Pilgrim

This grief is smudged on like a tilak
It rolls in my hands like japa beads
This grief makes my skin raw and fragile
Like a saint with a saint’s bleeding feet

This grief on my lips I am chanting
Hare krsna hare krsna all for him
Treading on stones that are glowing
I am hungry I am weak I am thin

On bruised knees for days and days
Relentlessly inch after inch
Away from the devil behind me
Away from his grasp on my wrists

Away from his cheek on my cheek
Breathing in where he’s still on my hands
With every part of me aching
I am a stranger walking in strange lands

Hare krsna hare krsna I love him I love him Hare
krsna hare krsna I am weak at my knees Hare
krsna hare krsna I’m a sorry situation Hare
krsna hare krsna krsna krsna hare hare

This grief is a deity that I pray to
I bathe it with honey and palms
Towards hope I am walking with strangers
I am door to door begging for alms

This grief is my own little Vrindavan
I offer it milk sweets and almond cakes
I am a stranger walking in strange lands
And every part of me aches

Every single part of me aches.

The affair with the tortured author

Like a drunkard
she spends hours in the hall
recalling his awful little stories, his gestures, his carelessness with language. Like a drunkard she stumbles and remembers things in her own way.

Their time had not been altogether a waste
but the point came where it was obvious
so in March she suggested he go already, back to her or wherever, just go.

(This was after months of him complaining about prefixes and suffixes and words he couldn't find and marks he couldn't erase. And he was trying, he said, so please don't be mad. I just need some more time. And it was just sex with her, not love. Just abstract prose.)

And when he said he needed more time she helped him by packing the car with his things, filling it with gas and saying ok, have a good trip, don't call me when you get there. She called him a sorry bastard and a bad writer for good measure.

Since then her own guilt and short stories
would not rule out the possibility that she may have been a bit harsh.

Right as she may have been,
like a drunkard she remembers things in her own way.
In the hall she wonders
about what could have been

had he not been brooding on his inabilities
had she been given to lower hopes
had he not been such a bastard
or at least a halfway decent writer