the sun

It is only morning, my friend
Why are you complaining of this and that?
This glorious sun has come out million times looking for you
And she is wasting her smiles on your face.
You don’t seem to see her at all. You don’t even feel her warmth on her hands
Because you are absent. You completely wrapped in your mind.
You’re either in the past or in the future.
But the sun has no ego and she does not mind.
She does not judge nor label you. She does not comment.
She does not care how you dress or how you walk.
She does not mind if you’re black or white or blue
She does not mind even when it is very cold
She comes out everyday and smiles for you.

Meeting the voice

All the treks, all the trips, all the walks... I have made, long and short;
All the communions i forged
With the spirit of mankind and the rivers and the
trees;
All the friendships i invested in the people i know and
those i don't know;
It is because of this constant hunger and longing
to meet the voice deep inside me.

Dark Room

I run into you

Through this mysterious path of life.

And long before I realize

I am filled with you

In the same way

A dark room is filled

With sunlight.

Meeting a friend on our way to nowhere

(For Michael McConnell and Ardis Wiley)

There are moments in everyone’s life when we run out of our own vitalities, our own resources, when creativity suffers beyond recognition, when the womb of poetry begets sands and banal words, when we open our eyes to uncover the darkness enclosing us and our shadows growing bigger and thicker than ourselves, when gossip and fear reign supreme in the villages and in the towns and at work places and friends lose trust and confidence in each other, when we raise our voices to be heard by the people we trust and the people we love but the wind Scatters away everything in our throat.

My friend, I say this: Show to your friends the indestructibility of the soul and the continuation of life and divinity of man’s will to grow and help others grow. Keep moving! It matters not from where and to where you move. Keep moving along the path of man’s sublime dreams where the sun rises from death, where the divine earth meets the oceans… Keep moving ahead so that we will meet someone in the form of rainbow, in the form of our other selves, in the likeness of god who would look in the depth of our hearts and say, “Arise Friend! Open your eyes and look in the East, the sun is up again, tulips are opening again, Birds are singing again. Rivers are calling your name through the mouth of nightingale. Arise! You are here for a divine calling.”

This world is too small and friends are many

(For David Lane)

This world is too small and friends are many
Let’s go out into this big, endless street roaring with life
And meet big, silent mountains and thousand bright suns
And good-hearted friends
And live thousands lives and sing thousand songs.
…..And this world is too small….
Let’s go out and meet good-hearted friends.

The season of love has come

The season of love has come

And the woods are filled with whispers of butterflies

Every mouth we kiss and every mouth we don’t kiss

Tastes like honeydew

Every name we call becomes an ice cream and melts in

our tongue

Every eye we see is filled with the passion of silent

trees.

Every new friend we make has the soul of the ocean.

The season of love has come

And meadows are sprinkled with perfumes

And lovers sit outside in the middle of the night

And talk endlessly and feel their heartbeats in the smile of the full moon

And see the color of their voice in the darkness of the night.

The season of love has come

And desert sands are covered with rosebuds

Where lovers lie down with their eyes wide open counting thousands of stars

all night long, making love and eternal peace.


The season of love has come

And humanity is ready to depart with his own fear and hatred

and long darkness and all human miseries

With no regret, with no grief.

The snow hills

In Minnesota

Ten thousands lakes

Lie awake and breathe even in the heart of the winter.



The sun arrived one day and

Thousand Hills of snow standing here and there

Melted into an endless abundance.



into a deep knowingness.


Scatterer of clouds,

For just this moment

I too want to melt into you,

into your splendour,

into your suns.

War and love

Stands two blocks away from my dwelling,

Clifton French Regional Park in Minnesota.

This is where all species of trees

Lived together and they don’t pick a fight.

Right now, this very moment

In Darfur and Chechnya and Najaf and Narathiwat

And in the westbank, in gaza, in beersheba

The son of man is hurling

Bullets and bombs into his brother’s house.

In Clifton French Regional Park, in Minnesota

Two blocks away from my home

Oak trees and birch trees and cypress trees

And cedar trees join for dance and song.

Dead trees and living trees, tall trees and short trees,

Black trees and red trees

Live together In Clifton French Regional Park

In Minnesota two blocks away from my home.

In kabul and Cashimir and in the horn of Africa

In Bagdad and in Jakarta a nine-year-old boy

Is learning how to aim and how to kill a man.

In the long history of mankind

Men are more inclined to teach than to learn.

If they learn, they would learn from the cherries

And the crap apples and fig trees and sycamore

That dwell together at the Clifton French Regional Park

Where kids play in peace

Where parents watch in peace

Where deer and foxes and song-birds live in peace

Two blocks away from where I live.

A thunder has no religion

I won’t ask where you come from
Or what your name is or your religion
Winds have no home and stars have no names.
A thunder has no religion. Would they worry?
I cannot see you any more for the light in your eyes has
dazzled me already. I can only feel you. I can hear you sometimes.
Your presence entered my bones and
torn down all the structures I’ve built all my life.
I am left with almost nothingness now.
I wanted to sit down on my knees and cry like a child of darkness
Yet, you approached me friendly and pointed to the trees standing across the hill, you pointed to the sun that was sitting above the horizon.
you pointed to the mountain that was serene tall and content. You said:
Look my friend; they are free from any structures and rules yet they are beautiful and pure and simple. Aren’t they?

Stillness becomes you

When I listen to your songs,
The sun in the tone of your voice
Warms the depth of my bones.
Buds of white roses emerge from your eyes and open up before me
Like roads of kindness.
I was trying for so many years to grasp you with the deluge of my emotions,
With the chatter in my head. That was when I went missing for ever and ever and ever.
Now I won’t desire to live thousand years.
If I live this moment fully and completely, the wilderness would sing with me.
I can say with certainty, my friend:
while we're in this physical world,
no one is a winner nor a loser.
We're just here to taste honey of life from our sacred bowls.
If the honey tastes bitter, blame not the honey
Blame your tongue.

When you connect with this poem, stillness becomes you.
If you hear a sound, instead,
It is only born out of lonesomeness, a collective yearning for beauty

Glass of orange juice.

Do you want to tell you what we are?
We're the collective energy field,
the body and the soul of the sun, the earth, the sky,
breath of a rainbow, muffled smiles of the moons
through which seasons move.
We're in Minnesota now and a heavy winter is moving through us
just like a cold glass of orange juice.

Form meets formless

Suddenly thirst descended upon me
And I downed a glass of pomegranate with my eyes closed.
You occurred from nowhere and whispered to me:
What you just drank was not a fruit juice.
It was my smile longing to merge with light.

That’s very true, I believe. What I just drank tasted more sacred
More delicious, more sublime than a pomegranate.
My bones began to grow layers of new bones and a flesh made of fire.
I hear you smiling vastly at what I said.
This is how I celebrate the song of life.
Wood and fire and the wind meet here. Right here
This is the center. Has no beginning. Has no end.

My fingers would love exploring into your silky mane that sleeps like Mississippi
Silence reigned and your eyes closed slowly.
If I may ask, tell me the secret of this wild silence, where does it come from, where does it go?
I said.
This is existence hungry for attention. She has always been here and will always be.
We will know her when we know ourselves.

Strong longing returned.
As I yearned to enter your formless
I also longed to enter your form.

Do I care? You’ve already opened me up. You broke me free from my own shells and I am no longer the same person. I am free from my old identity. Do I care? Enter me, as far as the form meets the formless.

And by saying this, you opened yourself to me generously, without doubts, without reservation.
And I entered you without doubts, without reservation.

Light sings her glory in the dark

Light sings her glory in the dark
Music from a flute is born in the hole
As an old man gropes for a cane to support his form,
Humanity needs a BEING
To rescue herself from falling down into the mud of life.
This poem claims her completeness. She is certain of her own existence.
Yet in the heart of her heart, she deeply yearns for uncertainty.

The dialogue

The dialogue

The mind is here to learn, to make efforts, to succeed and to allow fear to arise
The soul, to experience, to meet the beloved,
to burn in the heat of love.
The mind sees a group of white clouds and says:
These are harbingers of scarcity. They do not know rain.
The soul interferes;
“You cannot separate clouds from rain, you from me”
The mind looks at the clock and says loudly:
I am already late for work. I have to rush.”
The soul says,
“Calm down, you miss life and her joy in the act of rushing .”

Motion

While I stand here, right here in a complete bafflement
Everything else around me is in a motion.
Ask the sands in the ocean
What it means to be in love.

You’re the watcher

I can tell you this:
You might have arrived just today
or last night or years ago..
you think you're young and inexperienced
Yet your smiles and your sobs and your stillness
come from the ancient wisdom.
The dust rising beneath your feet
and the sun hanging down from
the sky that never judges, come from you -
that is silence.
You're not an endless dialogue in your mind
You're the silence in the background.
You're the music in the noise.
You're not even your social status nor your clan
You’re not your fear nor your jealousy
You're the awareness who watches all these things unfolding.
You're the watcher.

Looking for you

I trekked far away lands, surfed the oceans,
climbed mountain chains,
Crossed deserts and combed African jungles
I flew to east and toured west
I traveled north and south
Looking for you.
Exhausted, hopeless and resigned,
I came home
And I found YOU.

Log on fire

My heart and my soul
yearn to be a log on fire.
I went on caravan to the sahara desert
but the heat that surrounded me
did not burn deep enough.

Garden in my chest

There is garden in my chest and in their chests and in her chest and in his chest..
and there is sunshine and pasture for the cows and the goats and there is lake and there is human suffering.
Blessed one: I'm thirsty for you: Give me yourself in a glass of water

I dreamed

I dreamed and in my dream
I looked everywhere for laughter in my sorrow
I looked everywhere for lights in my darkness
I looked everywhere for oceans in my deserts
I looked everywhere for joy in my griefs
I looked everywhere for life in my death
I woke up in my bedroom and there I was,
With laughter and lights and oceans and joy and life.

I wanna surrender to THIS

I sat at my desk and looked out
To meet the vast world outside me.
A Christmas cactus bloomed right before my eyes
And then before my eyes it perished again.
What is happening is the birth of life,
the fire burning in the hearts of friends.
It is love that knows not benefit. It is enlightenment.
It is a silent beauty that knows no boundaries,
no race, no culture. no religion.
It is pure joy.
I wanna surrender to THIS.

Fog in the morning

I open my eyes and look outside with this s u p r e m e c u r i o s i t y;
A gray fog hangs down from all directions like unfinished human fears.
That’s O K with me.
The problem comes
When you close your eyes,
Bring energy to every part of your body;
look d e e p, d e e p, d e e p, d e e p inside
And the only thing you could see becomes
A g r a y f o g.

On the high way of life

On the high way of life
I was driving…
Not very fast, nor very slow.
I was driving at my own pace.

Someone who parked himself
On the road shoulder
Was judging me……

A young woman who was speeding from behind
Could not control her anger and frustration.
She aspires to get somewhere very soon. Who knows where?

Who was this man or woman dragging along a freightliner truck in front of me?
His vehicle swallowed a big chunk of land including some part of the sky
This was obstructing traffic flow and limiting visibility.

When you drive on the highway of life behind someone
Who limits your vision and obstructs your direction
You live life indirectly.
You are not yet exposed to the warmth of your own life.

I am still driving but not behind the freightliner truck
And the man who parked himself on the road shoulder
Is still judging me.

The way of Love

I was on my way
not knowing where to go.
I met a flower that was singing
a familiar song
I met a tree that was singing
A familiar song
I met a bird that was singing
A familiar song

The song says:

"If you are on your way and don't know where to go
Don't worry my friend; there is no way for you to get lost
For there is only one way...
The way of LOVE....

You

Standing in the vast sea of life
I inhaled a cool air.
To make it more explicit, inhaled YOU.
I breathed light arising from your face
I breathed your eloquence that was shining, that was burning
Like African suns.
I inhaled your vastness, your beauty blended with stillness.
I inhaled the smiles of the universe, of the heavens, of the earth,
That is YOU. I inhaled you.

Everywhere I look

Everywhere I look
There’re people who’re homeless
People who’re jobless, who’re cold,
Who cannot pay their mortgage
People who cannot raise their children
People who’re hungry, who’re despaired
People who live in the dark
People who’re angry
People who hate each other
People who hate themselves:
The voice from inside says:
It is time to take this home out to the streets
It is time to take this light out to the streets
It is time to take this love out to the streets.

Light dreams through leaves

Light dreams through leaves that are turning gold and fire.
How can we possibly hide this beauty,
so powerful,
so grandeur,
shaking us like leaves that are just changing colors?
Intoxicated and helpless,
falling down
and catching fire
like the leaves that are just changing colors.

You smiles remind me of the ripples in the sea

Radiant one:
You smiles
Remind me of the ripples in the sea
Or blinks in the sky or a flowering tree.
I can have the whole peach
or orange to myself
If I really want.
But not the whole sun
for She rises for everybody.
Last night

I laughed like a mad man
And the moon was blushing with jealousy.
The man held a child in his arms and shouted:
You little person, teach me the secret
Of aliveness. I’ve lost mine along with my laughs
Many years ago.

the sun is your heart

You are not as small is you think, my friend
You’re infinite and vast and without limits
The forests are your limbs growing deeper and higher
Winds are your clothes and mountains, your tender bosom.
Your firmness in life.

The moon is your beautiful sorrow
The oceans are your kindness, passion of deep knowing.
The sky, your delicious dreams and warm smiles

Stars are your eyes and the sun is your heart.
You are not as small is you think, my friend.

xposed to your smile

I am xposed to your smile, to your gravitational force.
It is not too late. Is it?
In your smile there is heat
Friend of the heart, this is where I want to melt.
A drop of water is being tossed into the ocean
A cube of sugar is being flung into a cup of ginger tea
Friend of the heart, this is where I want to melt.
In the name of the unknown,
Smite me hard in the back; thrash me on the ground like a sheaf of wheat and mix me with dust
Bite me on the neck with your sharp tooth and let me feel the root of the pain.
Let me toil and suffer in search of you
Pain and suffering is a joy in the face of love and longing.
Behold! Fingers are throwing a lump of salt into a jar of water
Friend of the heart, this is where I want to melt.

Body remembrance

Evening winds warm my feet on their way...
Who asked where they are coming from or where they’re going to?
Many a day I’ve walked on red flames when I know they burn
And still my legs rise in love with life.
In the same way I longed to touch the face of the morning sun,
I also longed to kiss hands of the winds I don’t know their whereabouts.
Love doesn’t long for knowledge. Does she?
When I saw a stranger in the busy mall buzzing with humans, the body remembered itself
And the knower inside did not ask a question.

Whole-ness

Whole-ness
Is not just the opposite of fragments.
It is the mother of all beauties, and the heart of all hearts.
In the beginning, you sacred-human being, who is reading this poem, are whole
In the middle, you are whole
In the end, you are whole.
But where is the beginning?
Where is the middle?
Where is the end?
I know not.

I thought about you this morning

I thought about you this morning
I thought about you yesterday
I’m thinking about you right now.
Last night when I was about to sleep
Your light and your darkness, your earth and your skies merged in my chest.
Later, as I drifted into deep, dreamless sleep,
Your wisdom, your follies, your tears and your laughs entered me
Silently through the holes in my limbs.
This morning, while I was awake and sitting at breakfast
I saw your face that was trying to smile in the middle of bitter sobs.
The sun was setting on your right face and the moon was rising on your left.
Your left eye was wide open but you could only see with the right one that was tightly shut.
Africa;
I thought about you this morning
I thought about you yesterday
I’m thinking about you right now.
There are moments when I calm my mind, sit silently, empty, naked and unborn.
Then you disappear, me and my stories disappear, my old fears, my thoughts, my imaginations disappear. I become you and you become me…
After a while, however, things return. Stories return. My fear of tomorrow and my resentment of yesterday return. The fight with life reigns supreme. You become no longer part of me. The word SEPARATION is written in bold letters. You stand tall, aloof, proud and wounded and your wings bleed the forgotten milk of my ancestors. I look so small, troubled and feeble. Your children stand on the verge of hatred and bark at your bare bones. Your sons and daughters wake up into their misery and start feeding on the flesh of your moons. The carcass of your suns and stars litters the peace of your woods. Your waters suffer from ignorance.
Silence returns to me months and years later. Madness returns with fire and nakedness. Your own prophecy sung in the mouth of your songbirds, arrives.
Your children rise from their own nightmares. They walk hand in hand facing the arrow of light. They smile and in their smiles, there is tenderness. In their smiles, there are pieces of moons. Your bulls, your hyenas, your cows and your tigers sing and dance at a dinner party together. Your galaxies proclaim the power of love. Your days and your nights surrender to beauty.

Africa;
I thought about you this morning
I thought about you yesterday
I’m thinking about you right now.

Like Jesus, like Buddha

Like Jesus, like Buddha
Who’s out in the streets to spread sunshine
Like Jesus, like Buddha
Who’s out in the streets to spread sunshine

The day broke into gold and peach and orange strips
And in the middle of this winding road
That takes you nowhere in particular….
There lies an open heart
Vast like skies, deep like oceans, silent like nights and hot like ball of fire;
I feared the hug, and yet I extended a hand longing to be burned.
And soon, the tips of my fingers
Started to bloom like tulips.
And army of bees broke out around me
To make HONEY.

Like Jesus, like Buddha
Who’s out in the streets to spread sunshine

Voice of the beloved

Down the Lancaster lane, before the sun was down
Before the day was done, while the summer still sings in the corner
I take a salutary walk every day
To hear the voice of the beloved.
The sun smiles on my face as I walk
My long arms and limbs becomes wings.
And I knew. Instead of walking I was flying
To hear the voice of the beloved.
In the leaves that rustle constantly
I hear the voice of the beloved.
In the mouths of the songbirds that pour honey and poems
I hear the voice of the beloved.
In the starry eyes of the lakes
I hear the voice of the beloved.
In the faces of young men and old men
And in the faces of those who are not yet born
I hear the voice of the beloved.

Love

You are a living witness;
About love
So much as been sung
So much as been written and so much as been said…
The word that has not yet been said
The song that has not yet been sung
The poem that has not yet been composed
The space that has not yet been touched…..
That is LOVE

Spring is dreaming of love

Here in Minnesota
Spring is dreaming of love
Existence is celebrating her powerful presence.
While mornings open up like tulips
Butterflies celebrate their wedding anniversary
Heavens pour down honey blended poems
For birds to chant them.
Trees, attired in flawless, green costumes
Are best ushers.
I am an invited guest.
I sit down here and eat from this benediction.

In the name of religion

In the name of religion
In the name of ethnicity
In the name of social class
Humans across the globe make wars and kill each other.
Beloved one:
You and I will make love instead
You and I have no appetite for war
You and I have no energy for war.

Listen even when there is nothing to listen to

Listen even when there is nothing to listen to.
Then everything becomes music.
Watch when there is nothing to watch.
A blade of grass raises his head to dance before your eyes and you become this dance.
A rock rolling down the hill crumbled into thousand small pieces and shouted to me:
I am not broken. This is my way of opening my heart to you.

same song

I say this
You say that.
Life’s meaning and purpose
Is lost in the concepts of rights and wrongs
Shrouded in the belief systems,
In dogmas, ideologies and interpretations.
In reality we’re all singing the same song

This love

This love. I am infected with. I am injected with.
This love. It has the aroma of fresh rain.
Depth of the sea. Face of the morning sky.

People say the way I live and act is not normal any more.

I tell them I drank a glass of red wine diluted with four spoons of light,
two spoons of laughter and three spoons of love.
How can I be the same again?

I am a pilgrim as well as a pilgrimage

I am a pilgrim as well as a pilgrimage. I am an existence born into rivers meditation.
I strike a match and the sea starts to sing a melody of yearning. I may be wrong. I look into your eyes and see you’re thirsty for kindness. My door is wide open my friend. I mean the door to my complete stillness.
you might come in and leave whenever you want and next time you come back, you wont see the door again. The wind that moves the mountains starts her innocence in me. Sometimes she is a wind and sometimes she is the tenderness on the lips of joy. I am a fire as well as the one who longs to be burned. Sometimes when burning is not enough one has to die completely. Are you afaid of this?
I am a silence you find in the middle of a noise. I sometimes become a noise before the silence is born.
I am the hunger you experience in the morning, when you wake up, I am the beauty your heart longs for, the light you can see after the sun goes down. I am looking at you now. The truth is I am looking in you. I am not afraid of your eyes because they are my eyes gazing into my own void. There is pain in those eyes. There is fear. There is longing. These are collective yearning. One minute’s openness to fire and two minutes demolishing of those old fences clears the path into that happy madness. You remember? I run into you the other day. You said you were really thirsty. You said you were tired and disintegrated.
You said life is a hard work. I offered my entire self to you. You drank me like a deer drinking from the spring. You looked at me and said: I am good now. This is my supper, orgasm of my existence. You said, my Jealousy is gone and gone is my misery.
The water of life washed all my knowledge and I have no any enemies now. You said I did not come from anywhere. I am not going anywhere. I am just here with you, my friend. Here with you! Just here with you. You said.

Tell me how to contain this spendor

Beloved friend:
Tell me how to contain this splendor
I am not prepared for.
A cup would not complain whether it is full or half or empty.
He would only say: I am all of these silence.
Promise me not to send a baby back to sleep at 8 in the evening
While she still bubbles with innocent energy.
She has a divine secret to share with you.

I would love to paint the sky
With the halo of this laughter so that grief would want
To change his mind and come out to the street for a dance.

Like a rose garden

Evenings ago as I was walking past, the fresh scent coming from your house filled my nose and then my whole body. It was like a rose garden kept with passion and tenderness, fed with sunlight and water and wisdom and care. How I loved this elegance while passing by! How I loved this energy!
We met the next day and I told you the story and the words you said blew my head like a thunder. You said to me: “You know, something strange happened to me this week. Something life changing happened to me. Something amazing happened to me this week. Very strange and difficult to explain with my own words: I got the courage or courage visited me on her will and I met my anger and my fear. I met my pain and my resentment. I also met my sorrow and my joy as well. I met all of them and conversed with them for hours and hours and finally we forged this wonderful companionship. Now I am one with them and they are one with me. We’re all merged together and there is no distinction between us. I am now free from any pain. Pain and hunger and grief come with separation. I can access peace easily now because that is what I’ve been naturally, in the very morning of creation, before I was loaded with many soft wares and programs. Meeting with your fear and anger and frustration also means cleaning all those layers and layers of programs. You see, that’s why I smelled to you like a rose garden.