Ganesha Poems—The Whispers, The Affair, The False Promises, The Breakup

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How it started with Ganesha

It must have started when I tried to guess what weather the water would be
It must have started when I orbited the mystic’s shop, the little owls, the onyx fingers
It must have started because I believed in her and sank deep into the freezing bath
It must have started when I finally let him go and watched the doorbell fixated on it never ringing again
It started when I heard the god’s name, before I said it over and over like a rosary
It started when I wandered up the stairs to the yoga studio, withholding my dollar for the mat
It started when I heard them scream from the solitary room in a brutal psych ward
It started because I moved to that metropolis with $2000 and hope like a trick bird that could sing
It started because I was born on a Monday and was fair of face
It started because I was precocious and sturdy, because I was Katchi’s little mouse
It started because I took a different route every morning, past the Polish church, past the playground on 2^nd Avenue
It started because I never knew how to love with humility and grace
It started because of a mythology that was also praxis and strategy
It started because of a story I told myself to get my solar plexus back
It started because of a shrine placed in my path
It started because I wanted more than starch and sex
It started because I didn’t trust the real world, anymore than I trusted the clock or Christ
It started because I had endured a catastrophe
It started because I refused to look around and take in their faces
It started because I trusted Om
It started because I needed something far out and non-rational, freakish
He caught me posing and it started
He caught me weeping and it started
He caught me with the crown of my head in his gaze and it started
It never stopped 

Captivity:  St. Vincent’s 2

I sit in a cell along corridors dimly lit
with florescent fizz, that smell of sulfur,
thorazine and milky-shock.
Across from me is a chair,
you might imagine that it
is leather and sumptuous but it is plain.
With the long night before me a voice said,
“Stay awake and read Norman’s book.”
My friend had brought me Camus.
And when I grew tired from the dim fizz
and the dark, the scary solitude,
the voice said “Then put on the light
and Ganesha will protect you while you sleep.”
So I slept without dreams, his light aglow.
His trick—I was protected by my captor
in my captivity. The elephant-headed god
was teaching me a lesson.

Ganesha Hates Me, Hates the Moon

Ganesh, that freakish deity, that lovable Barbar childish protector of puppeteers, thieves and fertility with your contradictions and your goad and your swollen belly of treats… who dost thou love? Is it your vanity and temper we must excuse oh cosmic Vedic champion of the wild?

You have been in me as a voice and dreams, you have threatened me and cursed me—“I’ll turn you into sausages!” like a dark cartoon in the New York night, have stalked me like a ghoul and bewildered me with charges, muttering, “You’re too expensive, you’re too expensive.” “Go take a lover, sit on the stairs with a lily…”

Yet how cheaply you threw me into prison to fast for you, all the while crackling through the walls, calling me “monumentally selfish” and your failed saint. Yet I bowed and chanted to you for a year, Ganesha, savored your name and its mysterious Sanskrit edge on my tongue. I learned your myth like the alphabetic remnants of a civilization I needed.

Why do you hate me so much?  Why do you hate the moon? Just because she giggled when you split your wide belly of treats? It’s a snake you used to pin it back up. Are you just lonely for a goddess’s love? Why would you throw your very own tusk at her, to make her shine less brightly?

All she did was giggle.

When you dream at night on your mouse, dream that you didn’t punish a devotee who loved you.  Dream of a better world. Dream that India is golden and Ghandi will always rule. Dream in technicolor that your temper may be restrained with reason and mercy.

For you are mad.

And how mad are the mighty?

The Gayatri Mantra

Om bhurbhuvahswaha tat saviturvarenyambhargodevasyadhimahidhiyoyo nah prachodayat.

Chanted on a pale blue mat in a yoga studio, windows overlooking 2^nd Avenue,
New York City. 
Divine mother grant us effulgent light, light and universal energy. 
Over 3000 years old.
The Sanskrit sounds like a mysterious spell. Vibrations from the crown to the
soles. Souls. 
Shakti energy. Chakras 7 of them. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, white.
Circles of energy. Energy from asanas. Pulsating the veins like ocean waves.
Ganesha taught me one of the oldest mantras in Hinduism.
I think it was to enlighten and purify my spirit. 
Om bhur, om bhuvah om swah—the Lokas, the Vedas…
The Lokas, the Vedas. And then, like a pool game, I whispered on
the music track: eight balls, eight balls, eight balls, indivisible by eight balls,
eight balls, freestyling it for my cover of T Rex/Marc Bolan’s Cosmic Dancer.
When there is a miracle it manifests in lessons and tricks—
how my forefinger tingled at the front door of Jivamukti—after
a year of desperate and earnest devotion
Stay outside today, it coaxed. You hear a story about a god:
it may be in your interest to listen or to run.
Drone of butterflies. Liquid fire. Ethereal magic. 
You gave me dreams Ganesh, oh my, the dreams you gave me.

Transformation

I’m not a Hindu, was never a Hindu.
I said, Hari om tat sat.
I said, Namaste to my yoga teacher and chanted the Gayatri mantra
the deity’s voice taught me, 6000 years old, to light.
The divine in me salutes the divine in you.
Was I a Hindu then?
Because I worshipped a Hindu god and bowed to him after every yoga class
& wore a white bindi sometimes as decoration, for my third eye,
in the middle of my brow like Indians do and it glowed a tear-shaped pearl. 

Yet I was not born a Hindu; I was baptized a Christian.
When the god got angry, he snarled, “What are you?” “Tell them what you are.”
“Are you a Christian or are you a Hindu?”
He was so angry at me for not lasting the night on the steps, voices swirled around in
the hospital where those in charge assign you to blank rooms,
Oh, Patanjali save me.
I left my fur hat in the cold as a penance for failing, failing to stay awake. 

Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha is what I chanted, in my mind, out loud, on lunch breaks,
in the yoga studio. I thought he would protect me, would remove obstacles, would
help me stay in the music world.
I believed in his myth wholeheartedly, like a child.
I was not told about his wrath.
I crawled on the cement, walked barefoot through the snow, could not fast, though
this was his exhortation.
“I will turn you into sausages!” the voice growled as I wandered down 9^th Street
with a pink lily as my magic wand.
They call it Bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, yet I told no one of my secret faith in Ganesha.
What is an American yogi who is taught the principles of ahimsa and detachment?
Who offers Krishna prasadam at Satsang
sweet offering of berries and cardamom?

Om, my mighty cleanser, strength, recovery, my song.
God, I let him in.
And he danced and pounded and dreamed,
a beautiful dream that turned sour.
Now I say the Lord’s prayer.
Now I am back to Christ and the blood of the cross.
His female/his male.
No more elephant-headed deity
who I adored…
And still I am that.
I must have been a Hindu.