Baijaks, Palms

5 a.m. morning stretches, abandoned.
You ask if I feel it:
the way the tide doesn’t move,
but the moon in its spine.
Is this the boundless freedom
that swells, then breaks, when you’re near?
I open my mouth
A butterfly moves around.

Your hands speak first:
Long fingers carving the air,
Not like a sculptor, but water
Grasping the rhythm of my shifting self,
Even the ouroboros blushes.
The old curse of separation?
We undid it just by breathing the same air,
Just by forgetting where your pulse ends
and mine begins.

Below, the leather belt, brown and etched
with red hawks in flight, wings taut
Against some unseen wind.
Hair falls in midnight rivers
framing the beard’s soft curve.
Then, the bare chest —an offering
I kneel before without moving.
My gaze lowers:
Breath catches, hooks, yet flows on
and I dissolve into the hush of it all.

I write from a space beyond time:
You strum the daylight into something molten
A song into my very cells.
Higher now, limestone caves swallow laughter
Then press it into stalactites in ancient silence.
I watch life, illusion, self
unravel into the same vast loom.
What lies beyond? What is real?
How much of this is ‘I’?

At the shore, water shivers as hundreds of bats
sweep the sky in black waves.
An islet holds its breath in the heart of the tide.
The tide gulps down their shadows before
night swallows the rest —then, nothing.

Baijaks whisper in the salt-tinged breeze,
Writing secrets, only the wind can read.
Palms murmur monsoon memories,
Licking sunlight from each other’s shadow.
Nature’s quiet pulse moves from
baijak to palm, palm to baijak,
in an endless sigh of this is how we touch
without hands.

Behind banana trees, heavy with scent,
Venus rises. Above, the eclipse bleeds,
its glow a sister to the blossom’s soft fire.
One echoes the other, bound
in the same unbroken cycle.

Breath slows. Bones settle.
Time dissolves like salt in the tide.
Questions fade to a hum, palm fronds in wind.
Only the tide remains,
pulling, releasing until even I forget
where my skin ends and the sea begins.

01.2025