Bihar Gaya

 My name is Gopal.
I was born in a shanty town.
Some kilometers from the Gaya junction station. Raised on cheap cuts of meat and root vegetables in soups. I may describe my life as hard. It was, but it was also sometimes joyous.
I used to tip toe near my mother's bed at night, just to hear her quiet snore.
Sitting down on her bedside mat. Thinking about what I might have to trade tomorrow.
How I might have to hussle between the train station stalls.
I'd nod off there on that mat, wake shortly before she did. Then go back to my rustic hay mattress bed.
During most days of the year the sun was aggressive. Rain came for weeks during equinoxes. We were forced to collect that rain water in buckets. We would cover the buckets and rationt he water.
In the shanty town we were known a Yadav family, originally cow herders. Of course now merchants. Cow herders hardly existed anymore. However the clothes shop that my mother ran gave us scarcely what we needed.  
I walked through the stalls in the lat monday morning bustle. The sun tyrranical. The blue sky slightly gray with the tinge of pollution. I noticed the tiny holes that had appeared in my shoes this month, a centimeter or so of fat no longer around the bottom of my abdomen.
I looked at the jewelry people were selling on the street.
Candy and gadgets but nothing I could afford. So I picked up the two essential ingredients wheat and sweet potato.

Everyday I made my way through the streets and sea of tarpoulin stalls. Motivated by the thought of my mother selling her clothes, and being able to sleep next to her bed on those lonely nights just to listen to her subtle snore. Whatever came to me beyond that, and many things did

A recorder, a hose and a train station.

 I reached the station after midday
My clothes shredded from navigating brambles
I had the homeless body odor
Though I walked across the pavement shameless

Into the station's paved open market
With mostly closed stalls
The elderly sat waiting for friends
Waiting for dusk

I was listening to my recorder
It told me where to go and what train to wait for
I put it up on the ledge of a closed store
Walking around and listening to its echo

The station suddenly filled up with families
I suddenly felt the need to get back to my recorder
I could feel it coming to its end
I approached the ledge where I had left it

It wasn't there anymore
A mother and her son were standing where it was
I asked them if they would hand it over
The mother feigned offence

Her son who was playing with a water hose, aimed it at me.
I ran and avoided the airborn flow of water
The mother didn't dissuade her son just followed
I couldn't look back to see if she was wearing a grin
 

Swimming inside this mind

 It's bubbling away today
I can't reduce its boiling
Yes my brain alive with molten rocks
The ones that after cooling have myths notched into them

The myths breathe whispers
Which in turn scream truths
someone knocks on the door
Someone with thick skin

Who can swim in the boiling waters
Survive in the heat of my mind
Not be run through by the blades of my perception
But be sculpted by them

To be taken into the undertow
Deeper and deeper
Where unknown things navigate
There do not drown

let the chaos drag you to peace
Like raging questions
That find calm shores of reason
Will you swim inside this mind

Confidence and delusion

 Confidence
I'll put up a wall
Spray paint my every strength
My every quality

I'll never let you see the other side
And you'll accept me
Love me and need me
Deluded

Confidence
I'll exaggerate every achievement
Show you me at my best
Then hide my real self

I'll never let you see me sick or weak
In panic or in pain
I'd hate to interrupt
your delusion

Confidence
I walk with my head up and back straight
I ignore the fear that crawls like a tarantula
Up my spine toward the soft part of my neck

I'll never let you know just how afraid I am
I just show the world how strong I could be
Cloaking so many strange defects to keep you
deluded

Into each other's world

 Looking at the world
Our special preferences
our lacks
Our excesses
The things we think bragworthy

When you hear me speak
When i hear myself
When I feel the urge to convince
Yet I don't buy the argument I'm pushing
So the gas dies down the fire goes out

we agree to disagree
I cannot convert you
looking into your world
Your special preferences
Abundance
Drought

When I hear you speak to me
When I can hear you
I feel the urge to believe you
Yet I don't have any reason to
Besides your dying smile

Imposing desires

 I focus 
Just on my desires
Stung and weighted by ambition
Aloneness manifests like a large shape

I create my doctrine
Strip the world of all irrelevant
And build my reality with the piece I find worthy
Wealth and love flow this way

What is all this effort
Just leave space in my heart
Patience in my mind
Needing growth

Desires overwhelm
ambition drives me past my limit
leaves it's marks on me
it brands the bricks of my construction

Lemes e Lona

 He painted on truck canvas
The soot and wear and tear evident
He dreamed colors onto it

The dust and oil stains embedded
Like life and its traumas
reoccuring nightmares

Desires in a glass bowls
Wild oversweet fruit
euphoric visions

Imagine how far they'd gone
the distances they were carried
Married to the frame

flapping in the wind
between cities
absorbing the rains and sun

Then absorbing all of the keen craftings of art

 from one man's mind and heart