Glimpses

Glimpses

In a crowd,
endless traffic coiling around,
alien faces brushing past,
hardly a breathing space,
I murmur the incantations
that would let me through
the sound of fury and rage.
I suddenly see a face
walking away at a distance
and I stare at it in disbelief.
A serene face absorbed and unfazed
with shades of gloom fleeting across
the tranquil state.
The places and faces of unfeeling strangers
ceaselessly block my way.
There are moments when I am pretty close, sometimes at an arm's length
and before I can extend my arm to reach and feel
the reality of his being
bodies and shadows intervene.
The distance gapes like a chasm of years yawning,
and a thin sheet of amnesia in between.
In the midst of the people my eyes close
in a dangerous swoon.
The glimpses and visions always come
not in solitude
but in the sheer loneliness in the midst of  crowds.
I lose the view in the midst of action
and the action, like a burden I carry,
pushes onward and down
along the stream
inexorable in its sweep.
Oceans are merely crowds
and the music heard in broken silences of heart
is drowned in the din of thoughts:
the thoughts which are empowered by the need to
work like a surgical knife
to cut around the ribs with a delicate poise
not to let the blood ooze and flow.
In the crowded streets and crowded rooms
glimpses are lost,
the trance doesn't last.
That's the way life flows and we have to call it real