Comfort and Karma

Image courtesy Dina M. Ramadan. Used with permission.

I too will find my comfort somewhere

treading these virtual hamster wheels.
There are spokes enough for people in despair -
a moment’s fragile foothold made in steel -
that bring me around, endlessly spiralling stairs
and I climb forever, blindly follow the spiel
of a final happiness that’ll always be there
just because I’ve bought into this deal.

 

Outside in the world, minute by minute

the old lamps are switched off one by one
other brighter bulbs are tentatively lit
and already some splutter, and some are done.
And circling is easily bent into habit
wherever it is that I might choose to run
and despair equally impossible to quit
it has its own headiness of addiction.

 

Not every night explodes into a dawn,

the flare of dawns can likewise be a curse
the wheels might turn, the roads go on and on
with nothing worth tugging into a verse
and comfort itself so brief that it’s gone
before I’ve raised my head, or even worse
it’s just like despair, its face wan and withdrawn
and even as I look its outline blurs.

 

Each chipped beaker that I stop at and sip

whips past so fast, before I can make out
its contents or its level, just touch my lips
and swill and swallow the stuff in my mouth
and then again get back on that doped trip
the spokes and the bespoke roundabout,
the treadmill and the wheels of pain and hardship
the routine numbers of despair and doubt.

 

My small world within worlds within worlds

each nested into others and the infinite;
Tiny fists of events eternally unfurled
and analysed till they splay and fray to bits
despair seeded deep in them and pearled
and strung into the same lines and orbits
that grain of pain preserved and never dulled
though the nacre vainly tries to cover it.

 

But I will find my comfort, never fear,

in the vastness of the universe, its splendour;
in the microcosms that my life here
tries to replicate fitfully and so render
them meaningful, yet meaningless too; in spheres
of unreality, where I grasp the slender
rim of that wheel, though I can’t feel or steer
by it; though all I do is, in the end, surrender.



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