I Got Lost

I got Lost....

Crammed into a thousand tiny spaces
by a million different faces,
getting off the tube at Oxford St
during early Christmas shopping...
everyone walking like penguins to the beat,
swept along, crushing dreams under timeless feet;

After a while i simply felt emotionally exhausted...
so I let the meeting go,
as I was an hour late anyway,
and walked around the back streets for a while,
soaking up the late October air,
full of its drinking house ambiance,
intermixed with the changing guard,
the dash of late shoppers,
mingling with the retreating business folk.

I wandered into Embassy lane, and sat quietly,
in front of a 13th century Indian cloth batik,
depicting the dance of the adoration of Krishna.
The walls full of prints from India;
and felt my energy come back into balance...
in that quiet space,
the silence in the Unity of Grace.

Two Prints in particular took my eye,
one, 'longing during the monsoon season',
full of peacocks, and blue waterfalls,
seemed like a song on the wall...
so i headed back home, alone,
singing it in my minds eye,
as the memory of that place,
passed me bye.

Time winnows us all through its great sieve,
and Shiva's dance destroys even the fleeting memories,
wrapped up in past joys,
and tied in the bow of contentment.
All that's left us are the token gestures in a stream,
passing endlessly before us.

A tipple from a draft of the ever fluid past,
slipping in sips, through the rivulets of your mind.
When even memories, become mixed and mingled,
will you still recall the moment of our calling?

or..., like the passing throng,
washed endlessly along,
will the memory simply pass you by,
swept aside, Lost...
like all those feelings, laughed or cried,
until at last, I too become lost,
a remnant of the past, an unremembered cost.

© Richard Michael Parker 2009