Trapped in Time

We are so trapped, the trappings have become us

We wear it, speak it and have become it

Children of history, yet it is the now that has its stranglehold on us

The trappings woven so many times over

Glued to the skin, and penetrating beneath

No difference between the trappings and the trapped

It’s like the scaffolding that has folded into the building

If being thus trapped is the human condition

And every attempt to escape only tightens the web

And the best of human intentions

With rhetoric of escape and freedom

With vain repetitions and rituals

Present only mirages of liberation

Then how is one to live? How is one to get out?

With no religion, no ideology, no state, no god able to detrap!

What should the self do? How should it be free?

What about the self’s journey inwards

Penetrating, piercing, meticulously making past every layer of trapping

Reaching beneath to touch one’s skin, one’s flesh, one’s very bone

And even the marrow below!

Flesh meets flesh – the touch, touched and the toucher merge

Don’t let any fool’s rhetoric confuse you, nor be foolhardy

It is only in that moment of self-touch can one see the beyond

The beyond of the self and the trappings

And in that sight, one flies, leaving the trappings behind