WITH STRINGS ATTACHED

               

Puppets we are, in life as in death,

Try as we might, to be in positive health,

Ever wondered who decides who would depart

From the face of earth only to ride to heaven in a heathen cart?

We live as strangers in a world –

Devoid of meaning and purpose, as if sequestered

In a room without doors, where the only means of escape

Is lost amid struggles for existence, breathing over others’ nape,

The king and the beggar reside in this same room,

Where mortality reigns supreme which the heaven renders cool,

Because we step into this room in a state,

Shorn of glory, maybe sporting a bald pate,

And the Supreme Being embraces us with compassion,

Rendering the life lived before as a mere heat of passion.

Human eyes are the windows of the soul,

So they say, with exceptions of nature most ghoul

 If one delves deep into these ‘windows’,

One could see what he has which endures

Him to others and to himself too,

He has but one life to live as the others have told him so.

The emperor and the clown are but jesters

In the grand court where gods are the masters,

They hardly know when their lives on earth

Would culminate in order to keep aglow another hearth,

Men are but executors of their passions,

Hardly are they aware of their concomitant repercussions.

Women are victims of their own desires,

Hardly do they know to what extent they aspire,

People are trapped within the galaxy of their ambitions,

They do not think twice before letting go their inhibitions,

The cycle of life and death goes onward,

A metaphor which obviates all things considered otherwise hard,

We move in cyclical order, all ordinary mortals,

We cross our journeys on earth through hallowed portals,

Mortality is our ultimate destiny –

It’s hardly of any use to go into any mutiny.

The cycle of life goes on till we cross the bar –

We hav

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e kindred souls following the door kept ajar,

Civilization dawned after victory over our heathen counterparts,

It has divided up our lives keeping in mind the rule of the arts.

We cross the threshold with a smile –

To lighten up our journey through many a mile,

When we become denizens of the heavenly abode,

We’ve all left behind us a life wound by many a code.

Earthly existences act as anodynes –

To men who’ve soaked their lives in various enzymes.

When we cease to be humans anymore,

That’s to say, we’ve left all our bestialities of our core

To an earthen shrine, we become spirits,

So as to help others to usurp it,

Dust to dust, so our scriptures stipulate,

But shorn of outer glory, we’ve ourselves to mutilate,

All the physical objects, part of our lives,

Are but as redundant as an abandoned beehive,

Dressed as we are for our earthly sojourn,

We’d relinquish all our things which we’ve worn.

The prince and the pauper are on a level before the Almighty,

In the ultimate run, they are with objects scanty.

We cry as we enter the world and make others cry when we depart,

But has anyone wondered what happens in between, between cycles of life apart?

With or without strings attached, we continue to be mortals,

Men have struggled barely to raise voices in many ‘hartals’,

Women have also protested since the days of Joan of Arc,

They have tempted the first man holding many a bark,

Man and woman, each incomplete without the other,

They’d find each other one day, why bother?

It’s our lot to gape into the distance,

To await for those to return with a stoic stance,

We’ve been waiting for centuries for our men,

Men-in-arms, many have laid down their lives, O my brethren!

Had there been a way to resuscitate,

We’d have revived many lives lying in a state.

To round off, men achieve success through devotion,

To reiterate which would be a puerile notion.