The girl in the seat next to me is watching an
Influencer on her mobile phone
It’s on the Mumbai Express first class
I’m thinking about gurus and healers
and the villages whizz by like tik tok scroll
Waterways patch the dry landscape as
low cloud tiptoes toward the sea silently
The Influencer may change the ‘self image’
The guru will help you to find ‘inner meaning’
Yet as this tube hurtles through the land
I think we are all lost like kids at the fairground
Crying – reaching out to seize a helping hand
to escort us back to safety
As if the burden of Knowing and Unknowing
was too great for our cluttered minds to fathom
Like a garage sale where nothing gets sold
Chipped vase and deflated lilo discarded
A Versailles of broken ideas left uncleared
Too much emptiness to contemplate now
As a poet I’ll keep travelling and learning
Perhaps we weren’t born to be healed or
moulded into perfection – just to be calm
inquisitive and satisfied with the life we lead
Let the influencer and the guru sleep in peace
The last of the monsoon rain hammers against
the walls and I just lie there thinking
one thought after another like the blades of a
fan slicing the air above us
going round and round in a circle and having no
final destination
.
Malcolm Paul
.