Ashok Niyogi

Progress Report on My Meditation

Every time I twist and prod and churn
it is not ocean that I find,
but your hazel eyes,
as alive as they were in the Moscow snow,
a decade ago.

You had told me that ocean beds are ashes
which rise when disturbed
by the fury of a new found wind,
you had promised to empty me,
but there is so much you yet
moving back and forth between mid morning sleep
and afternoon sweat, there is much gasping
much wanting, much wandering unknown roads,
much passing by your apartment door
with unstamped travel document
and the green churning rod
of a new born mendicant.

What alms will I get, when I am still
frothing venom into my extinct cellular phone
and you back at your ‘Russian-English’,
your vanity mirror gifted by me, your outdated jewelry,
stale flowers advancing into middle years,
your holidays in Sochi with impoverished travel groups,
indefinite Armenian brandy and water melon from Azerbaijan,
and nothing that will ever go according to plan.

With my newfound friends, I sit and meditate,
constant prayer cocooned in incense,
reflection on after effects of lingering death
and being caged in catheters,
refusing, at last, to take in anymore,
of someone else’s blood;
I will not be sedated, but there is yet the
mid-morning vision
of my confusion with names of Russian streets
that I have left far behind
with the lurching Myitnaya auto-bus.

The time piece on your TV set ticks away another day,
I get well away from this obscenely throbbing, soggy mess,
sit down at my sterile corner with prayer beads, < br>knock my knees and fuss.