POEM_: Whoami

Whoami?
Idunno.

But what I do know
is that I am
one thing one day, one moment
another one,
another day, moment.
Some days I am an egocentric
selfish bastard, ready to trash half the World
for some real
or imagined injustice to me, or mine.
Other days I am a sucker for love
ready to torch my career, my life, my world...
...for the World,
for some real or imagined
beloved. An idea
or a man.

I am a bundle
of such contradictions.
I am also
a son
a citizen
of this my country, India
and of the World.
I am a brother
to a Hindu
and three Muslim girls.
I am a Muslim,
culturally;
I am an agnostic too.
I am a man
and yes, of course,
I am a fairy queen!
I fuck
and I get fucked.
I am a gourmet,
and a gourmand.


Apart from these
and so many more
contradictions, I am
an executive by profession
an engineer by education
a fat lazy bum by inclination
a poet by inspiration
and a gay,
human rights activist
by necessity.

Who am I?
I still do not know.

Or perhaps,
I do know.
I am ‘I’,
And that is perhaps
a definition enough.

- owais

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POEM_: Morality?

Standards of morality change.

I am sure some of our haloed ancestors
believed that it was immoral
to not eat a vanquished
enemy's flesh.

You tend to begin
and end your moral history
at a point in time
a few, or perhaps
several hundred years back.

And I can not
live by a canned morality
the use-by date of which
has expired long ago.

So you live by your tradition.
But I,
shall make my own.
Please don't judge me
by your standards.
And I will not judge you, by mine.

- owais

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POEMT: I Couldn’t Say Goodbye...

...His door was closed.

And I wouldn’t knock
on his door!

- owais

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POEM_: To Be or Not To Be

Do not
ever
for me do,
any that which
goes against your self, your being.

I can accept
you not being
what I want you to be;
I can not,
your being what
you
do not wish to be.

- owais

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POEM_: Does God Exist?

Asked the disciple:
“Does God exist?
What is His name?”

Said the Faqir:
“Does it matter?

“For if He exists
He needs no assistance
from me,
nor,
will He want it,
being Omnipotent
and Omniscient.

“And if He does not
I can assist
Him not;
All that I need to know
is the path
that brings peace
within me.
And without me”.

- owais

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POEM_: To Know

Upset
at his inability to know
the nature of God,
the disciple asked
if the Faqir did not lament
his own ignorance.

Asked the Faqir,
“What am I
not ignorant of?
I am limited
and can never gain
infinity.

“Thus any knowledge
of the infinite, absolute truth,
must remain, for me,
a dream, unattainable.

“For even if I were
to know everything,
how would I know
that there was nothing more
to know?”

- owais

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POEM_: Desires

“Does not
the prospect
of fulfilling a passionate desire
fill your heart
with joy?”
asked the disciple.

The Faqir smiled,
“It does.
But just as
everything that goes up
must come down,
my heart knows
that suffering must follow
every pleasure.

“And,
with the fulfillment
of every passionate desire,
just as I am born anew;
with every suffering,
I die a new death.

“This unending cycle
of rebirth, recurring death
and the futility of it all,
leaves me
with one abiding desire:
to be free.

“To be free of it all.
And the prospect
of this ultimate ecstasy of freedom
leaves all other joys
dwarfed, undesirable”.

- owais

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This is first being published on this page.