Useless Deities

Photo: Moody Nature on one of my walks in the autumnal rain.

No one needs me.

Useless I am free.

No one needs dance.

I dance its irrelevance.

Useful Gods fulfil needs.

I seek useless Deities—

Apsaras* who lurk unseen

with their irreverent dance.

No one needs poetry.

It does not feed hunger.

My blood pulses in poetic chants

in the interstices between needs.

It fuels invocations of useless dance,

fashions my Body in alchemies

of incantations long abandoned

in the lustful march of neediness.

No one needs me.

No one needs my invocation.

I am free to meander

useless as birds and flies

and to find me in their choreographies

of irrelevant soul-igniting beauty.

-Padma Menon

*Apsaras are the archetypal dancer-Deities who are the stewards of invocatory dance.