Empty Dreams Poem by Padma Devkota

We are a race of soul-gazers who
with closed eyes visualize the Truth.
We are the pride of our ancestors
who lived a dream and passed on their legacy:
"Life is just a dream! "
We worship Time.
We fondle no future nor reject the past,
but focus on our goal:
To merge with the cosmic dust at last.

We marvel that they relentlessly attempt
to explain, to control, to improve
life and the world.
We know that they err in their thinking
of consciousness as the child of the brain.
We laugh at their attempts and our selfies are sweet!
Sweet as the stuff of all empty dreams!
We delight when the Google assistant replies
in a sober voice of a know-all femme:
"That question makes me a little self-conscious."
And we go for the spandex, the smart bulb,
the robot vacuum and the like
with increasing hunger for we enjoy such dreams
unaware of how reality changes
from the ethereal heavens to the solid rocks,
weakening our conviction that the inward gaze
must be the best of all.

We wait to be united with you,
O, Ocean of Life!
O, Source of all our wisdom and all our stupidity!
(This too is an empty dream!)
We long to fall from this emptiness
into that dark void where you reside,
where all empty songs of emptiness are sucked in
after the breath's event horizon of no return.