Nimal Dunuhinga
Samsara
My Friends In Samsara
This dreary unending tunnel
One day I searched for them.
Nobody was there.
I was so sad
Another day I pursued them again.
All were there except me.
Title. Double click me.
Night school in the lower depths
"Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school”
— George Ade (American Journalist, Writer and Playwright. 1866-1944)
The drug addict TEACHER comes with a book of pornography
And sits on a desk showing her underpants, half drunk.
"Hey! You idiot clean the black board."
The idiot stumbles with the mature students as his equals:
Quarters, Dimes, Nickels and pennies and he cleans it it seems..
Then the teacher asked him to write a sad but CORRECT sentence.
'No chalk.' 'Then bring it SOON.' He went
to the next door pub and had a gulp of cheap liquor, returned
with a piece of chalk. He wrote: I skipped
my golden school days and went to the movies,
ran behind the stars to get their signatures.
Now I learn from my mistakes
how to sign myself.
Title. Double click me.
An English Class in a Lunatic Asylum
'My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me; and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my father's hand. I and my father are one.'
And he comes to the blackboard and writes: 'I am a man;
I am a woman. My name is John;
the surname is Ann. In the garden of my rickety
soul I grow plants and my holey pocket is not so
full of fertilizer, SORRY
I urinate on the roots. Flowers bloom in an off-season
Someone came and plucked them all? Leaving
a NOTE in the wheelbarrow.
THANK you my gardener..............
Flowers do not belong to the Earth
But precisely to a higher place in the sky!'
Title. Double click me.
Why all this childish quarrelling as in an uppish parliament?
Some prefer nettles and some
drink their own urine as medicine.
You should read Charles Bukowski's poem, 'A Man'
Totally a blank, but I would prefer another one of his best
regarding the ridiculous Man.
All the Bosses in the World still firmly believe
That one plus one equals eleven?
Human behaviour is very strange, some
good husbands hate broccoli at home
But outside they praise it a lot!
Brother and sister, there are things to quarrel
With whom I do not know?
For an example take a needy family of a dozen
With few bread crumbs dipped in water they fulfill
their kinky bowels
And in their shack no ROOMS, parents
undress and do their fundamental exercises in front of the children
Some are awake at midnight
What a sad EVENT?
Title. Double click me.
When My Geography Teacher Draws the French Alps on the Blackboard?
She could draw maps nicely and once
she said: 'Here are the French Alps.'
I was not interested in mountains in those days but was
mesmerized by her magical smile! O those dimples on both her cheeks
when she smiled. Once a week my usual routine was to be put out of class
without cause. Probably my mysterious looks at her?
When I was in the port of Marseilles in France,
a French lady walked along the pier
towards the yacht harbour. I had just came down the ship's gangway
with a cigarette in my mouth. And she smiled at me
with dimples on her cheeks that dragged me back
into Geography class. I verified the French Alps
with a stevedore near by. 'O it's far away' he said annoyingly!
I had a sad nostalgic feeling. How far I was from my motherland.
It haunts me everywhere in the same manner
being an alien in this unknown World.
Title. Double click me.
She is very fragile, so handle her very carefully
Life provokes all the time and the man
in the netting stings when touched like nettle.
He gets a partner for his solitary pilgrimage
And she seems to be tangible or at least capable of rough weather.
Otherwise this whole mysterious life would be like a sore.
She's like a sister to him and sometimes a lover.
She advises as a mother does, so please strum her soft heart string carefully
Then hear the melody that tiptoes along with you on this tiresome journey.
Title. Double click me.
An Autumnal Frenzied Dream
'Hey! Chum leave that sleepless graveyard shift
You are too old now and you said that you have a guard license?
Let's go to some Ghost Town where there's a Gold mining project.
They hurriedly search for SECURITY guards and offer a handsome salary.
And many more benefits with health INSURANCE?
You'll get an opportunity to cure YOUR nagging sciatica too!
By the way, secretly you can collect gold dust! '
The dark fellow murmured like a ghost
And I saw his upper golden denture glitter.
In the morning I told my beloved wife that I had an idea
to work in a Gold mine. She said: 'O no, you are allergic to gold
That's why our jewelry is still in the pawn shop
And not yet REDEEMED? '
And she cried secretly.
Title. Double click me.
The Child Housekeeper
"A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them."
—Victor Hugo
Paintings of kisses on the walls
Music and Wine flow on the Veranda
The rich Lady stands beside the Manor's pillar.
The orphan boy who polishes the Mahogany floor that turned
into a real mirror. In the mirror
he smiles and nobody knows that he's poor. On the long table
the maid servant prepares the dishes for breakfast.
Toasted bread, Strawberry jam, butter, ham and bacon
Shiny knives and transparent napkins. Still wearing pyjamas
The bearded baron comes with his pet dog that wags its tail.
The boy thinks that he is the only dog in this huge world.
All Poems Copyright © by 2015-2017 by Nimal Dunuhinga All rights reserved
Title. Double click me.
You can read more of Nimal's poems in an earlier issue of The Quiet American, entitled: 'The Venomous World.'
Samsara is a Buddhist term that literally means "continuous movement" and is commonly translated as "cyclic existence", "cycle of existence", etc. Within Buddhism, samsara is defined as the continual repetitive cycle of birth and death that arises from ordinary beings' grasping and fixating on a self and experiences. Specifically, samsara refers to the process of cycling through one rebirth after another within the six realms of existence, where each realm can be understood as either a physical realm or a psychological state characterized by a particular type of suffering. Samsara arises out of avidya (ignorance) and is characterized by dukkha (suffering, anxiety, dissatisfaction). In the Buddhist view, liberation from samsara is possible by following the Buddhist path. — from Wikipedia
Title. Double click me.
Title. Double click me.
Nimal Dunuhinga is a poet and freelance writer. He was a seaman for 15 years. Originally from Sri Lanka, he currently resides in the United States.
He says: "All my loved ones have supplied me with the ingredients to enrich this life's bitter-cake. I am not a scholar, just a sailor, but I learned a few things from the school of life. I found that man does not belong to anybody, any race, or to any religion. He is an independant and non-descript mammal."
"The heaviest burden he carries is his brain."