The Shambling Fellow Poem by Muhammad Shanazar

I neither smoke nor drink sippingly,
Nor eat sweeping essence of flowering puppies,
Nor ever tasted the potion of hemp green,
Nor I have cancerous tumors in the brain.

I was thrown from the lofty zones,
Down deep headlong into the dungeon,
Dark narrow subterranean round cave,
Darker it grew at each moment of the down fall,
And journeying against the culminating heights.

Beholding behind nothing except horror I felt,
Only I could see a circular patch of the blue sky,
Then the dark channel began tuning at last,
To the right with imperceptible slow bend,
And I soon came out gasping of the deep tunnel.

In front then I saw the houses small and white,
Painted not afresh, extended left and right,
Numerous congested like a city inhabited thickly,
Smokeless, clear and with no profanity of the noise,
Tranquil like village in the days of harvest.

Like a swallow I darted from roof to roof
With light movements,
Much speedier than the flight of a hawk,
And soon I saw a slim tall damsel standing,
Awaiting, anxious in the middle of a yard,
Beside the two children, playing in silence.

Ah! Then a sable thought confounded my heart,
And irresolute frail mind with weak intents;
Overpowered by immodest possessing lust,
And with overhasty dart, suspending the sense of piety,
I made an instant leap to realize the desire.

Landed in the yard, subduing shrieking voices,
In front of those deep blue inviting eyes,
And red-brown face wreathed with smiles,
I seized her from the arm left; she turned the face aside,
Stretching a thin covering of gauze between.

Then whispered she a secret blushingly,
A thing hopeful, indicating my own woeful follies,
“Be not impatient, restless, no one would step,
Into the yard, though very small,
Immodest longings cause decline headlong,
Spoiling life long endeavours to rise.”

When this broke I felt ashamed on finding,
Stinging serpents and devouring dragons,
Biting into the neck of my shambling fellow,
In rags, drooping with feeble faltering legs,
Wriggling in vain to uncatch the firm grips.

Note: This poem is purely based on a spiritual experience, and nothing else. In my life I passed though a certain period (from 1992 to 1998) when I often felt a sort of titillating sensation and something dispatching from my physical body and flying with all sensations and consciousness, into the distant corners of the universe, beyond imagination where I observed other worlds much vaster than ours, saw spirits of the diseased men and women, often I had a chat with them, revealing mysteries. My poem is a narration of the same experience and it is not merely a vain imagining; I have evaded myself from exaggeration; I put my case to the psychiatrists, and spiritualists for comments and criticism, the poem also contains a substance for the cosmologists.