Pilgrim's Return

The Pilgrim's Return

It may be that the satisfaction that I need
Depends on my going away, so that when I've gone
And come back, I'll find it at home.
– Rumi



What if I called you in the middle of the night,
woke you, crying, telling you I must go
wandering searching seeking desperate pilgrim,
no time to plan the route or even the direction,
barefoot, penniless, backpacked,
taking with me only my notebook two pens one coat –
battered, of course, Army disposal,
festooned with the medals of late-night curries garlic sauce olive oil
and cheap, foul-tasting wine –
and the obligatory dented hip flask promising euphoria and oblivion?

What if I said, there's a hole in the middle of me,
that none of it works anymore?
The bread, the wine, the man on the cross –
he's too perfect, he can't touch me –
and there are no gods in the market
no magic in the dollar
the nuclear family
the quarter-acre three-bedroom home with two cars one dog and a mortgage –
it's all empty.
So what if I said I had to go?

I might scrawl you an incoherent poem,
crouching on the banks of the holy dirty river,
drinking the filth, the shit, the greasy ash,
the sacred sacred water,
screaming all night while Mother Ganges rips through my insides,
trying to tell you that the agony purges me.
This means something.

I might shout down a telephone line and you
would hear between the clicks whistles buzzes hollow silences
weeping, babbling, ecstatic despair,
half out of my head with starvation purification drunkenness and dysentery,
but still trying to tell you I'm getting there,
I'm fumbling around the edges of something real.

But there's still a hole in the middle of me.

There might be a crumpled, grimy envelope,
postmark smudged into obscurity by a hundred anonymous fingers,
containing only a single blurry photograph of me
shaven-headed hollow-eyed corpse-faced,
transported, transcended, trancelike,
flesh giving way to spirit, to soul.


And what if the weeks stretched out,
crept slyly into months, into years of silence,
no news, no calls, no letters, nothing to tell you where or if I am
maybe dead and rotting in a muddy roadside ditch,
maybe live and rotting in a stinking village hospital,
raving, staggering through crowded marketplaces,
glanced at fearfully, moved aside for,
howling at the bars and the four concrete walls
or simply broken on a wheel of inarticulate need?

And what if I returned to you with my eyes full of blood
my mouth full of ashes my throat closed over
with despair, with grief, with a thousand thousand
cries of denial sealed in behind thin-pressed lips,
enlightenment disillusionment sour on my breath like vomit,
self-knowledge, self-determination, self-awareness
snarled like elf-locks in my hair,
bony hands full of evasions, excuses, questions, promises
I could have I should have I meant to
it wasn't supposed to be like this
I will I can't I almost –
I almost –
whining, contemptible beneath my drunken half-mad sincerity,
hiding behind a curtain of hair reeking of sweat and stale incense,
clutching in my dirty,ragged-nail fingers
a bundle of scribbled-on train tickets, newspaper margins,
notebook pages, roadhouse menus, paper placemats, napkins, toilet tissue and tablecloths?

What if I said, there's still a hole in the middle of me?


And if I fell down at your feet
and the scraps and tatters of my satori
went floating down to lie in drifts about my knees
and I clung to your hands weeping, broken,
ruined body, maddened, wailing and desolate soul?

Would you still wrap your arms around me,
hold me,
let me come home to you?



Edit 26/10/11