And then you realized that in spite of everything, people can always and inevitably see you naked. Won’t you give up and stop caring pretty soon? Does giving up always connote that I have stopped caring? It might just be the other way round. I can see faraway lands from the shore. But I can’t see them in fog. Winter is the cruelest month. Especially for lonely people. Static pictures dissolve in the frozen thickness. Red and blue scars stay awake through the mist, like obstinate islands. Ship has left the shore. It has no compass, no radar, waiting for Venus to rise up from the Mediterranean Sea, stark naked, and pirates wait with bated breath to snatch the girdle from her. Being in love has pushed me beyond these ever since my earliest shot at it. She won’t know.
Ship, O ship, what will you do when all your ropes tear away. Wretched waves rise and fall, smash against harsh rocks, harsher feet of lighthouse, gnashing in full-beast proclamation, rather, demand, for finality.
Childhood has a dash of Marriage of Figaro in LP. Don’t remember when or where. More importantly, I do not remember how. I’ve always thought that there’s a nerve inside the brain, jostling with the rest of the pictures and jut up and sink down, which carries white laughter. And then one day, it gets torn and the laughter, soundless, will fill it all up and everything else will drown, and it’ll rise like water and houses and pictures and Venus and Mozart and islands and everything will really drown like city drowns in sunshine-yolk on cloudless mornings. Will the eyes drown with everything else? We, who get pulled by the gulfs of sleep throughout the day and fail to sleep at night, who pride ourselves as lonely people and build personal empires out of it, are more conscious about our eyes than anyone else. They stay awake when nothing else does and they keep floating at the tip of the dark cosmos when the rest of it sinks, cold, forked tongues reach out for the deep mirror-shine pool of blood. We haven’t learned to love ourselves. We’re those foxes that wake up in moonlight and move downhill through forest right down to the edge of the river. It’s an ancient river and we shed off layers and layers of blatant, ancient skin, to catch snowflakes, Pharaohs asleep in cold pyramids, numb pictures stare through frames and mirrors like shadows of stuffed tigers, jaws tighten, autumn leaves swirl down to the darkness that never screams. Bronze horses fly when the moon is sad. Our eyes, crudely primitive, stay awake when nothing else does.
We, who have waded through the swamps of sorrow, solitude and misery, through sleepless nights on which the history of the world, of the burning of stars and streets and of the entire cosmic wilderness, have survived raptures and ruptures through the soft, sharp hemorrhage of stuff that pile up, sights and sounds that refuse to build bridges in between and keep playing like random notes conjured by our killers and hunters and iguanas from lost children’s encyclopedia, we who have seen our cruelty masquerade as our lady of mercy and become march through time and space and fill them up like ants that ejaculate out of cracks on the blank, brusque wall and march to the corners in slick files till the entire canvas is teeming with ants and they’re jostling to jostle because now they have no corner to march to – and this applies to all bluntly sharp pictures of perfect agony, our bridgeless islands and mires – we have survived these and we will survive those, until we get slain by wishing and wanting – two fatal sisters who make up the big, wholesome picture, make us raise our hoods like phallic, fatal pillars through fields of darkness, in dead intensity, we wipe off the blood from our heart and we shut down like ghastly tuberoses on beds of pacific silence in dead-intensity, nil-nihil-intensity. We have never really been searching for anything. It’s just the idea that keeps us going every now and then, and keeps us away from the circles of fire and from staring into the heart of mirrors. Slender nurses of heart feed us, clothe us, fend us from the sharks and the wolves. Behold them naked in moonlight. Behold the cowards of the world clapping their way to the heart of defeat. Listen to their pearly peals of victory.
So what will you tell to the ancient, naked children who roam the ancient, naked earth through these dumbfounded millennia? Can you hear their souls weeping? Do you see them bleeding? Do you have the guts to tell them that we, too, were heroes once?
I have seen mammoths drowning in twilight. I have seen phantoms of the moon gliding through neon-vacancy of midnight. I have seen faceless heads stuck on window-frames of buses that drag their own heavy corpses through the city that bleeds in soft concert-caked dreams of living and not-living. I have seen living and being alive in strong, throbbing coitus till they become one and push me beyond love and hate and beyond loving and hating. Sun sets behind the fort and bats come out of demon-trees. Sun rises from behind the fort and bats go back to demon trees. I have seen the withering away of souls. I have been to Babylon of dreams and seen woman riding seven-headed beast. Do I need to see more?
Camellia camellia take me to the island, join my dots, feed my bones and blood, keep the creatures that sniff the ground while walking and paw at all that moves off this heart of hearts. City bleeds in monochrome. King loses kingly robe.
Now tell me, once you’ve pulled down the shutters, pressed the switches and triggers, turned stones and paradises, now that there’s this world where there’s no need and hence there’s none and you’re here, now, and you were there, then, staring at Tantalus in Tartarus, contemplating the coldly burning boobs of Ishtar and then you have seen horses drenched in blood of moon and frogs choked by ashes of charred stars, now that you need it all and you don’t need it all, sliding through photographs that scream of dreams, to sink in all that stinks the horizons up, now that you know that you can’t drown in dark sleep because you’re afraid of free-fall because as stuff piles up on your personal bones of time and universe it gets harder to let go of them and you can’t let the ghosts dance in your cortex without you knowing that, you fear to wake up in cold, sharp terror and thirst and hear machine-shriek shattering the skies and waters and earth and you can’t bear to see the deep, long cracks in them and you can’t resist them from pulling you close to their guts and into the blank mirror-heart of all that’s lost and the foxes are all over the forest tonight and they’ll get to you once your eyes sink and hence your eyes don’t sink, tell me, are the red and blue scars inside you or are they terribly outside? Forsaken ship roaming through gruesome fog. Pilgrims blinded in snowstorm. I speak to you from inside this abyss. I raise my personal echo. Is the bridge strong enough? Do you hear me? Have your black and blue roses bloomed yet?
A million little bells shall chime
when our red riders ride out
to touch
the pale crime of purple time.
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