This is from the archives of the loves I have been recently visiting. I wrote this for someone, without hope or agenda, a few years back and sent it much after it could ever mean anything. The person in question has shunned me ever since. I haven't questioned the person's motivations but cannot help wondering what it was that was so disturbing. Or disgusting.
I could not finish it then. I still cannot. Maybe it, the loves, defy the deliberations of beginnings, middle, and end.
__________________________
In between the redness of the moon
I reach out to you in honesty with twisted arms that can no longer carry the weight of the shoulders, which carry the world beyond them. And in this, I know, I am being vain. Honesty is the indulgence of the vain, don’t you think? Thin people, fat people, people with no soul, people with million eyes yet no sight use honesty to proclaim their superior position over the lesser mortals. As if to shout and tell everyone of their enlightened state of beings. Of the stars that shine on and for them. I fear that people who lay fanatic claims to honesty are the ones who can clamour the streets to demand the bloods of the outcasts. The liars. And I dread that. Why? Because I think I am one of the outcasts for these fanatics? I don’t know. I don’t know yet.
Yet. When I write to you I proclaim honesty. Am I changing sides? Am I becoming one of the fanatics? No, I dread not. The honesty I profess is the one that fills my soul when I pass a familiar smell. The honesty I believe in is the one that makes me count the endless stars and have a number. The honesty, which makes my bones stiff upright and straight, is the honesty with which I gaze in the eyes of the children who wave out to me or at times curl their toes out of numbness. In the stifling lights of the sun that creeps in through my glass doors I reach out for an overflowing pen and wipe it on my tangled hair. Then. In that moment. I know I am being honest.
I have restrained myself from spilling the lives and loves sought on to the paper with your name engraved on it. When you have sent me a message, I have held it close with open eyes and opened it with close eyes. I have seen you writing to me sitting at borrowed desks cascading through our collective memory. I have wondered and wanted to know the details you remember of the snatched moments we have spent together. You are and will always remain a stranger to me. And why, I have asked myself? Is there no way I could have known you better? There may have been but I do not want to tread on those paths. I relish the surprise with which your memory (the moment) takes me. Walking down the crystal clear paths with reflective surface throwing around many more of me than I can handle, I catch a glance of the singing butterfly in the mirror shop and I swallow your name. I cannot in those moments conjure up skins for you. I can only swallow what I already have of you in me. In each message I have sent to you I have left a secret calling. If you scratch the edges, hold the message uptight and twist it in the moon-shadow walks, you will hear them calling out to you. There is a poem, a song, a yearning, a desire in each of these messages I have departed for you. Have you felt them? Have you? Or did you leave my messages on the kitchen top to have covered coffee conversation stains? Did you lift and drop them mercilessly in conversations when you dreaded being stale? If you did, don’t let me know. From where I feel it, they are nicely tucked in satin and stars under your pillow. For me, my love, let them be over there. Do not take that away from me.
I have known you a decade and a half. Have I known you for so long? A smile crosses my blackened lips and I roll the tobacco in which I will taste you. I still remember the first day, first moment, when you cracked open the wounds in my skin. I was then celebrating a lost love. Yearning and mourning for it not because I felt it but because it was a ritual of discarding the dead skins I had accumulated through the telling touches and the calling out. I saw you walk into a borrowed room where walls were incestuously woven into each other where the lizards where the spectacle for some. Did you walk in? Did you stride in? Once you had entered did you dissolve into the background? Why did it take me so long for you to feel your presence? You, standing in the corner, reticent and reluctant, angry and aggrieved. It was my corner in those borrowed walls that you had occupied and when I tried to slide into it half way through being thrown out of my galaxy having smoked the grasses of the netherworld, I touched you. I did not feel you then. Just my skin felt the sensation of the blood running down your streams. My mind was too numb to acknowledge, the body reacted. The body, in that instance, was beyond the mind and it craved for more. I saw the longing in your blank eyes and deep curls. You looked straight into my eyes and I responded. We both were strangers to one another and were not yet caught in the systems of shame and guilt which knowingness brings. Not yet.
Beyond that moment, I loose recollections. I only remember dreams of dreams of you and I entangled in pleasure in that corner. Soon enough I lost the borrowed walls and with it the corner as well.
When did we meet again? Did you call out or did I reach to you?
I saw you again since then through half broken glass and shattered hearts. Sometimes you were picking up the pieces while I was at my masterpiece. We laughed through drunken conversations and I scratched your hands with my unkempt nails. Did you feel me then? Did the blood make you cry? We shared a many too beds. Broken and bereaved. We slept through the nights the demons wearing out the passion. You never touched me and I never cried out. Maybe I should have. Then, hopefully, we would have eaten the icing off the same chocolate dreams.
The evening has abruptly fallen into the platter from somewhere. One moment I looked out of my glass walls and I saw the cloud scoops laid out for the childish indulgence of dream scattered, clear ice-creams. Now everything lies in the middle of nothingness, there is no day to look forward to and the stars are shinning elsewhere. This time of day makes me nervous and search out for sheets that will curl me in sleeps to wade the day off. How convenient would it be to wear out days, then I would just wear out layers and layers of days that keep me away from you. That stand between us, in-between us, mocking at my plight, seeing me writher and squeal with both pleasure and pain. It reminds me of the state I am in, I was in, I will be in, a suspended reality of temporal being. In nothingness I am defined and in desperation I seek for you. The night we spent together celebrating the long flight of a friend for you and lover for me comes to my mind. The loves I sought then was made of translucent skins and tiny hands. Was it love? Was I in love with the idea of love? Or was I just unable to let go of the anchors that held my sanity? I know not what it was in the moment but when I live the night under your skin, I know that you knew that I was going to slip it away. That world for me will come to an end. The translucent skins will turn blue and black. Why did you not tell me then? Why did you not hold me and shrug off the actors and the acts in the head? Did you want me to suffer the endings as I slipped through the beginnings? For that love I borrowed lines from somewhere and cried out to crowds one night, `nobody, not even the rains, have such small hands’. And that moment has made it impossible for me to borrow, shamelessly, those lines for you. Or the other loves I sought.
Instead I write,
`how can I feel so much when you feel so little’
Another borrowed line. Another burrowed text.
In reading texts of inane pleasure and high theory, I have unveiled the sub-text of love and its longings. A line, a word, a phrase (half baked and carelessly thrown away) catches my attention and I latch on to it thinking through the entire text, the whole theory through that cut out glass. I do not have the patience for the whole. I dread the endings to stare at my face and mock my incompetence. Instead I draw an entangled web of ideas and images through my nocturnal pickings. In the morning, I am convinced that I have conquered. While the mirror tells me otherwise. I never remember the names and the references of these texts. I also forget too easily the ones I loved too passionately. The only things you forget are the ones, which you were convinced, you will never. And because of this deep conviction you never bother to remember them. They come back to haunt you uncalled for and unannounced. You, my love, I have never forgotten to remember and loved slowly. At the pace which the rains leaves there mark on un-cleaned windows, seasons after season. I have let you live in me. I have let you alive in my memories and in my makings. In everything I have become, in each flight I undertook, I carried some of you in me. Unlike others whom I have allowed untimely and brutal death I have caressed and cuddled you.
Dearest so, do you remember the night we laid out our fears on the brazen, cold rocks? Amidst the star lit moon, you held me close (my orange-ness seeping through you) and said, `it’s not about sex’; in that moment I wanted to shout out, `only if’. I could not because the closeness made me feel things I never have. It made me look into the beauty of things, which did not exist. And then you left. I connected through you crackling voice and you said you were leaving. Another someone you had touched out to (or not) poured over my soul and said that you both had become star-crossed lovers. I did not understand the exit. I could not claim it as mine exclusively. So I dropped it in between the glowing neon signs and helpless glances. I sought new loves with an animal ferocity while diminishing the ones I already had. I told homespun lies to naïve travelers. Created the stories of demons and devils and the little princess. I let them touch my hands under the dirty table linen and then allowed them to clean themselves with it.
And in middle of all this I spent one night crying on the wet grass staring at the broken street lamp singing, all I really wanted was some love. I did not mean it then. It was a rhetoric I use to wade away the present lovers to tell them that I did not find love in the smells of their underarms. And now, do I mean it? I don’t know.
I could not finish it then. I still cannot. Maybe it, the loves, defy the deliberations of beginnings, middle, and end.
__________________________
In between the redness of the moon
I reach out to you in honesty with twisted arms that can no longer carry the weight of the shoulders, which carry the world beyond them. And in this, I know, I am being vain. Honesty is the indulgence of the vain, don’t you think? Thin people, fat people, people with no soul, people with million eyes yet no sight use honesty to proclaim their superior position over the lesser mortals. As if to shout and tell everyone of their enlightened state of beings. Of the stars that shine on and for them. I fear that people who lay fanatic claims to honesty are the ones who can clamour the streets to demand the bloods of the outcasts. The liars. And I dread that. Why? Because I think I am one of the outcasts for these fanatics? I don’t know. I don’t know yet.
Yet. When I write to you I proclaim honesty. Am I changing sides? Am I becoming one of the fanatics? No, I dread not. The honesty I profess is the one that fills my soul when I pass a familiar smell. The honesty I believe in is the one that makes me count the endless stars and have a number. The honesty, which makes my bones stiff upright and straight, is the honesty with which I gaze in the eyes of the children who wave out to me or at times curl their toes out of numbness. In the stifling lights of the sun that creeps in through my glass doors I reach out for an overflowing pen and wipe it on my tangled hair. Then. In that moment. I know I am being honest.
I have restrained myself from spilling the lives and loves sought on to the paper with your name engraved on it. When you have sent me a message, I have held it close with open eyes and opened it with close eyes. I have seen you writing to me sitting at borrowed desks cascading through our collective memory. I have wondered and wanted to know the details you remember of the snatched moments we have spent together. You are and will always remain a stranger to me. And why, I have asked myself? Is there no way I could have known you better? There may have been but I do not want to tread on those paths. I relish the surprise with which your memory (the moment) takes me. Walking down the crystal clear paths with reflective surface throwing around many more of me than I can handle, I catch a glance of the singing butterfly in the mirror shop and I swallow your name. I cannot in those moments conjure up skins for you. I can only swallow what I already have of you in me. In each message I have sent to you I have left a secret calling. If you scratch the edges, hold the message uptight and twist it in the moon-shadow walks, you will hear them calling out to you. There is a poem, a song, a yearning, a desire in each of these messages I have departed for you. Have you felt them? Have you? Or did you leave my messages on the kitchen top to have covered coffee conversation stains? Did you lift and drop them mercilessly in conversations when you dreaded being stale? If you did, don’t let me know. From where I feel it, they are nicely tucked in satin and stars under your pillow. For me, my love, let them be over there. Do not take that away from me.
I have known you a decade and a half. Have I known you for so long? A smile crosses my blackened lips and I roll the tobacco in which I will taste you. I still remember the first day, first moment, when you cracked open the wounds in my skin. I was then celebrating a lost love. Yearning and mourning for it not because I felt it but because it was a ritual of discarding the dead skins I had accumulated through the telling touches and the calling out. I saw you walk into a borrowed room where walls were incestuously woven into each other where the lizards where the spectacle for some. Did you walk in? Did you stride in? Once you had entered did you dissolve into the background? Why did it take me so long for you to feel your presence? You, standing in the corner, reticent and reluctant, angry and aggrieved. It was my corner in those borrowed walls that you had occupied and when I tried to slide into it half way through being thrown out of my galaxy having smoked the grasses of the netherworld, I touched you. I did not feel you then. Just my skin felt the sensation of the blood running down your streams. My mind was too numb to acknowledge, the body reacted. The body, in that instance, was beyond the mind and it craved for more. I saw the longing in your blank eyes and deep curls. You looked straight into my eyes and I responded. We both were strangers to one another and were not yet caught in the systems of shame and guilt which knowingness brings. Not yet.
Beyond that moment, I loose recollections. I only remember dreams of dreams of you and I entangled in pleasure in that corner. Soon enough I lost the borrowed walls and with it the corner as well.
When did we meet again? Did you call out or did I reach to you?
I saw you again since then through half broken glass and shattered hearts. Sometimes you were picking up the pieces while I was at my masterpiece. We laughed through drunken conversations and I scratched your hands with my unkempt nails. Did you feel me then? Did the blood make you cry? We shared a many too beds. Broken and bereaved. We slept through the nights the demons wearing out the passion. You never touched me and I never cried out. Maybe I should have. Then, hopefully, we would have eaten the icing off the same chocolate dreams.
The evening has abruptly fallen into the platter from somewhere. One moment I looked out of my glass walls and I saw the cloud scoops laid out for the childish indulgence of dream scattered, clear ice-creams. Now everything lies in the middle of nothingness, there is no day to look forward to and the stars are shinning elsewhere. This time of day makes me nervous and search out for sheets that will curl me in sleeps to wade the day off. How convenient would it be to wear out days, then I would just wear out layers and layers of days that keep me away from you. That stand between us, in-between us, mocking at my plight, seeing me writher and squeal with both pleasure and pain. It reminds me of the state I am in, I was in, I will be in, a suspended reality of temporal being. In nothingness I am defined and in desperation I seek for you. The night we spent together celebrating the long flight of a friend for you and lover for me comes to my mind. The loves I sought then was made of translucent skins and tiny hands. Was it love? Was I in love with the idea of love? Or was I just unable to let go of the anchors that held my sanity? I know not what it was in the moment but when I live the night under your skin, I know that you knew that I was going to slip it away. That world for me will come to an end. The translucent skins will turn blue and black. Why did you not tell me then? Why did you not hold me and shrug off the actors and the acts in the head? Did you want me to suffer the endings as I slipped through the beginnings? For that love I borrowed lines from somewhere and cried out to crowds one night, `nobody, not even the rains, have such small hands’. And that moment has made it impossible for me to borrow, shamelessly, those lines for you. Or the other loves I sought.
Instead I write,
`how can I feel so much when you feel so little’
Another borrowed line. Another burrowed text.
In reading texts of inane pleasure and high theory, I have unveiled the sub-text of love and its longings. A line, a word, a phrase (half baked and carelessly thrown away) catches my attention and I latch on to it thinking through the entire text, the whole theory through that cut out glass. I do not have the patience for the whole. I dread the endings to stare at my face and mock my incompetence. Instead I draw an entangled web of ideas and images through my nocturnal pickings. In the morning, I am convinced that I have conquered. While the mirror tells me otherwise. I never remember the names and the references of these texts. I also forget too easily the ones I loved too passionately. The only things you forget are the ones, which you were convinced, you will never. And because of this deep conviction you never bother to remember them. They come back to haunt you uncalled for and unannounced. You, my love, I have never forgotten to remember and loved slowly. At the pace which the rains leaves there mark on un-cleaned windows, seasons after season. I have let you live in me. I have let you alive in my memories and in my makings. In everything I have become, in each flight I undertook, I carried some of you in me. Unlike others whom I have allowed untimely and brutal death I have caressed and cuddled you.
Dearest so, do you remember the night we laid out our fears on the brazen, cold rocks? Amidst the star lit moon, you held me close (my orange-ness seeping through you) and said, `it’s not about sex’; in that moment I wanted to shout out, `only if’. I could not because the closeness made me feel things I never have. It made me look into the beauty of things, which did not exist. And then you left. I connected through you crackling voice and you said you were leaving. Another someone you had touched out to (or not) poured over my soul and said that you both had become star-crossed lovers. I did not understand the exit. I could not claim it as mine exclusively. So I dropped it in between the glowing neon signs and helpless glances. I sought new loves with an animal ferocity while diminishing the ones I already had. I told homespun lies to naïve travelers. Created the stories of demons and devils and the little princess. I let them touch my hands under the dirty table linen and then allowed them to clean themselves with it.
And in middle of all this I spent one night crying on the wet grass staring at the broken street lamp singing, all I really wanted was some love. I did not mean it then. It was a rhetoric I use to wade away the present lovers to tell them that I did not find love in the smells of their underarms. And now, do I mean it? I don’t know.
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