HOMELESS

Sometimes it rains ceaselessly
And droplets race down my body
Like some slippery moments
I spent with you on long wet nights.
Sometimes the sun scorches my body
And I miss the silhouette of your body
Against the warm rays of the sun
While I lay in bed feeling blissful
Screened from the rest of the world
Finding a sanctuary in the shadow of your eyelashes
The incandescence of your form
Mellowed the cruelty of the sun
And I’d come alive under the shade of your presence
Sometimes it gets really cold out here
I hold my body tight
And clasp my knees with my arms
And rub my forehead against the inner arc of my elbows
Yet I shiver and shake
And when I search for your reassuring eyes
I find myself squinting in the dark
I miss the blanket of your body
The fire of your touch
I miss burning in your caresses
I yearn for the fever of pleasure
My frozen body wants to melt into yours
Sometimes the streets get breathlessly crowded
And strangers brush past me like I don’t exist
They stare blankly as though I’m just another thing
Some stares longer than the other,
Suddenly becoming aware that there must have been beauty
Residing in me somewhere
I miss being held by your piercing gaze
I remember holding your hands
I remember walking with pride
Knowing in this over brimmed cup of life
You were mine
Secure that I belonged
I had a home.
And I had believed its walls won’t give away.

A home is all I had ever wanted
To be myself with you.
To let the masks slip
To be vulnerable
To give in
To let go
To merge
To disappear
To be free
To be found
To love
To be loved.
My home
Your body,
Your mind,
Your heart
Your soul
My only home.

Then came the tempests
Then shook the earth
The walls couldn’t contain you
Your illicit needs made cracks on the walls
Your indifference took up the entire place.
Yet I endured
My home
Was all I had?
Till it was no more

I’m homeless
A waif
Available now
Vacant
Should I advertise?
They touch me
They promise me shelter
They grope me
They say it’ll last
Just that I don’t live here anymore
Who is it inside me I wonder?
There isn’t me inside of me
Sometimes I miss my home.
Sometimes I really do.
BY
ZAID AL BASET

.......................................

Do not make promises that will disappoint,
Don’t make me search for eternity in your sparkling eyes

Just let this moment be
Let no past taint its sheen
Let no future mar its gleam,
Just take a snapshot of this moment in your mind
Cause sooner than you think ill be out of your sight
Cause sooner than you wish ill be out of your mind.

I have rummaged for love in this cluttered world,
I have gathered bits and morsels of love,
But let me not forget that love cannot hold me tight
For I’m not what, with which is love defined
No you can’t marry and take me home,
No you can’t hold my hand and feel bold

Don’t tell me you want this to last forever
Don’t be so sure that you will never go away.

I have heard these words so many times before.
I have seen such eyes admire me before
But trust me there a thin line between poetry and abuse
Please believe when I say you won’t stay forever seduced

I’m a magician and I can cast spells
But let me tell you a secret - these illusions will betray
And then you shall run, run for your precious life
And you shall make every moment a beautiful lie

Don’t insist you can love no one but me
Don’t say you are attracted to just me

Love, that fleeting, ephemeral high
Lust, that desperate unbearable sigh
So you felt both with me in your arms
Yet your eyes were closed,
Your senses were numbed with pleasure
You did not realize what I was, did you?
Not a man that in daylight you could abhor
Not a woman who you’d desire in some wet dream
I was just an essence
A promise of love
A soul searching for some permanence
In this temporary world
You neither lusted nor did you love

Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you the dream would break,
Don’t tell you didn’t know that you will wake up and leave.

For I was simply an essence
A promise of love
A soul searching for permanence
In this temporary world.

by ZAID AL BASET

Watch there, the day coming
Watch the shepherd leading
His brown hair in the wind
Watch there, opens the door
Of the house of love
He comes as gentle as the wind
That plucks the apples from their boughs


Scio amo

Watch there, the day coming
Watch the shepherd leading
His brown hair in the wind
Watch there, opens the door
Of the house of love
He comes as gentle as the wind
That plucks the apples from their boughs


Scio amo

The rose fades, only its memory remains
The friends have all gone, the Friend remains



~~Scio Amo

What if I offer you the blue sky?
Will you return then, I have nothing to offer you but my breath
And the blue sky
O friend, will you return?

O heart, what has happened to you?
Without a lover, you have fallen in love

Does the grape wait before fermenting?
You may ask the moth not to sink in fire

I have spent my life gazing at the road
One more day, my heart will not break

Was Ayaz the most beautiful of slaves?
Yet he was acceptable to you

I had a thousand wishes, none could I satisfy
Beauty teased Adam with the curse of mortality

A few sparks were enough to turn my nights to sleepless day
If creation was so beautiful, how beautiful must the creator be?

Four men take me to a bed of flame
An evening of regret for an eternity of ecstasy

The rose fades, only its memory remains
The friends have all gone, the Friend remains
Naked in Eden you saw me,
Now it is you who have removed the veil

Fading summer leaves a warmth on my cheek
When you shall draw away the night, what shall protect me
From your gaze, my friend?

I whirl, all is you, I whirl, I am you
The sun has sent out its light and veiled itself
But all is light, all is you

O gazelle, the perfume is in you, stop your mad longing
The fire you run from, Man, is in you

When the candle is extinguished can you see anymore the burnt moth?
Where I am, you are not, let me die, all will be you

If a beautiful face can leave behind such peace, my heart what will happen to you
When you see the beauty of souls?
Your beloved in flesh has veiled beauty, yet a bird sings of emptiness

I leave the tavern
True drunkards make their house in the street

I have spent my days in dreaming, and my nights in searching for you
Does the victor ever return to what he has won?

Heaven has given us wings, and a lifetime of sorrow
So what? Shall we blame God?

All cry for the martyr except he himself who in death has met God
Never does love find so beautiful a nest as in the executioner’s axe

When the Companion comes you will offer your neck and cease to exist
Why worry what will happen after? Will the pot complain if the potter breaks it?

Sing like the swan and cease to be
You have lived and loved, that is all you are,
Now be silent and let Him love


Scio Amo

who does Scio love? who does he desire?

A re-affirmation of the love of God

As we met this evening and Zaid made some rather revealing comments while reading tarot cards for me, a question that inevitably arose was on my rather elusive carnal life…it is a pity that Zaid, and less surely, Swastika raised some interesting questions but could not find the answers to. Neither did I have the time to answer them fully and clearly. Here then is a reply addressed to them.

Do I feel carnal attraction? Yes. To whom? To God, and in a particular way. Why?

We feel, I think, carnal attraction when someone sends us certain signals, and we are aroused by them, and respond to a certain way. The question next arises as to why, consciously or unconsciously, we get aroused.

One major unconscious reason is of course reproductive. Evolution dictates that such genes shall survive and be able to propagate themselves as ensure attraction to reproductively compatible beings, females for males, and males for females. The large majority of the gene-pool therefore dictates us to be attracted to human beings of the opposite sex. As women with a certain hourglass shaped waist hip ratio, and milk-giving large breasts, and tall and muscular men who could hunt the best would be most able to ensure the survival of their offspring, therefore evolution again dictated that those genes would survive which ensure our attraction to women or men of these body structures. Other evolution-dependent factors such as facial and bodily symmetry, estrogen or testosterone induced secondary sexual characteristics are also important factors in inducing carnal attraction.

Genes are obviously not the only determinants. Cultural factors (which are as socially produced as the biological ones) have produced their own influence. Fair skin is prized, for example, in both an Aryan-dominated and later colonial-dominated society. A liking for some talent like music or a social characteristic like wildness or rebelliousness or power might all be attractive, not necessarily for merely reproductive reasons, but for the other desires too that we feel.

What I mean to say by this is that carnal desire is nothing spontaneous or natural or some such thing but produced because we desire something and someone makes us feel that they have that something.

The question next arises as to what do I desire.

I desire love.

Perfect love.

I desire safety, security, comfort, redemption, climax, perpetual unending pleasure and everything else that love implies.

Who arouses me and sends me signals that I will get this from that person?

Not human beings. I love my parents, I love my grandparents, I love a very few friends, but not in the carnal way because when I love them I do not put my desire at the forefront of relationship with them. I can’t say I leave my ego completely behind when I deal with them, it would be too saintly, but the desires of the ego, its tensions, angsts, madnesses, passions, crazinesses, everything that one associates not with love, but with one specific form of love, carnal attraction.

With the rest of the world, there are (as for everyone else) fluid hierarchies of affection moving on from liking to dislike, and in a few cases of people who hurt me a lot, hatred.
But I do not feel attracted to them either because I do not think they can give me what I desire.

In short, what I desire is not satisfied by human beings I know. Therefore I do not desire human beings.

Perhaps there is also an element of semi-conscious power involved in this also. The body is very important to me. I like to maintain it as an inviolable sanctuary. All the people who have hurt me have, maximum, hurt me mentally through abusing, jealousy etc. my mind may have been bruised and hurt but never my body. I hate losing control of my body, so I don’t get alcoholic or drunk or engage in sex I don’t desire. My body is a room into which I can always retire into, withdraw into, safe from hurts, safe from the world, the one place where I am sovereign. Hence perhaps there is an element of semi-conscious policy in never being carnally infatuated with anyone because that would mean losing control of my senses, i.e., my flesh to someone else, of surrendering to someone, of becoming someone’s servant, if only from the point of view of the senses. It would mean defeat if that other person did not equally desire me.

Also, with respect to human beings, I am always a top or an equal. I hate to be a bottom, to be passive, to surrender, to lose control to the point that the other person willingly or unwillingly may hurt me. Maybe it is because of the hurt people have caused me, in school, college and university, maybe it has got to do with my ego, possibly with both. Zaid invokes society’s patriarchal power equation to suggest that masculinity lies in being top, active, penetrator. In society’s language then, I am a man with respect to human beings.

Why do I flirt?

With the people I love or care for a lot, and I am excepting my relatives eeeeeeeeeks, flirting is like poetry, a way of reveling in intimacy, of affirming non-physically the bonds we share, the places where our souls cares each other, linger …… you don’t do it in a utilitarian way to attract someone to you, that would be crass and materialistic…..its like how monkeys often scratch each other’s fur or women braid each other’s hair….

With the people I do not care for so much, I flirt to get attention, to make people desire me…..i hate to be ignored, I want to attract others not because I want to engage in any carnal relation with these people, but because I desire their friendship, decrease my loneliness, and because flirting is one way I feel will make them intimate enough to me to the extent that they will not hurt me as the people did to me earlier. It’s a mixture of friendship, of desperate solitude and the depression engendered by it and a natural defence-mechanism…….but it is not, it is never, carnal…

Who am I attracted to then? To the one who gives me what I desire. God. Or the idea of God, if God does not exist.

Why?

I imagine God to be a rock, a saviour, someone who has always been with me, protected me, shielded me, anointed me, and will finally come to me, fold me in the divine arms, and give me peace and rest. God is what I hope for, what I carnally love, the one I think of as the source of every pleasure, every meaning, the source of strength and the remover of loneliness, the meaning behind all metaphors, the beauty behind all beauty, the rewarder and the punisher, even whose punishments give pain only to chastise us and take us to good, to be one with the Good, which is ultimate pleasure. I imagine salvation to be an unending sexual act, an unending love, the way indeed in which our religions generally describe it, Hinduism and Buddhism directly, and Christianity more indirectly.

Adopting the language of a patriarchal society, my seeking for God is in some senses akin to a woman’s seeking a man. Is this abnormal? Yes, from the point of view of secular atheistic or agnostic modernity, no, from the point of view of eternity. Tagore, chaitanya and the vaishnava poets, tantra, the song of songs in the bible and the psalms, bhakti and sufi songs, the Upanishads, the Christian mystics, all speak often of the devotee as a female longing for God the male. Here man and woman are metaphors for the beloved and the lover, the strong and the weak. Chaitanya speaks of feeling Radha-bhav in him, the feeling of being Radha. But gender here is only a metaphor. And it is an unstable metaphor. In vajrayana Buddhism, God is imagined as at rest, as a woman, while the restless devotee is male and seeking union. in Hinduism, it is the female Shakti that is seen as active, and the male Shiva as passive. In medieval troubadour songs, the strong is the woman lady while the weak is the male knight lover. Therefore one cannot on the basis of a narrow 21st c. experience claim that to desire to be passive is to be feminine. In Bengali hindu poems, Shiva is the repeatedly seen as passive, while the active Kali is the one standing on top. It is a poor colonial hangover that makes us ignore these crucial issues.

I desire God. But do I love God? I do not know. My desire for God is in some ways egotistic, I desire God because god has and will save me, protect me etc. this obsession with God is narcissistic then. But that is not the only thing. When I love people or try to do good to them, it is only then that I truly love God for God’s only commandment to us is to love the Other as my Self. I love God when I help my fellow beings.

Why do I help and try in my own small ways to help my fellow beings? I love loving people and being loved in return. Also, I genuinely try to be good to others coz I feel that in those moments God is closest to me, I can feel God………. I feel alive when I am good….i feel rewarded too…..like that night when I was emotionally climaxing while the wind caressed my thighs and I felt one with the universe, alive, alive….

I don’t want to bring desire into the picture with people I love coz desire starts games of power, of seeking attention and so on that often ruins relationships….i have messed up a lot of relationships coz I wanted ppl to not only desire me but give me the love that is fulfilling

Desire and ego and hence carnality are things that for me are directed to God who alone can satisfy them….i try to love God too……perhaps because I want god to protect me in return, to reward me, but that is only partly….i do love, not perfectly of course, but I love…..a few human beings, and God

So why should it wrong that I do not carnally pursue any human being? Why should it be abnormal?

I have had and have some extremely intimate and enriching relationships that by God’s grace I think has allowed me to become in some small ways a better person. Is that not true love? Why should love always be about carnality and desire? Why can’t it be about friendship? Of living everyday? Of feeling the breeze between one’s thighs? Of having some indescribable moments when you feel you have reached the stars? I have had all this..and you still mean to tell me, that I have not loved and been loved in return?


Scio Amo