Magnitude of disorder

"I believe that life can go on forever. It takes a million years to evolve a new species, ten million for a new genus, one hundred million for a class, a billion for a phylum -- and that's usually as far as your imagination goes. In a billion years, it seems, intelligent life might be as different from humans as humans are from insects. But what would happen in another ten billion years? It's utterly impossible to conceive of ourselves changing as drastically as that, over and over again. All you can say is, on that kind of time scale the material form that life would take is completely open. To change from a human being to a cloud may seem a big order, but it's the kind of change you'd expect over billions of years."

Freeman Dyson, physicist (b. 1923)

Fragment #13

Drip-dripping under the elm trees

after the storm

lashed words scattered

amid the branches

tip-toeing deer

amidst the wreakage

what can be salvaged

and the silence

the silence after the fury

its echo wreaking havoc

the forest not unscathed

to be healed someday

to be whole again

yet different

such was the force of the storm

such is the rage of the silence

which will last

subdued, hidden

behind what the content traveller

expects to hear.

Fragment #12

Last night, I went down in history

as the first man to go down in history for

nothing more than going down in history

just as history had just stopped.

Brought back to Life

Today, my class had a test.

A simple test. On everything they'd learnt

this past year.

They prepared for this for two weeks.

Most, if not all, were ready.

And as I was looking at them,

going about the rows,

Amid the scratching and the sighing,

I knew that at one point

Life would happen to them.

I knew that at some stages

they would be as drunk as a skunk,

they'd be harassed,

laughing till they'd hurt,

they'd fall in love and have their heart broken,

they'd yell at someone, for next to no reason,

they'd have kids, be happy, separate,

divorce, cry and pray for themselves,

or for someone they love,

or for someone who's gone,

or about to.

I knew they'd all know their bit of shamefulness,

their awkward moments,

their flashes of treachery, of deceit,

of contrition, absolution, desperation.

I knew that most of them would never be ready for this,

but on the other hand no one is ever ready for life.

Life just happens,

quicker than lightning,

bitterer than the bitterest lemon,

sweeter than the sweetest kiss,

yet Life is that most precious thing

which ever happens to us along the way.

I also knew that they'd come to love and hate it,

to protest against its manifold proofs of injustice,

to groan under the buffets,

but in the end I knew they'd realise that,

as I was going about the rows,

as they were answering questions

for an ultimately stupid test,

years from now,

they'd smile and remember this bit of their lives

as one of those engaging moments when

all things are vested with a different shade of life

with so many layers of meanings and interpretations

that

after the soberness, the drunkenness, the elation,

the disappointments, the breaking and the healing,

the mess and the bringing back to the surface

Life would essentially be the same

for each and every one of us,

though time changes and levels,

come what may,

perspectives be grim or endearing,

life would be, all things weighed,

all paths considered,

such a mighty gift that

it'd be sheer madness to spoil such an opportunity.

Pated writer

"Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté."

Margaret Atwood, novelist and poet (b. 1939)

Smile

smile when the wind comes

smile when the storm blows

smile when the typhoon roams

smile when the hurricane bellows

these are just transient phases of the flesh

much like the moon that waxes and wanes

– make this weathered country your own desh –

– do not endure the elements like so many banes –

smile when the skin is furrowed

smile when Man your ego berates

smile when rage is rearing its ugly head

smile when the pit of the stomach pulsates

these are just transient phases of the self

much like the sea that ebbs and flows

– erosion levels even the deepest coastal shelf –

– turn always toward the sentiment that glows –

smile when the fog smothers you

smile when the word hurts

smile when life stabs you through

smile when the blood spurts

these are just transient phases of the frame

much like time that goes back and forth

– no action will ultimately bring glory or shame

– no man can ultimately alter your worth

so smile, smile when the rain pours

smile when the sun shines

smile, crawling on all fours,

smile, when the bell chimes

Destroyer

None will ever claim to have destroyed me.

None has ever cast me underfoot.

None has ever dared raise their hand on me

or hurl words meant to hurt.

I am no weakling.

I am not one to fidget.

I am not one to budge

nor am I one to prostrate.

I am not one to show a weakness

for I have none.

None will ever harness

what will always be one.

I can play with my foes

and my lovers alike

in the fashion of felines,

I can swallow their bones

or just leave them in stacks,

stripped of their very import,

for I have power beyond measure,

for I have wrath beyond reckoning,

for I am a destroyer.

If this be the verse, this be the news

"It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

William Carlos Williams, American poet and physician (1883-1963)

Fragment #11

Your smile, in the half-light of the drowsy bedroom,

discernible in the thin shaft slanting through the louver,

is like a sleeping dragon,

breathing slowly through a century-long sleep,

never has sun shone through jalousies with such passion.

Corps

 

Corps-sujet (corps-je-ils-nous-tu)

Corps-dépendant-à-corps-défendant

Corps à corps

Corps-décor(um)

Corps-frontière (corps-Schengen)

Corps-fierté-corps-lié

Corps-re-source

Corps-ex-sculpture

Corps-citadelle (corps-Samarkand)

Corps-action-(axiome)

Corps-à-dessein

Corps-armé-pétition

Corps-ouvert-fermé

Corps-si-leste-céleste

Corps-cœur-de-pierre

Corps-de-contact

Corps-détruit-intact

Corps-sain-produit

Corps-vigile (corps-musée)

Corps-étendard

Corps-de-principe

Corps-muet (corps-secret)

Corps-sacré-corps-fin-en-soi

Corps-centre-O

Tea-time

Tea has – and always will

be – spelt with an 'L'.

Why, you ask me,

quite rightfully?

The reasons are dead simple:

because it can serve as

a handy looking-glass,

because it may also be a well

with which you may your thirst quell,

but 'tis also a book by the fire

or a meal when times are a-dire,

'tis a long-lost child,

a brat you can't chide,

'tis a feisty woman on your knees,

a pouty Gill who says: “Pretty please?”

'tis a radiant Sunday afternoon

or a masked haiku by the moon;

tea is a deer throttled by a hound,

tea is midnight's fog on Edin's Mound,

tea is the books you'll never read,

tea is the crumbs and the birds you feed,

tea is a plane's fastened seatbelt –

that's why it can't but be spelt

on Earth, in Heaven and in Hell,

with anything but an 'L'.

I left a copy of this piece sellotaped on a concrete pillar in the Looking-Glass Bookshop in Edinburgh (fine place which I strongly recommend for the quality of the books, the warm welcome, the ready-for-anything spirit and the taste of tea I had there). There may be differences in the punctuation (same for the dating of the writing...my memory doesn't work wonders) and I originally left the title to be added by any potential reader, but it is essentially the same.

The fight

"Why bother? We have enough

Cans to last us a siege

And water to have us laugh

At the very face of the liege!

There is no darkness we fear

There is no man that can us bend.

As long as we live we will leer

As long as we breathe there is no end.

They will see, those barbarians,

What it takes to be a man,

And to feel every human sentiment,

What it takes to shoot a man,

What it is to have delicacy and nuance,

What you earn by curbing your essence.

What they are, as they stand behind our walls,

Is beastly, coarse, and unlikely to make us fall."

Double dash

Like a dash of spilt dark tea

Over the bright tabled glazing

I run my lucid dreams over and over

Until they seem dry and exhausted

And then the real story begins

"Know no fear."

She awoke with a start,

They were all there, still

Stilled. They would, eventually

Remain here and rot.

Mouth agape and contorted hands.

Wounds ope on the innards,

Discreetly yet unashamedly.

"Know no fear."

She breathed in and out,

And resolutely gripped

The broken handle of her jagged knife.

 

To the line

Journeying to the line

Unembarrassed by desire

Or hatred, or vindictiveness,

Or gain, or fear, or shame,

we went on, seeking not adventure

Nor meaning to obey orders

Or do our abscond duty

Nor driven by the will to conquer,

We were there as chance willed,

By some fluke of fate,

Owing to a long and serpentine

Chain of events no one governed

We went on because we thought

Liberty was a woman.

Fragment #22

Things need to come to an end

-- however ugly it may be --

for as things now stand,

my life goes by horribly.

The Tattoo

Covering her entire back

The intent artist is putting

The finishing touch to his masterpiece

Never had tattoo been so revealingly beautiful.

The girl had been thinking and designing

Her tattoo for the best part of ten years.

It had taken him a full week to catch her intention

And another to train his wrist to the perfect movement.

Now is the time to prove his mettle.

And the girl had fever breaking after the first three hours,

And they have to do it in one sitting,

No other option, nothing else matters.

It is obviously painful. And the level of detail is boring into her skin.

In about an hour, this girl will have,

Etched onto her back, into her soul,

The greatest overcast one ever saw,

Down to the smallest, darkest billow.

The music rang

The music rang deep into her mind

Made every inch of her skin quiver

The tip of her teats were so hard

Eyes closed, swaying to the sheer vibrations from the speakers

As if she were thrown away

And riveted to the spot

Fractalled into infinity

Like a raindrop

On a corrugated iron roof.

After the fury

The bird hopped from crack to crack

Past the commotion, the rush,

The rot, the stench,

Under that steel arch,

Looked at the towering giants

Belching thunderous bellows

And was gone, in an instant,

Into the soaring, unaffected air.

Food would be gotten

After the fury had died down.

The relevant fall

They all saw him fall to his death down twenty floors

They all thought at once of what they did that day

So that they could remember it all and tell the neighbours

Their own sadder version of the story of that fateful day

They saw a guy fall to his death down twenty floors.

She looked down at him

She looked down at him

His face buried in pillows

And then out the window

Darkness were spreading

Like squid's ink in a fishbowl

The smell of soot in her nostrils

Made her frown and scoff

She needn't look down again

To see him look up to her

And watch his face fall apart

In a million million pieces.

Suitcase in hand

 

Suitcase in hand

He follows the hollow

On the side of the road

Spatters of mud

On the hem of his trousers

Perhaps brought back

From a hundred miles off

Where he was at a few days ago

He realises now he was happy there

Watchful, horrified but content

The barrel of his gun emptied

In a haystack alive with possibilities

Of murder, revenge, hatred.

Memory lapse

[Ten days in Edinburgh at the Jazz and Blues festival, and raw here I hand over whatever I wrote. I will publish each and every piece in a separate entry, chronologically but starting back in time, like retrieving my footsteps in the sand.]

A melancholy face, 

seen through the flitting

window of a surprising

train booming on a race

in the opposite direction,

brought to a tired mind,

years later, as a friend

breaks out the information

of an orderly quietus,

both sat on the edge

of a bed facing the ledge

of the window, like statues

ready to recover from the salt,

her face ebbing away

as the memory of that day

quietly comes to a halt,

finally acquiring a meaning

long sought and deferred,

as that the moment conferred,

duly timed to the awakening,

probably hidden all this long

in the fold of the bed-sheet,

in the cold of the slanting sleet,

or in the iridescence of the sun --

which ought to have been seen

years before on that train

thundering through sun and rain

glowing on that face's dull sheen.

 

Can't live with, can't live without

 

"[L]e lien qui attache l'individu à la société est tellement puissant que, même dans la soi-disant “société des individus”, ces derniers sont si peu capables de prendre leurs distances avec les entraînements collectifs que, spontanément, ils consentent à l'anéantissement de ce à quoi ils tiennent le plus : la liberté."

Daniel Cérézuelle, Écologie et liberté. Bernard Charbonneau, précurseur de l'écologie politique, Parangon, 2006, p. 21.

Mocking

You and I met on a rainy day

much like today

and your eyes were telling me

that you already loved me.

I didn't believe them.

And the cars swoosh past us

unmindful of us.

No chirp can be heard

for all the birds

have flown away,

hiding from the grey.

And sleep always comes late

and dreams hardly ever sate –

then you told me you could salvage

me from the ruins of an age.

That you could change this wasteland

of a heart just by holding my hand.

I didn't believe you.

Morning is mocking us, rain is mocking us,

laying on the windows behind many a buss –

When they consort to slur the moment

They never fail to disappoint.

You told me that one could love as many times

as you did and true it might happen sometimes,

that I was one of a million

and I could find no reason

to believe you.

A broken gutter somewhere is dripping rain

and my feelings are going down that same drain –

arms at the side, helpless, I watch time pass by,

dreading this greeting as much this goodbye.

With parting lips you tell of the beauty of death

and you can tell I am taking my breath,

smooth breathing in a soothing hell

and now the gods are mocking us as well.

And I don't know you as well as I wish

yet methinks this you do relish.

– I don't believe you.

And the gods we believe in never fail

to ignore us yet we suffer their bale,

day in, day out, until the end of our time,

guilty and innocent of a known crime.

And you tell me we can still make amends,

though you slept with two of my friends.

And you tell me to have faith in love,

that there's no feeling love can't fly above.

But I don't believe you.

I don't believe you,

for your eyes say something different

for the rain clinging, indifferent,

to your hair says that the day has ended,

that you can stop all that you pretended,

for I don't believe you.

And you have broken me down

without so much as a frown,

with a half-veiled scorn,

here, on this wet morn,

with your wonted absence

of finesse and elegance.

And yet, even now, standing crushed

in the rain with all sounds hushed,

looking at your wanting smile

I don't believe your guile.

You may disguise your sentiments

as well and as much as you want,

you may hide your nature

and come out as another,

you may mock everyone

into believing you're a man,

but being tried and true,

I don't believe you.

And you had better leave me then and there

in the middle of the rainy nowhere,

for nothing can change either you or I

or make us believe each other's lie –

both spent before this affair even started,

both broken before we even parted,

mocking the stars and the promises

and the hollow and the artless kisses,

and you had better bid me adieu

before I start believing in you.

Swimming in this sky

Food for aught

"So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being."

Franz Kafka, novelist (1883-1924) in Investigations of a Dog (Forschungen eines Hundes), 1922.
 

D'amour et de fer

La tête haute sous un soleil plombé bas

comme attiré par le sable qu'il reflète,

il faut marcher, marcher, faire un pas,

puis un autre, courbé sous le lumineux bât,

jusqu'à la prochaine dune, la prochaine crête

mais, surtout, ne pas baisser la tête,

et avancer, parce que c'est loin, là-bas.

Ne pas attendre, car le soleil mord.

Il déchire la chair, lentement,

sans remords ni aucune dent,

car c'est lui qui décide du sort,

qui mirage de séduisants ports

desquels personne ne ressort,

pas même les pieds devants.

Marcher au travers du silence,

du crissement du sable,

les gerbes marquant la séquence,

le rythme de l'incomptable,

seul et inconsolable,

combattant la somnolence,

le soleil et l'absence.

Aller, aller plus loin

oublier pourquoi

on en est arrivé là

pourquoi ce point

à portée de main,

au bout du doigt,

tendu et las,

restera

là-bas,

plus loin.

Sauf si, d'un brusque coup de rein,

on étalonne la dune,

on balaie d'un revers de main

la sueur de la lacune,

si on boit l'eau de la lune,

si on accueille le lendemain

sans envie ni plainte aucune.

Car ce soleil qui tord les chairs

c'est aussi celui qui nous éveille,

qui se couche sur nos éveils,

qui rougit nos chimères,

qui donne vie à notre air

et qui allège notre veille,

orbe de feu, d'amour et de fer.

Undo the day

Undo the day that I met her

Ravel her mysteries, cipher

Her tongue and uncurve her hips

Conceal her smile and whiten her lips

Let me live the grisly days of unfete

When I thought I was controlling my fate

Before I heard these two luring voices

Before I faced two unnerving choices.

Before this time, I was an empty shell

But I was whole in a soothing hell.

Sadness kept me quiet and calm

Nurtured in night's solacing balm.

Now love robs me of sleep and cheerfulness,

Blands the food and swells the restlessness.

Please, undo the day that I met her,

I hate to have to face this mirror.

the sworded hand

– the sworded hand –
– with spider-like fingers –
– and hale, accurately-trimmed fingernails –
– gripped like a prolonged member of the body –
– unnerving magnitude of meticulous, methodical death –

 

Diamond

Of all geomatrical shapes

diamond surpasses quartz

minutest precision of angles

determined a hundred million years afore

and an hour ago by the diamantaire

as the lesser hour is ticked off by his wristwatch.

 

Circle within circle

Leeway north of the wind

Intercostal access to the core

Too much leeway

Sleepless rosary of stars

Immobile latitude

Pellicle of pearly fog

Such roaring canticles

Ringing clearly as morning bells

Shortness of exhaled breath

Strands of hair loitering near your face

Heaving respirations of the night

Nigh your shoulder

Cooling down the heat of debate

Acts of love like bottles thrown at the blue

With desperate foreboding messages

Smashing into rain

Into speechless clouds

Chronosensitivity of ideas

Uncipherable sentiments

Light weighing only the impetus of its speed

Trickling down your throat

On a mother-of-pearl morning

Through your bedroom window

Where we still embrace

On the threshold to good or evil

Shattered pieces of self everywhere.

Hellespont

At last, here on the shore of the Aegean sea,

Stranded like a stranger, dishevelled yet alive,

Sand in my mouth and hair, lying among debris,

Her heart's pulse like an echo that I can't revive,

The memory, cherished for too long, is now gone,

On this Thracian shore, as I lay torn, by doom drawn.

 

There

Today got me to face the question:

why ever should I go there?

“Because –” said an interior locution.

I clammed it up before it could blare

anything that might be unfair,

anything that might hurt.

Like I have any voice.

Cowering under destiny's quirt

lashing at my back

offering Hobson's choice

whack whack whack

rolling in the dirt

all beaten blue and black

time would dally dally dally

I have to go there

willynillynoshillyshally

because there's one question

one question only

and its solution

its lonely solution

all along –

was there.

 

What Really Irritates Me in Men, Women and Poodles, and Other Sartorial Considerations Very Late at Night - Part 4

Thank you, Cécile, for putting me back in the saddle! It has been a long while since I last posted in this section, and now my notebooks are full to the brim. High time I relieved them of their atrabilious content.

Ladies and Gentlemen and Poodles, here comes...

What Really Irritates Me in Men, Women and Poodles, and Other Sartorial Considerations Very Late at Night - Part 4

Aaaaah poodle, how do I love thee? I love thee not, indeed, but I love thee anyhoo for pawing me the material to my cantankerousness! How have I missed thee? I have missed thee not, of course.

The ostentatious joie de vivre these quadrupeds effortlessly display when they greet anyone borders on the indecent. Wait, it IS indecent. Why do they frolic about as if they'd found a pot of gold? I know every dog does that, but not to the extent poodles do, and not with a certain relish at their own excitement which make their eye lustre...I guess the absence of survival instinct must be accounted for. On a different topic, I heard recently that the smaller the breed, the longer they live...dear Lord, protect us from tininess.

A good friend of mine directed me to a silly page on the Net (http://www.funfacts.com.au/cachi-the-killer-poodle/4/) The story has it that a poodle named Cachi fell from the 13^th floor onto a woman's head, unexpectedly killing her in the process. A passer-by was hit by a bus whilst beholding the stunning scene, and all this foofaraw caused a man to have a heart attack. This...article, for lack of a better word, is highly dubious and probably means to poke fun at an unfortunate series of events. Made me raise an eyebrow, I must admit. Because I believe that the said poodle must very well have been trying to greet the woman below with a well-deserved hug, and must have greatly misjudged the distance. I don't think this is beyond their capacity. Doesn't say if the dog survived, though. Tough little blighters, might have, for all I know.

It does seem I can't get enough of poodles, doesn't it? Well, believe it or not, I still haven't exhausted what seems to be an antediluvian hostility against them. But let's move onto other things which nark me to no end, for if I don't do it here and now, it'll start growing on me...and I'll turn into my great-grandma, which will be way more unfortunate than Cachi hurtling down on someone's head.

I recently joined a dating website. That wouldn't be such a great deal if this hadn't sparked a helluva lot of concerns. For instance, why on earth must fifty to sixty percent of all the pictures in there show a woman, age ranging from 18 to 50+ with

• rounded or pouted lips
• her index and middle finger held in a V shape near said mouth
• rounded, glittery eyes
• heavy make-up
• tilted head
• a blinding flash?

There should be a limited number of selfies allowed. I know that the first selfie to be shot was achieved by a certain Robert Cornelius back in 1839 (more accurately a daguerreotype), but man, why would you lovingly debase yourself in such a fashion? I know ridiculousness never killed anyone, and that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but ridiculousness DOES NOT MAKE YOU STRONGER AND NEVER WILL. This syllogism is a complete fallacy.

I understand the selfie-in-the-mirror trick though, for obvious, pragmatic purposes. But please, PLEASE, do pay attention to what's in the background! We don't want to see knickers scattered all over the place (actually we do), dildos (true story), a kitchen sink full to the brim with dirty dishes (another true story) or the general mess you live in. Which could easily make me rant against pictures of men sporting a dubiously immaculate whitish tank top over a dubious/sculpted/tattooed build, but as I haven't seen them myself, I'll deal with them hollow men later.

Something else which peeves the bejesus out of me is when I look up at the profile of a woman and it says...nothing. Just plain as day : Such-and-such – I can't discuss pseudonyms...I consider this way below the belt because they range from the purely pathetic to the downright ludicrous and/or ridiculous, though inventiveness ought to be lauded – well, Such-and-such hasn't filled in her profile yet. She's been on this site for six months, and she hasn't had time to write a single word? You kidding me? Too busy trying to take the right selfie? Duh. Sometimes a woman visits your profile, “likes” it, and you visit hers, as common courtesy wills it: no picture, no personal description, no desiderata. How do you want us to react to this buffet? How should we judge your “likeability”? What in this vast ocean of nothingness would trigger us to “like” your profile and make us think we would match?

Last diatribe and then I'm out for the day. However we lonely men appreciate the efforts some of you lonely women put into self-portraying your pushed-up cleavage, your long, spotlessly-shaved legs, your fluttering eyelashes and your smouldering look...we don't quite understand why you take the pains to specify in your description that you really DON'T want us to choose you because of your looks or to think you're superficial. And sunglasses, when worn, have that irking tendency to cover a part of the visage I tend to be interested in – but that is the sunglasses' fault, not yours, right?

See you soon for another piece of rambling harangue!

*keeps mumbling* 

 

Shards

and sometimes

shards of love like shards of sun

warm the eyelids

lying down in the meadow

looking for shapely clouds

creased blades of grass underneath

the crickets' distant mellow

hands laid casually aside

spring like a diaphanous sheet

lingering over

lingering over

murmuring in one continuous breath

like the breath of a lover

whispering over your neck

words of love

warms words of love

like tepid rain

on a leaking umbrella

drops oozing onto your visage

tasting like honey

ageless words

sliver of smiles

kisses like flakes

fingers toying with those shards

catspawed hair toying with

those shards

of love, of sun

and the eyelids

blink twice, and open

tongue-tied

tongue-tied

no way this crass world is keeping me

tongue-tied

tongue-tried

tongue tired of repeating again and

again tied

to the system of up and down

down-tried

trown-died

drown dried

blank

blank

blank

i have delved into depths unmeasured,

and unmeasurable

where the breath is short

if not impossible

where space is equal

to the intake of breath

one can muster in

a four-thousand-fathom downfall

life, ruled by such equation,

is a logic

which died out

when the first oak leaf fell

long before

speech was inspired

long before

speech came to us

and died

and left us

tongue-died

 

Fragment #14

Word of God
Searching through
Stumbling on nuclei
Of neutronoms 

 

Fragment #10

Equally tempted by hell and heaven, both ways paved with good intentions.

 

Fragment #8

“Now, how do you tie together the pieces of your life that were torn up from the canvas? You can't. Thing is, as hard as you wish that to happen, your life, once fucked up, is fucked up until the very end, until God comes to clear the mess you've made shooting right in your face. Truth is, you've really messed things up, son. You had everything a man could ask for. But you lied and you threw everything to the devil who welcomed such impetuous acts, such blind rashness with open arms. Your lies more than anything brought misery down upon you. You were trying to flee, to get away from the consequences of your lies, but you were the source, giving birth to ever more lies, and in the end you had to live all by yourself, for within a prison of lies you had carefully woven you found yourself trapped. Like a spider. You yarned it up all around you. And when I say 'in the end', you're what now? 35? This is the end, son. This is the end. You'll have none other than the self-hatred, the regrets and the solitude, the interminable waiting for a message which will never come, and you know it will never come. You'll have your books, which you'll grow slowly to despise, the writing which you will learn to detest and day after day you won't do anything else but this, read and write, read and write. And what you will write will be good, but compared to what it could have been, well, that's the thing: they're incomparable. The mediocrity you've always tried to shun and ward off, you'll end up to your neck in it. This is where your intelligence is leading you. I don't deny you're an intelligent person, but you're socially awkward, have always been awkward. Pretended to be ok and smart, but the ill-at-easeness was gnawing at your guts each time you met someone nice. You'll never be the one you're pretending to be. And none of your friends should, upon your death, judge you for the lies and the pretence, for you never really got to know yourself. Deep down, you were fucked up from the very beginning. You had no chance. Also, your friends asked way too much from you, but they knew where you'd been, and back. You're good enough to empathise, to put yourself into people's shoes, yet and because you can't be in your own shoes, you can't know what you feel because you've never been shown how to listen, how to look, how to love. In essence you pay a total attention to the rest of the world, and keep none for yourself. The first one who dropped down on you is yourself. Your averageness couldn't save you: you had to be mediocre in order to survive, but now the mediocrity has caught up with you, and you're dying. Miserably, at that. Your hands hurt so bad you won't tell anyone. Your teeth are all crooked because you haven't got any money to fix them. You can barely pay off your debts. Your family hardly ever calls you. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying you're a failure. Some of what you wrote, and all of what you will pen in the few months before your death are going to mark this century. But you will leave your imprint as an inadequate, uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin man whose ambitions were always foiled, who always failed to make an impression deep enough to have someone stay by his side. A second-order mind in a third-rate world. You will be the last Romantic ever to roam this earth, with a splendid posthumous career. [...] Look at all those lies you said meaning to embellish your quotidian in people's eyes! Let me tell you: people are no fools. You're a see-through. Your life was sad enough as it was, there was no need to pour more syrupy schmaltz on top of it. But you didn't want to settle for anything less than pure, antique tragic. And some of the things that happened are nothing short of that – tragic – but the tinnitus rings on, son. You can pretend not to hear it, yet it echoes and vibrates and destroys. There, some unseen-before chaos inside of you, and I can tell, I've seen a few of those myself, within and without. There is no other way this can end up. You know it, son, I can see it in your eyes that you've known all along how it would end up. I'm not saying you won't need a great dose of liquid courage to achieve that, but it's all for the best. As much for you as for us. We can't spend whatever time we spend worrying about you, we have families to take care of, occupations to pursue, destinies to fulfil. Yours was a done deal a long, long time ago. You were not born to last. You've just kept on postponing it, even avoiding it, by some strange tweak of fate. But in the meantime you've written for the generations to come a simple message: don't waste your time on earth, just abre los ojos, hermanos, hermanas, and let the convoluted pseudo-Romantics perish in the flame of forgery, for there never was another Romantic after Keats but you. You know the world will be a better place without a tortured poet to heal and nurture. You're broken past mending, and we can't afford your breaking anyone else...you've already done enough damage as it is, haven't you. You know she could have remained at your side, she could have endured your whimpering had you not cast her away for the third time. You knew that, but you couldn't help, could you. You saw she suffered staying with you, and you couldn't stand it. Ultimately, you were right to break up, for she had had time to renew herself, to rebuild what you had unwittingly and unwillingly torn down. You're like a wrecking ball, son, like an asteroid. Poor girl. But you had the sense not to inflict your self upon anyone else, and you'll pull ourself out of harm's way. Hell is paved with good intentions, you'll soon realise that. Your pacing to and fro will cease, your whiling away the time will also come to an end, much to our benefit. Your watching other people having fun, moving on in their life, wondering when it'll happen to you, all this will stop. The questioning will stop. The longing, the pain too. And you know you'd make a bad monk, probably not the worst, for some have set precedents unlikely to be matched, but as you've been averagely bad at almost anything you've ever done...it stands to reason that you won't stand out being a bad monk. I wish you the best, son. This is going to be hard, let's face it, but you have the guts, you've always had the guts. You've shilly-shallied in your time, but not this once, and we both know you'll be brave facing the black one, and I don't know why, but you've never feared her, like you had come to terms with her before the terms were even defined. Perhaps that makes you the bravest of us, perhaps. Now come, it is time.”

 

The world burns

The world burns.

The man, on the doorstep to his house,

– one hand in his pocket –

– the other holding a cup of tea –

watches the writhing flames

dance in the pale segment

of grey dawn.

The world has been burning,

day and night,

for thirty years now.

There seems to be no end to it.

The inky carapace of clouds

has not yet been breached,

the sun deemed dead,

the moon, gone.

The world burns,

and the man, in the cool breeze,

– his jacket flaps to an unknown beat –

ticks off another day in his mental calendar

– the exact number him only knows –

until the end of the fire.

 

The longest night

In the dim nowhere we stand,

erect like rows of pickets

or like sunbleached obelisks

in Luxor,

our parched skins

speak for themselves.

We look for a sign, alert,

our gaze floating over the dunes.

The searing sun is still hung high.

And we think we hear a voice

but it is just the wind hissing

over the sands:

“I will open my hand and

I will show you man in a handful of dust.”

We watch our palms,

watch the dying man's rake

the dying man's claw

the last stand

there is bitterness and damnation

in those raking fingers

the minutest scratch carving doom

in the halest flesh.

We know full well that

the dyer's hand, congested, swollen

and puffed like a bloated drowned,

only the lines on the dyer's hand

can show the way there –

where we have need go –

tumefied as a dier's hand.

To hold

a dier's hand is

terrible

nothing has a stronger grip

and a sadder release.

Somewhere, far away and yet visible to us,

the summer deck chairs are being brought in.

The wind swirls the napkins,

shakes the flowers in their makeshift vases.

The storm is massing in the East,

the horizon billowy and swollen and

streaked with claw-like arcs.

The first raindrops bloat the tablecloth,

contort and contract in unshapely waves.

The party shall continue inside the grange.

We lost the pace of the longest night of the year

face buried in 'kerchiefs,

unable to see through tears,

adversity pushing our gaze clean to the horizon.

the warmth of a stranger's hand

glimpsed at a cashier

exchanging notes

surprises us

like painted players stuck in a

dumbfounded, ridiculous

rigor mortis

the feel and the dream long gone

of water and that of the sand

rubbed in the palm of the hands

begin to fade

the desert and the country

make one, in the dier's hand,

united for one second

of agony, of glory.

Now we feel on our skin,

prickling,

beginning, for us,

what we shall forever know

as the longest night

of our lives.

Fragment #7

J'ai souvent du mal à viser aux toilettes

surtout quand, après quelques verres,

je suis un peu pompette.

Alors je pose mon derrière

au centre de la lunette

et fais ma petite affaire

en laissant place nette.

 

Quarks

Suspended minutes in that hall
-- Like particles of dust --
-- Ebbing, ebbing --
Busybodies of the void.
Those are people,
Passersby just,
Walking like androids.

Their pacing like compasses
Going wild in every direction.
Departured from all senses
Crazed, meaningless amplitude
Legs arching in unwise longitudes,
Strides like a polarised magnet
Repulsing any sort of attraction.

Love is e'er opposite where we face.
Love is that air we breathe
When we resurface
After a long time depth-gazing.
Floating in ether,
Forgetting, forgetting.

Gyring to the ground,
Uncatchable,
Music soft mirroring
The fall,
Echoing the friction.
Particles
To nothing bound.

People as fickle as feathers.

I used to think I needed a war
To die with honour
Or find out who I was,
My purpose here.
I would have started this uproar
Had I not seen you against that wall.
It is not your beauty which stopped all,
It is the look into your eyes
Which made wars meaningless.
This look you still have to this day,
Yet no longer war dwells in me.

The both of us have seen
The east sleep
And the faint sliver of light
In the west, on the train
Bound homewards
Where silence used to preside.

Often you wondered what given
Lit window would harbour,
What life unrolled behind it.
Once we saw a silhouette
Carrying a bundle of linen.
It might have been a toddler.

Unsearching your hand into mine
Already.
Love was found among the dust
All ready.
Nothing around us fussed,
We were just in suspension,
Two particles in suspension.

When I was single I used to rue every hour
That passed by without you
-- Long before knowing you --
Even when I spent the night with a her
Who wasn't you I was expecting you,
Looking for clues of you on other girls' bodies,
In the fold of the neck or of the pubis,
Where I would later rest my head and sleep.

When I talked about love
I clearly didn't know what it meant
Trying to sound clever
To look knowledgeable
Yet I had to balance all
With what you'd come to represent.

Often you seem like a part of me
That was amputated by some devil
Before I was born
And, drawn like some split electron
Bound to be one again,
We found each other in this hall
And still two were made unity,
Asymmetrical matter made ideal.

But back into that hall,
Where people pass
-- Bindles of mess --
-- Forever stumbling but
Unable to fall --
Even though you and I are trembling,
I take your hand and hold onto it.

Nothing else can mean more

than your hand into mine

Here because it was inevitable

a call impossible to ignore

Than your lips against mine

in this hall where all pass forgettable

us to dwell oblivious of time.

Resurface

 
The ground too hard to bury their dead,
The battered men outlive the long winter,
Content, on one hand. Somehow life
Was meant to endure, to sustain the little breath
It had infused here, centuries ago,
Seemingly by an unfortunate case
Of circumstances.