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.
 

Unwitting teachers

"I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers."

Kahlil Gibran, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

Hard and sad

"He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise."

Voltaire, French philosopher (1694-1778)

Fragment #6

The stench would long remain in her nostrils, as her doll dragged behind her on a leash. The black bags lined up to where the sky ended. The stench would come back to her in the deeps of night, when sweating and panting she would see the bags waking into motion, summoned by invisible threads, and stack in the quicklimed pit, in order, as close as they were in life.

As for now, her doll would join the rest of her belongings in her plastic bag. The ground was dirty.

She made

I met her at a point when I thought that nothing could abate the pain pricking my sides.

She made me see the light where I saw only, only darkness.

She held my head so as to face it.

She made me remember what I had forgotten.

She made me smile and laugh because I had forgotten the sound of my own voice.

I had to listen again to the sound of the wind in the reeds to know the sound.

She made me breathe again in the open air.

She opened a rend in the clouds to make me feel the rain.

She made me whole, again, and see the colours of the sky at the break of day.

She tore the crust off a loaf of bread, and handed it to me. Instinctively, I munched it between my molars. This I had forgotten too.

She was there when I wasn't anymore, and understood that I couldn't dwell amongst the everyday.

She made me realise the everyday was where I had to be to understand.

So there I went, heavy of heart and with a sore soul. I struggled and came out, after what seems aeons of buffets and sighs, victorious, amongst the living.

She made me ride unknown storms and stand upon the wreck of the bloody plains, beholding.

I couldn't have done any of these things I take pride in without her.

She made me find the strength whilst having none.

She made me try with all my heart, made me see what I could, made me, made me.

Curved hills and levelled mountains to do so.

If only I had met her.

Deep down

"A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life."

R.K. Narayan, writer (1906-2001)

A deep breadth

"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."

Crowfoot, Native American warrior and orator (1821-1890)