Mixing up bodies and exchanging souls among them
At daytime playing death with ironical patience
At sunset to only start all over again



The End in Varanasi

*
There are neither disappearances nor separations,
Only meanderings of the mind.
What remains after nothing remains
Is the soul pulverized into air and walls,
The unbeing just as illusory as the flesh.

*

Over there where the ones started will never be ended
Where the sun rises from Ganges on a shield
Where Earth rotates with nowhere to go
Under the dried-up hump of the fiery cow
Over there the idols rest serene on the sun
They share eternity in small cups of saffron
Mixing up bodies and exchanging souls among them
At daytime playing death with ironical patience
At sunset to only start all over again

*

The promise of death delayed
Agonizing wrecks
On the stairs to Heaven
With its face of a famished saint

The fire is smoldering on the pyre
Lit up by ageless men
The Destroyer blows the ashes of a girl
On a bee wing

From above only the smirk of ravens  
The illusion of the ultimate death

*

Fleshless bodies coming in and out of mother Ganges,
The heaven and cleansing for the chosen,
Laundry is beaten against rocks and laid in the sun
On the oldest piece of earth
Longed for and loathsome
Leprous beggars good luck vendors,recluses (ascetics) with painted faces
Cow manure dusty illusions abandoned sand castles       
Wrinkled monkeys hanging on ruins jump from nothing into nothing
Bicycles rickshaws cloths shrouds mimicking already-cremated bodies
Passing through the rusted machinegun resting below the only guardian
At the door of the coveted city
Bells, horns, Shiva’s roar fed
From sunrise to sunset with oils and carnal petals
Shoe shiners of worn out soles, famished dogs
Men pissing for thousand of years on the side of the same road
Stuffed with countless lives reincarnated
Only the conquerors defeated
There is no bigger humiliation than the happiness of the condemned
Silently placing in line their suffering
Awaiting the fire to only start from the beginning

The putrefaction of purity and the purity of putrefaction
Over Himalaya snow is howling with hands put together
            
 *

How much of us is by mere chance
And how much by aimed errors
Which breath can choose its body
When all one can see through a hole in the sky
Are white and steady stairs
The ribs of god hauling its resignation through the desert
Pilgrims sipping from the sacred hoof
The water of a foreign empire

*

We will return over here unseen
On the wing of an insect
Or in the skin of a snake
We will quietly unfold our sheets
And lotus will spring from our joints
With delicate neck
Moving our world from above
So we can reach with our soles the sunset
Neither sky nor earth
Neither human nor bird
Only life chopped-up on a tray
From which cynical gods
Taste and spit in turn. 
    
*
I no longer know what shame is
Nor the humility of having not just thoughts
But this body too towards which God’s finger
Professionally points out my vulnerable spots

Who could tell that poems are written with the same hand
That rummages on the funeral sheet yellow flowers rice
Some pieces of words left unlived
The Destroyer is a riot of colours and dye
He sits his legs crossed and plays with a bone baton 
Over the bent heads
He captures the flying soul of the dead
Sucks out his molecules and blows them into our joints
Like spherical forms of fog in search of vehicles
To carry eternally their transparency.

 *       
        
Our passage through here
Is no more than a rehearsal
For that Great Journey
Where the two of us will fly on our backs
With eyes grown wider
By what we had to learn too late
And fingers locked together
As if we lived our lives
Elsewhere
And came here
Only to scatter the ashes.