Hidden in the Dharma

A bus ride with an annotated copy of the Bhagavad Gita,

sunny window seat, I continue my tidy

journey to enlightenment…

I am a student of Myth, the disciple of Books,

the Vicar of Psyche,

greedy for education, for you see

my Dharma is squeezed from cold ink.

But today Krishna met me on the icy field of Kurukseattle,

stranding me between duplicity and truth.

Today I was caught in the tug of ambivalence,

as a woman wandered onto the bus.

Some invisible thread needled us together

as she nodded under a newly inhaled spell,

reeking of an unwashed and over-lived life.

She had mastered the art of sleep-sitting in Metroblivion,

freed from the cold slap of perception.

Some part of me wept for her vacancy,

yet I also envied her successful postponement of consciousness

                         for one more day –

She lifted her slow-motion gaze in my direction,

unblinking, looking beyond my transient mental meditation,

cupped her dirty palm and caught a tender cough,

then rose like a crashing Phoenix,

unfurled her stench and stumbled off the bus.

I watched her drag aimless boots across some train tracks,

her filthy fingers plucked a needle from a sack.

Krishna whispered, "Pay attention, consciousness

always slips up on one like uninvited love."

As the growling bus lurched from the curb

I watched her thread the needle with a slender vein,

together we straddled the seat of time

and pedaled in reverse. I saw her story:

A little baby shed her mother's womb,

slipped unseen into a filthy bed,

stripped of possibility -

the  placenta was insignificant,

she was the afterbirth...

aborted before she took her first breath.

Sad to watch a womb become the grave

before she even had a name.

I reached into my bag for another book

to ice my concern in flakes of inky snow,

oh these words,

so much cleaner than living.

end/michael bogar