speechless

Every now and then I think I see a shadow

stop between the flowers.

Where is the death of the moths ?

Is it in the external form of the flames ?

The last words of a leaf are not spoken hence they are words.

There is space everywhere to come and go.

That’s all there ever is in the end.

Everything becomes insignificant because they are significant.

To return back to the moving of the breath is the last anchor.

There is not even the slightest vibration.

The heron breaks the stilled mirror with its beak.

The wind brushes a droplet spilled on its smooth feathers.

You taste what it has tasted.

Even though you have not moved an inch.

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Flat Line

There is woodsmoke rising in the distant.

A small thread of manifestation.

The same energy that mixes pastel shades

of an artist.

How is it that it separates to where it came from ?

To the nature when we blink an eye.

When an infant feeds on the breast of his mother.

When we smile at each other over the brink of our tea cups

or to a simple sight of a bursting sunset ?

This

Just felt like loving you today
when I had nothing to offer
from the trees in my garden
where they’ve taken my every flower.

Just felt like looking at you today
when the emptiness of things
filled my muscles and bones
which I’ve given up as offerings.

Just wanted to sit like you today
and breathe in the scent of the stars
that sometimes roam the earth
in firefly bodies.

Didn’t mean to wet my eyes today
at the things I saw,
how even the floor in my room
turned out to be the most beautiful.

Shape of Silence

At the mouth of two rivers.
These feet that have carried me
are not aware of the skies above.
There is an extra wink in the stars tonight.
As if mocking me.
Mocking this pain that is a flat line now,
infront of me that sometimes
takes the shape of a lone mallard.

There is no telling
what silence is made of.
But I know just this now.
What is beating inside me
is the sound
of my own two wings to fly.

White mountain

blowing on my tea
hands gentle
around a tin cup
hoping I can sip the summer
and be with the falling leaves

feasting
on pine needles
I drink in the gathas ;
I’ve forgotten to beg for food
and the blossoms keep falling

so alone up here
I startle
hearing my own laugh
this attachment to solitude
is so good

how soon
the night sinks
behind the trees
as if the perfumed plums
is the land of the Buddhas

***Haiku Presence
Issue 56 (October 2016)***

Actually living — Mindfulbalance

If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead,…

via Actually living — Mindfulbalance

Pink dusk.
The sky has many layers of blues.
A cross between a girl’s and a boy’s
patchwork quilt.
How innocent is karma ?
My mind is an unmoving needle
drawing a flat line.
The clouds flow slowly
dragging away the causes.
A troy train
filled with silly fluffy animals and horny humans.
It’s the birds that are chasing each other
in the distant sky.
The effects are zero.
I feel nothing.
Just a silly needle with no sense of geometry.
Horrible line.

© Malintha Perera 2016

The mist is just right
to be fed into the mouths of the trees.
How many sentient beings must be hungry ?
Yet
there is a filled hollowness
in the depths of the mountain cliffs
and it’s the silence that moves
inside the incense smoke
that is insatiable
like a belly
deep in the three worlds.

© Malintha Perera 2016

flowers take up the space     within me
to such an                 extent
so much so that when I walk along the path
i get
lost
inside the flat lands
touching so many wild flowers

i don’t mean to          carry so much of their scent with me
I keep reminding myself that they are my
emptiness
that whispers so many teachings
that I can overlook the weeds that have grown within me
that this ache I feel
is nothing
compared to the fullness of things

© Malintha Perera 2016

The rain has gone.
It has pulled away my words along with it.
I’m left to dry on a chair
looking at nothing.
My hand has drawn nonsense
on the notebook
of mated lines and circles.
I have ruined many pages.
I have searched
for a nameless self.

© Malintha Perera 2016

Leafing through the speechless trees.
They have stopped turning
the sense around.I stop at the openings.
Space
within           space

freeing               chains.
A bee’s wing.
Water tongues
lapping    void.

The light is a formless   spray
sprinkling on my face.

Making me squint.

Reminding me
to smile.

poem and image © Malintha Perera

it is the least I want
but
the perfect place I want it to be
the snakes have long faded
this flower in bloom is ready to burst in to thousands of petals
kundalini
rising
this matter of atoms
who would have thought
this existence
with cosmos
is just a crack
within a void
of a cell
inside where galaxies of jewels
shine
mirroring each other
a quilt of patched up colours
of planets and stars

the crown opens
we are one

© Malintha Perera 2016

Image : https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MalinthaPerera/posts/NTNSzgXuzin?pid=6253638787475405858&oid=109279372830689552349

To see a butterfly
taking off from an open flower.
You become it.
Neither the flower nor the butterfly.
You are that moment
that get released from both.
An invisible
spring
uncoiling.
A bubble
swelling
bursting.
It is unbearable.
So      fleeting.
You cannot capture the feeling.
And then
………….you forget.

© Malintha Perera 2016

how much can the moon take ?
sometimes it’s the mountains that swallows it
sometimes the sea make a silvery juice
even the trees make a kebab
and we say so many things of it
making it half
so many slices
so ignorant
when actually it is just
itself
no matter what
…………a very ball moon© Malintha Perera 2016

as I move
on to the tip of my nose
they surface with gills made of spoons
stirring the broth they live in
no wonder I can’t see the bottom

this neon identity
from    surface to    surface
a flamboyant centipede

my breath makes  beads
nose tip against nose tip

staring at each other
facing so many
I put my hand against the facade

and distorts my own self
looking
in to me

Image and poem © Malintha Perera 2016