphany of some sort

to come whirling down from the creepers

like flowers. And the answer to "what is love?"

will be found written in one, like a fortune cookie.

And the answer will be as trite as the answer in a fortune cookie,

"Love and you will be loved."

What is love?

Can I cry my answer in wordless tears?

Can I silently awaken you to the pain in my heart

that cries with unfulfilled fulfillment?

What is love? I seek in the kama bija,

searching in the svadhishthana

I draw the essence of my desire and draw it upward

with my breath and try to pierce the skull

and in my one-pointed mind behold the object

of my worship, sitting on a lotus

sharing sidelong glances and glowing like

ten million suns their love cascading through the universe

touching every atom, every molecule, every creature

in greater or lesser manifestations

and taking this form, for me, for me alone,

and for me to share with someone, with someone

to love by giving this vision, to share this vision

to melt into this vision with the tears of surrender.

And I will cry out in a pure heart

calling out calling out their names

and dancing like a fool as sometimes I laugh--

hahahahahaaaa hahahahahaaaaaaa!

What is love? I will not dance alone!!!

Let me hold this vision before you 

and sing sweetly the holy names.

What is love?

Love cannot live alone.

If love comes to you in your loneliness, you must take it.

You must. Otherwise you are an offender to Love.

No other way to say it. But once Love strikes a man

it seems that her business is to run the damn'd male ego

like a piece of sugar cane through the press

until it runs torrents of juice,

which is really the blood of your false sense of self,

turned sweet through the crushing,

and conjures up the true best of yourself

and will not rest until, through love alone,

she has accomplished her task.

And the gratitude for that love is the impetus to love,

to become a lover, a true lover,

and not one who, bee-like, flits from one flower to another,

but saint-like, plunges into the depths of the Other

with total abandon, doing whatever is necessary,

whatever apparent abasement She demands

to be granted the grace of Her favors

the grace of being One with Her

while being fully one's Self.