Mae Phosop (โพสพ)

The weight I carry is neither given nor taken but transformed. Centuries of dirt cling to my skin, some falling away as dust, some sinking deeper as stone. I no longer scrub at these stains; they are my oldest teachers.

Once, I ran. But the earth remembers every footprint. Now I kneel instead —not in surrender, but to sift through the layers. What is escape but another kind of burial?

I kneel here, letting the rituals work through me. Each cultural thread I grasp tugs at something deeper, stirring a remembrance that’s not quite mine. This back-and-forth motion probes the depths of my mind: no single stride, but a perpetual unraveling some more of the unknown. Perseverance. Courage. Faith. The flux of all things; neither absolute purity of good nor evil, instead, a dynamic interplay of these intricacies maintains balance within the whole.

Healing arrives like rice grains: small, necessary, torn from something greater. I gather them, not with hands, but with patience. The rituals help: incense curling like a question mark, spirit houses humming with forgotten songs. Each offering is a mirror. I see my face in the rusted amulets, in the pineapple’s spiked crown.

Child of concrete and fluorescent light,
you thought yourself rootless.
But the Mother was always there,
her skirts frayed by monsoons,
her arms full of hollowed-out fruit.

When the mannequins whispered to me, their headless necks sprouting wild silk, I finally understood:
Purity is a fable.
The sacred tree grows from split bark and gasoline spills.
Rice shrinks, gods bargain with fish, and still the hungry are fed.

At the edge of the palm forest, the air smells of rotting jasmine and new rain. This is how rebirth smells. Not like incense, but like mud.

O Phosop,
neither in the bin nor the field,
but in the space between
where the mice dance
and the Buddha laughs.

The sun ascended invisibly behind the pallid sky as I hid deep in the palms. The monsoon’s night-long dampness rose as petrichor in the breeze, but I barely noticed, too consumed by the anger nipping at my heels. From what else, from whom else could I abscond?