[nukkad] nukkad - age

["Homi Kaikobad" <>]

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What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? 
-Jean Jacques Rousseau, philosopher and author (1712-1778)
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AGE

How do you compute it?

By days on a calendar? By lost friends who are no more?
By the love who went away? By the lover who never came?

If it be by days, half the hours of the months and years were
spent in sleeping, in dreaming. Does one count that as time
spent on earth?

Between life and it's end are a million night hours when one
wafted in murky darkness. There was no name, caste or breed
in sleep. One hated and loved and ran and killed in a non-linear unconnected
fog. One was on the bed next to the spouse
but acted on another planet. Does one count the sleep hours
in age?

Does one count wasted days doing nothing? Monday wasted,
Tuesday wasted, months wasted, years wasted, serving no one,
in random erratic pattern, now gorging, now in drunken stupor,
now laughing senselessly with friends, now giggling with
drunks and the drugged, now groveling before God, now
placating the Devil, now orgasming, now defecating?

Is age not more than marks of passing time? Does a calendar
give life, and ultimately take it away? Are we the slaves of
the running sands?

Younger, older, then, now, past, present, was, is, maybe;
fatal words, which fetter and will finally kill.

The calendar you count your days by, has one marked
for you, after which there is no sunrise. Count age
by days, and sure enough it will kill you by night.

I look at time, and it looks at me, and I give it no quarter,
for it gives me none.

Time is action, action is waning, waning is age, age is
death.

Time is breath, breath comes and goes, time rises and
falls, tides flow and ebb, destiny waxes and wanes.

On one end you breathe, on the other you live by the
days. In between is either death, or the Doorway.

As I write this in the early hours of dawn, I see Time
standing in the shadows, she frowns and glowers.
Often she smiles, as though to seduce.

I neither consort with Time nor let her live in my hours.

One of this days I will turn her out of the village in to
the wilderness.

And she will say, O for how long?

And I will say, for all Time.

Arya of the Hills.

















































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