At Story's Departure

 
Poetry has left.
We two never walked poetry's road, never understood.
Poetry has left on poetry's road, walked straight ahead on its own path,
never once looked back.
I kept looking, groping through story's narrow alleys.
Leaving my hand, poetry is now in another's grasp, triumphant in its cunning smile of changing hands.
Today, having lost, I understand why another's story played in my poems,
when that story pulled me up to bind myself in its body,
I forgot the story, lost everything, and drowned in poetry.
Life's story was lost in poetry's life, all poems ran out.
All the accounts of love don't come into my poems,
I've grown used to living without accounting, holding poetry's hand.
Buying my understanding, my entire being cheaply and selling it dear, strangling all my poems to death, poetry is quite well today.
I learned to understand love's colors, had no time to learn its price.
Losing time in the wrong season, I understand poetry doesn't understand love, it understands love's price,
forgetting life's worth, poetry lived in expensive life's personal equations, in fact, still does.


In a sliver of afternoon at Ramna, in hurt I said, "Look, one day,
I too will learn to live splendidly without loving well! That day my mirror will be your mirror."
With that little divinity in her head, she made me weep terribly with her divine acting.
Her neglect or annoyance, taking neither to heart,
helpless, I would think, "Do people carry this love around too?"
No one ever taught me how to forget poetry, how to stay forgotten.
My poems came holding poetry's hand, they didn't teach me either.
How much shock it takes for the time to leave to arrive, I learned losing everything, binding chains to my feet's rhythm.
I never met such moments when poetry wasn't still in my head, throughout all feelings.
Burning a little, coming half-close, loving so much, one day I lived in poetry.


Whether I exist or not, what difference does it make?
Poetry never wanted to know me,
I dressed myself like poetry, stayed that way day after day.
Poetry, did our time then advance taking the oath to retreat? Never thought so!
The fire of my hurt and your insult burns together all my foolish faithful feelings to ash.
After much time I see I'm spinning terribly at the same point.
Accepting as fate being swept away and lost in the fierce current's play of an ocean of feeling, I still live.
All the egos flee far away leaving me alone. My mountain of shame reaches shamelessness's peak and turns its face,
higher expensive heaps of love gather in the heart, meaningless in your false memory.
Trying to touch each passing second, suddenly in dreams I think, what's gone, settling all time's untimely claims,
let it return stopping all the fierce storms of my emptiness, storms that clutch and shake and fling me away laughing.
A few moments cut away in hurt are more precious, longer, endless than centuries—
how perfectly they pass me by, making me helpless! I stare speechless.


What's gone from me left knowing it would never return, when such truth comes and stands before me,
my hours stop one by one. Such a devastated person has no worth to any poetry in the world!
I know it all. When I'm burning, who dies hoping it will be put out? If life itself goes out when this fire dies,
I'll live with the fire then. Learning to walk can't prevent the festering wounds on the feet.
Still I wait. Knowing it won't return, intoxicated by such meaningless waiting, death's addiction overwhelms,
in the addiction of eternal freedom, releasing everyone from obligation, I'll move forward unburdened, unworried, untroubled,
just thinking this, the mind wonders, will I truly be free in this freedom?


My love is false, all feelings false, everyday's, every moment's tears false.
If it weren't all false, why would anyone move away from the obligation of touching and wiping away my feelings?
Relying on love that's false, how would poetry have stayed beside me?
The truth mixed inseparably with all my feelings, that truth made false, life's great
truth has left. Today what's the point of staying mixed in the meaningless imagination of that truth's existence?
Every moment, the kingdom's false feelings keep me greatly restless. I bathe in restless light.
This restlessness, this pain all false, knowing this, before the disobedient water of the eyes blurs everything
I'll pay the price of tears with death. When the moments of waiting end
I'll find those days touched by happiness's dreams in another life exactly, in such dreams
nurturing pain, wiping tears, I see the path's end clearly in conviction more constant than life.
I came to poetry holding poetry's hand.
Coming, I see,
poetry has left in the pretense of staying.
Story has left in the pretense of coming.
Searching for another life, life has become other.