©
All poems
and stories
© 1988,
1989, 1990,
1998, 2000,
2001, 2003, 2006
by Advaeta.
All rights
reserved.

I offer You my foolishness,
That just about sums it up.
I'd give You more if I had it,
But I've emptied my cup.

I offer my achievements,
But I think that they are great.
So this is also foolishness,
Too little and too late.

I offer You my courage,
But You laugh behind Your sleeve;
I'm courageous when You're with me,
But chicken once You leave.

So I offer You my foolishness.
That pretty well sums it up.
I'd give You more if I had it,
But I've emptied my cup.

16 May 99

In the peace of the hospital,
When sleep bursts,
We awake to daily terror
Only at our own glands and tissues, face
Untelegenic atrocities by microscopic cells,
Invisible infractions of our human rights.
Even Amnesty International says nothing.

"The bombing has started," a new arrival told me,
"In Afghanistan."
They wheeled him out of my room an hour later –
Even I will never know his fate
In the peace of the hospital.

8 October 2001

Just off Little Russell on Ho Chi Minh
(If group4’s finest will allow you in)
This Little America and Uncle Ho
Buried the past many years ago.

“Let’s have some fun,” is their motto today,
“We love everyone (if they don’t overstay) –
Let’s invite the whole world and raise a toast,
And party it up from coast to coast.”

I have my disputes with our president –
You might even call me a dissident –
But that Ho Chi Indo-American crew
Are warm and kind and patient too.

They close for Durga and the Fourth of July,
And every other holiday under the sky,
But other than that they’re always in place,
In a dangerous job with a smiling face.

“Ho Chi Minh!” I used to scream
In my days on the campus protest team,
Now I still yell it to the taxi man –
“Please get there, bhai, as fast as you can!”

15 January 2003

“Let's have some fun,” is their motto today,
“We love everyone (if they don't overstay) –
Let's invite the whole world, even the ‘axis,’
And party it up in Houston, Texas.”



He would never make a mistake,
A reply should be qualified.
There are many paths to take –
Truth is on neither side.

One of nature's gentlemen,
He might press, but never shoved.
He loved excellence, but then
Later on he simply loved.

5 February 2003

The first seeker said to the second one day,
"If our lives have any worth,
Before our kids are five years old
We've got to clean up this earth.

"Before our son surfs the internet
Or switches on the telly,
And soaks up sins and treachery
Straight out of Machiavelli,

"And before our daughter starts to read
And thinks that day is night,
We've got to finish this sordid story
And set this planet right.

"This world holds a cunning few
Who pass their days in sport,
The rest should lead lives of despair,
Nasty, brutish and short."

So the two young Tantrics made a pact,
"Before our kids are grown,
If no one else will do this work
We'll do it all alone."

They thought of the light within themselves
As they took this solemn vow,
"We only know that we have to do it,
The Lord will teach us how."

They turned and looked where their children played,
Tumbling across the floor;
They looked at the children they used to know
And then they looked some more:

Their little boy's face was as powerful
As a freight train on a track;
They gazed into their daughter's eyes
And all future time gazed back.

17 February 2003

At junctures fraught and perilous,
When developed minds go manasphot',*
I pray for a smaller cranium,
I wish that I could be a goat –

The kind of goat that does God's work,
The kind of goat for whom God cares,
When humans do their mental meltdown
And lose whatever they had upstairs.

Some goats are white, some goats are black,
They talk in different "mother bleats";
In Goatville, though, you won't observe
Goat blood spilling on the streets.

Socio-sentimental** hate
(Or fear) exists, it's very true;
But it spirals through manipulation,
Dies down when the same folks want it to.

Revenge is a well-known indoor sport
Amongst the most evolved of creatures –
"But better yet a sound night's sleep,"
Goats learn from their respected teachers.

Another thing that puzzles goats
Is why a man wants admiration –
It doesn't taste as nice as grass,
Is treacherous even as decoration.

Schumacher said that complex systems
Are prone to fail when you need them most;
So the complicated minds of humans
Are nothing of which a goat would boast.

So I wish that I could be a goat,
Controlled direct by the Cosmic Mind;
Let's bound in joy at pleasing Him,
And leave the other stuff behind.

* Manasphot'a: explosion of the mind.
** Socio-sentiment: national, racial or religious chauvinism.

9 March 2003

Watching the sun set over the ocean
On a day that never really had a chance,
There’s no way to stop this perpetual motion,
Nowhere to slink if you’d rahther not dance.

Even those void of any hint of devotion
Find it hard to resist long that Cosmic Recruiter;
The sun blinks dark at the back of the ocean,
It’s now safe to turn off your computer.

The sun goeth down and the sun also rises,
It’s another day when you open the box;
On your plate is rice pudding and rude surprises,
A time for peace and a time for shocks.

And if you’d prefer a new dispensation,
With more of the soft side and less of the other,
That's not on the agenda of this Administration,
God is your sergeant as well as your mother.

And even on the weekends of your wildest dreams
Nothing is programmed to come to a stop;
The permanest of permanence is not what it seems,
And the bottom will sink again down from the top.

And why would we want things to all run amok
And shower us with blessings like a meth-intoxed Santa Claus?
The universe is ticking like the costliest clock,
With professional precision behind each of its laws.

So better go within the ups and the downs
And swim with the current that drives the machine;
This world is a circus and we are the clowns
If we fail to focus on what it doth mean.

6 November 2003

At a quarter to five
I woke and sighed . . .
Did some meditation,
Felt beatified.

Should I fast today?
I couldn’t decide.
I found some courage,
Felt beatified.

Out on the street,
Full of pride,
I thought today
I’ll get beatified.

Caught the bus
And went for a ride,
All the people I met
Looked beatified.

[preferably a bridge (change tune)]

But I reached my office,
Things started to slide.
None of my needs
Were gratified.

The boss is a man
With whom I collide,
Sometimes I feel
Stultified.

And my colleagues there,
It can’t be denied,
Would love to see me
Crucified.

Yet everyone wants you
On their side,
Saying this is the way
To feel satisfied.

From the fortieth floor
I looked far and wide,
Couldn’t see anywhere
To be dignified.

And I made a mistake,
I sort of lied,
It was hard to feel
Bonafide.

So all my hopes,
Whatever I tried,
Just drifted out
With that remorseless tide.

Yes, the day was tough,
I nearly died,
Felt I was ready
To be mummified.

Then quitting time,
Crossed the great divide,
But the roads were jammed,
Packed with homicide.

Finally made it home,
I cried and cried,
It was half past seven,
My mind was fried.

I said, Now it’s time
To reach the other side.
I sat in lotus,
Felt pacified.

[end of bridge]

Then I floated in space,
I hit my stride,
I thought of God,
Felt unified.

I followed my mantra
Deep inside,
Getting closer and closer,
Feeling sanctified.

And with a longing urge
To coincide,
I finally reached His lap –
Beatified.

Finally reached His lap,
Felt glorified.

Finally reached His lap,
Got beatified.

9 December 2003

Putting prisoners in a pile,
And posing with a smile?
The times are out of joint,
Or I don’t quite get the point.

Our leaders wash their hands
As we cheer them from the stands.
They talk about new rules,
And we lap it up like fools.

It’s about a selfish nation-
’s quest for every gratification.
It won’t pan out to much.
Or I’m really out of touch.

15 May 2004

One poet said that this earthly sphere
Is a hospital founded in a far-off year
Endowed by a ruined millionaire,
And now I'm feeling that intensive care.

People lying all around like Judgment Day,
Their relatives come and they weep and pray,
But with insurance coverage beyond compare,
Now I'm feeling that intensive care.

I can talk to anyone and look in their eyes,
The wonder that I feel is no surprise,
We drink the water and breathe the air,
Seeking the path of intensive care.

All the moving targets fill every street
As they flow to the ocean to beat the heat
And they read the wine list and bill of fare,
While inwardly yearning for intensive care.

I need something more than another transfusion,
I need to journey beyond illusion
And go deep in my heart and find You there,
And now I'm feeling Your intensive care.

12 July 2004

I wish that your eyes were as clear as glass,
And through that crystal pane
Your mind laid out like an A4 sheet
In Arial characters sharp and neat,
Your agenda spelt in black and white,
The sentences short, and sweet.

I wish that your mind were as plain
As my hand in front of my face,
No need to excuse or explain,
Doubt or disguise or erase;

As plain as plain could be
The link between you and me,
Speaking brain to brain,
To him who hath eyes to see.

A sort of Unicode.
No killers on the road.
No devices to explode.


I wish that God's eyes were as clear as glass,
And through that crystal pane
The answers writ in black and white,
His mercy like gentle rain.

All the past at a glance,
Nothing obscure or arcane,
Arranged on open pages,
The account book of the ages.
A form of total recall.
And the fate of high and low,
The future of one and all,
A writing on the wall.

Yes, I wish God would show me the way,
In this world as mad as a hatter,
Straight to the heart of the matter –
The truth on a silver platter.

10 October 2006

In every human heart that beats
There lies an aching void,
Which in some is filled by Param Purus',*
In others by Sigmund Freud;

In some by pleasures of the sense
And in some by recognition
Achieved through writing ponderous tomes
About some obsolete tradition.

In each of us some vague idea
Of right and wrong has surfaced,
But to practice one and shun the other
Is not our major purpose.

The human mind seeks happiness,
It strives by hook or crook,
Restlessly turning every stone
And reading each best-selling book.

Tantalus said he was not so sad
That pleasures seemed so elusive,
Because in the twenty-first century
The case would become conclusive.

Param Purus'a is one tough nut
And dances to nobody's tune,
You can try all the quick and easy techniques,
But they'll work like a lead balloon.

He has hooded our eyes and taped our hands
And dumped us out in the woods,
But for those who can find the way back to Him,
He really delivers the goods;

For every atom of the bleakest existence
Throbs with a life-giving mission,
And the peace which passeth all understanding
Seeps through the human condition.

* Sanskrit for "Supreme Consciousness."

25 December 2006

It’s not the first time nor the last
A man will write of love –
An abstract noun, not well-defined,
But highly spoken of,

Occurring in hieroglyphic texts,
In palm-leaf manuscripts,
In blinking letters in cyber-space
And in bottles on sunken ships.

This term occurs so frequently,
It should be clear enough.
But I ask (with all due poignancy)
Did they really know their stuff?

Some understood that things we love
Are like a wisp of smoke,
But nonetheless pursued their dreams
And never quite awoke.

Doctor Zhivago till the end
Pined for a certain face,
As though his quest were the only hope
Of the tortured human race.

Othello loved his wife not wisely,
But too well, it seems;
When he thought she might not love him back,
He put a pillow on her screams.

Then some love to drink, and the good things in life,
And don’t like to be denied,
They may get tired of the roller coaster,
But line up for another ride.

And some hit the courts for a hard set of tennis,
To glow and to breathe and perspire,
They tingle to their toes and could leap like a tiger,
But as humans there is more to aspire.

And then there are those who much loved Bob Dylan
And go searching for that old thrill
Through every album in their collection,
But can’t find the perfect pill.

And for some there’s the crossword-puzzle model:
A life lived for information.
But filling in thousands and millions of blanks
Never adds up to salvation.

Yet at the end after loving such things
There’s a love which will set us free –
Love for the nucleus of our existence,
That which will always be.

18 January 2007

I tried to tell my story,
I tried for eighty years,
I started with my pink arms flailing,
Now I cough, my voice failing,
At my terminal ward peers.

I tried to sell my story,
One has to make a buck,
If you could listen just a minute,
In fact I’d like to put you in it,
Faithful and wonderstruck.

“Sin spoke in soothing whispers,
Fat traffic flowed by fast.”
Every man’s got one good novel,
Some fertile ground where he can shovel
The pieces of his past.

It seems I’m all alone here,
Light years before my time,
Stranger on a stupid planet,
I won’t try to understand it
Nor repent of any crime.

And what I’m trying to tell them
They never want to hear,
I came with a cascade of fire
To a place that values nothing higher
Than basketball and beer.

Now if you would only listen,
I’d make it very plain.
The benefits are automatic,
Don’t make your life more problematic,
There’s much that you could gain.

To this haunted hopeless city
I came to wander free.
The frozen fissured sidewalks glisten,
And if you would only listen,
It’d mean a lot to me.

I stare out from the window
At the vacuum of the night,
Where a moment through the cloudy seas
The ever-certain Pleiades
Twinkle on my plight.

And then a heavy burden
Seems to slide down off my back,
And a voice from another shore
Never noticed heretofore
Comes softly through the black –

And says, “I know your story,
It’s not completely new.
I dreamt it in a far-off age,
Then watched the while you turned each page.
And I’ve been waiting here for you.

“I wrote each tragic chapter
With the greater good in view,
Then threw this twist in at the end,
That I would be your only friend
And I’d be waiting here for you.”

29 January 2007

I have reason to rejoice today.
Today was the day I didn’t think about germs.
Not those hairy pink ones nor the slimy white ones,
Gorging through my soft tissue like army ants.
Their razor teeth didn’t lacerate my guts,
Their sneering faces didn’t haunt my dreams.
They didn’t swarm and multiply like maggots,