rain

with the tiniest glare, the lights form human figures wailing against the liquid mist. here, i sit, abbreviated, past midnight, with fingers counting long lonely days. between sighs i forage history, between numbers i create perfect memories in order to exist here, now. but, without  proper burial,  the secret of my darkness thrashes in silhouettes against my will. my perfect memories tipping over exposing open wounds that ooze empty gestures. here, i assimilate with the brutal silence in the corner.

the city

"I begin to think there's nothing i can do: like the city, i belong to the living dead, i am a corpse that still breathes, a wretch condemned to walk the streets and pavements that can only remind me of my filth and my defeat" (Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City)

caution

the street lights walk past me. the pavement glows with a hint of red. you echoed my name softly, delicately, honestly, faithfully, insistently, obsessively,  hollowly, elongating the promise. this shallow thought hums suggestively. but it wasn't my name, but the sun descending, burning me, in the name of caution.

moving on

let's move beyond self-pittance and acknowledge the punctured ego
in the middle of seaweed, deep and shiny
i can hardly move

can't seem to sleep

memory distracts the pen and now the paper is cluttered with jagged edges

figs and lovers

old lovers will be old lovers
will be broken hearts on a pavement
expanding on a bed of dementia
silhouette's on a postcard
watering graves
a fig on a tree branch in the middle of winter

love

 gentle hands cross to stroke the sunlight cradling your eyes. sinking letters narrate secret sorrows at dusk.  feverish hope rises with the clinking of glasses against the nestled moon. the words, the letters, the sounds become a frail attempt to fill in the absence, your place. it's a jarring heatless silence and i'm sorry for my abruptness, but this absence always returns in blackness, insistently invading.

loss

what can we do with loss but try to find it, pronounce it. roll the rs even when the word is already gone beyond the procession of fences, the frightened warriors, the dried tongues, and the honeyed pews. seek familiarity with all the breathless sensations invoked--the candid scriptures, the missing hands, and the secrets of the gleaming ice.

this artifice, fully framed, picture-perfect, is always intentional.

words

i often think i'm losing words, that they are somehow trailing behind me, until i'm honest with myself and admit that those words were never mine.

a confession

i think of you, not often, but often enough. the thoughts diffuse like a broken string of beads moving down the staircase you may be descending or ascending. the beads fall nonchalantly in a linear manner, aligned and rhythmic, into an amorphous space. i delude my self with an illusive familiarity: you are alone, of course. the beads have disappeared. at the precipice, surely you think of me, too. the walls are narrower than i first perceived. we disperse facts and anecdotes. since we are on equal footing now, i have to confess that i am now thinking of death and you must be too. it is the epicentre of this building--floating, gliding, metamorphosing, alive. nothing can reverse its movement. my angst arises and i begin to falter; you are now difficult to read, you always were. i notice the brown creaks, the evasive dust, loose hair, broken hairpin, torn note, and muddied foot prints on the stairs. none belong to you.

Solitariness

 At times solitariness edges towards narcissistic solipsism, cornering oneself to escape the gaze of the other, the gaze that is always looking elsewhere.

I came across this eloquent, and helpful quotation by Paul Auster:

"Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else."

Though retreat, for me, is at times only wishful.

re-turn

amidst dark lashes and lilac shades the thought re-emerges like a firing-squad; the wooden fences i`ve built are as kind as unrequited love.

survival tip # 1

on the slippery scroll, inch toward the gap right below the musky moon, fill it with madness, horror, and profanities, then tiptoe away

what is the poetry of existence?

a construction of temples for and without the 'other'.

this day

the day announces itself over and over and over again, a nauseous turn spiraling and sinking, but i cannot hear it, feel it,  maybe, but for me it has yet to begin

just write

i can't "just write" when the sun is weeping at my fingertips.  i must first handle the carcass of words melting at my touch.

in the middle

all the lights are out. while we know that the life we construct is partly a grand fictional race between life and death that inevitably leaves sun-stained skid marks ; yet, it is guided by real people and events that provide some sort of stability, comfort, and meaning. with that said, i just had a monumental revelation--monument in ruins is more accurate--that i must disparage, diminish, decry, and desert my illusions that are not only empty, hollow, saccharine, but pathetic. i find myself an unwanted, hypersensitive beetle mangled in a spider's web in a bottle thrown off-track in the middle of self-otherness.

seamstress

it's not my place to comment or insist that your silence has left a mark, figuratively, of course, at first, but it has, somehow, climbed its way to the exterior flesh. you can stand there innocently with your hands in your shallow pockets and a half smile creaking, slowly, creepily, momentarily. you must know that you got me all wrong, i think. now, your blade-like silence is intoxicating, itinerant, illuminating, and irritating. i look around at the debris, notably the spectre of an echo in a torn note and unanswered letters, and hear the shrieking of moving chairs above and the melodic sound of a distant bird, realizing c'est mon histoire that needs some darning. you interlace your slim fingers and glance at the camera. charming. there must be an epistemological distance between us forcefully instituted by my incapacity to weigh my words, or, more accurately, to tame my cascading, ambulatory imagination. i'm certainly lying and untying a sinner's spinning story. 

waiting

worried, agitated, anxious, forlorn, empty. this specious waiting is enervating. but, i must forget, move on, begin anew. i'm now on my own, completely alone. i must produce work to gain some self-respect and meet approaching deadlines.