the thing with a compromise is that one end of it is always in a murk you cannot even hope to make sense of

there's a storm here / rough 3AM winds & I hear the keeing keeing of bikes, reminding me there are things that have to cut through the harshest rain while I exist somewhere between my floor of privilege & my roof of gratitude

aren't we where we are because the world has been the way it is/ even though the fire burns on the fuel of those less privileged than us, if the fire didn't keep us warm, would we be able to tell our stories around it, no matter how noble

come morning, the canopy chirps out of sync with the grassroots / my wings up there, my beak down here

leaders promise, not to create, but to bring peace as if it were a mystical beast at the borders waiting to be saddled by the chosen one

no data as sad as the sorrow of a single tear shed on one of those trains from lahore to delhi, or the sorrow of a single persistent strand of memory in someone's mind of what once was but cannot be ever again

the internet has democratized our access to information to such an extent that our identity is formed on an a la carte basis / our culture has become a pick 'n pack culture

I sometimes love to be a part of this wet rocky speck in the milky way, which we, by the power of our perspective, turn into a living gem hurtling through time-space

time is the only currency I have, yet, dazzled by joys and paralyzed by fears, I do nothing and then the bell strikes / lunch break over

first rule of peace club is that by knowing what something is not, we gain clarity on what it possibly is / second rule is doubt

if our species has evolved favoring aggression and combat, isn't the quest for global peace a sisyphean progress that will tumble down at the next twilight / is peace a matter of invention or discovery / have we fallen from paradise or does paradise fall from us

we want to bring justice to the victims rather than create justice to ensure that there are no more such victims in the future / by recognizing this ambivalence, we might define justice by the state of mind, the intention behind the action rather than the action itself / we might realize that the knife that caused wounds on his body was intended to heal something under the surface

marvel at the edens that we have made and the edens that have made us / ask ourselves, what if the fire isn't keeping us warm, but is burning us / aren't we better off telling our stories in a world of our own making

if most of the leaves keep themselves green, the tree is bound to be blissful / if the tree is blissful, birds of peace with wings of justice will come to roost on it and sing all the time / it won't be the final word because the universe is an endless story, but we may finally connect the words with the possibility of their meaning / and say - in earnest, without any hypocrisy- shanti shanti shantihi

~Ajay
10/12/2020