There were times when some people thought
I was a pure specimen of life,
But such adulation was rare and far between,
Most of my life I was a mystery man.
They came to me as I was clean and harmless,
Curiosity was often rife
As how a strange person like me existed,
Or why he existed.
Love was given to me sporadically
As I could never surrender my aloofness,
I was a privileged specimen of some disorder,
A mystery shrouded in an enigma.
Ambition was my engine,
Achievement my goal,
But I did not want humans to judge it,
My ideal was the yardstick.
Heaven and hell were to me the same,
Twain they existed,
One was the prize,
Other its price.
The hardest thing was to live amidst materialists,
The day-to-day artists of existence,
The blind and the deaf,
The greedy and the selfish.
Life by itself does not give anything,
At best it can return you what you put in it,
It is your ideas of life that open the lockbox:
Your vision is everything.
What is love:
A relationship between the observer and the observed,
Held in reverence and grace,
Eternal compact without conditions.
Some of the journey of life is mindless:
Inanities thrown at us without reason,
Imaginations of the crass and benighted,
Dreams of the destitute and vulgar.
How to turn pain into elixir is the challenge of life,
There is no one we can complain to,
The almighty who designed human life,
Is soft on reason and long on imagination.
Stupid I have tolerated but insane I can’t stand,
Life is a long journey of ignoring and compromise,
But the true principle of life is life itself,
Rest is a convenience or mere convention.
I have been victimized by the cheap labeling of the world,
By its false innuendos and vulgar narcissism,
Un-eclectic choices and brutal selfishness,
By a visionless journey and blind faith.
I have seen good ideas mutilated by expediencies,
Imagination crushed by practical solutions,
Good of the community dwarfed by the ambition of one,
Infinity reduced to a momentary thrill.
I have been crushed and beaten by the majority,
Humiliated and tousled by the powerful,
Jeered and lectured by the popular,
Laughed and maligned by the special.
But now I have gained the rest of my freedom,
I have come to the end of my journey,
My sunset beckons me,
I can only look forward and not turn my head.
Why is life so difficult,
It is not so as it comes from nature,
But has been made difficult by the world:
Culture, religion, politics, economics.
Life is a fairy tale but we make it into a project,
We squeeze its music out,
And turn it into an achievement machine,
Results and not reverberations.
Suffern, New York, February 4,2022; Rev: January 14, 2023
maharaj.kaul@yahoo.com
