That’s my lot, irredeemable, worse…

Strangely, only writing articulates my being satisfactorily these days but the urge to publish has diminished too. I don’t know how to reconcile them, this diminishing urge and growing satisfaction. So here are a couple of poems which I treated like journals, lesser as poems, something continuous to personal prose and really giving a damn… I know it will be read by less people because it is longish. But I know that these days only friends read me…

I enjoy hyperlinking lines in a poem. I am drenched in Leonard Cohen’s songs these days. You might find, if you have listened to him too, his lines popping up here and there in my scarcely appearing writings these days. Sometimes I will link the phrases to his original verses sometimes I might not.

I won’t mention why I am angry, bitter at things happening to human beings in my country and in the world at large. I want to, instead, I want to kneel down at her altar, at her nakedness instead even if she is as fallible mortal as I am, even if she is as much unknown to me as much thoroughly I know this ugly world. It is just the act of beholding, just the moment. I give a damn to those daytime life of mine and the newspapers…

But before the poems…this song…along with Gustav Klimt’s paintings

The steadfast that I am, the fleeting that you are all
The bliss that spread in veins when an unexpected woman calls
She asks for the place I am living and who are living with me
She asks which day I was born, if I am a Cancer or a Gemini
I say: lady, I am both, I’m crowded and I am alone
I’m born here everyday, I’m delivered by none.

This friend introduced me to someone: this man has his way with the girls
He has this face like a scripture, but look for those eyes in the lurch
And the old one told me that a ladies’ man should roll in laughter and glee
In those sleepless ten thousand nights when I’m telling tales only to me
Even when words in hushed voices and in abbreviated telephone-texts
Assail like celestial waves haunted with touchlessness

This is the way I chose it, this is the way I preferred
This is the way I regret it, this is the way I suffer
This is what I have a laugh about…that’s my lot

My poet wished for a love of the harlot, to be happy, satisfied and free
Since he has lost his lovely mother to a general he went gunning to kill
My singer was named the silent one, he taught me how to gently kneel
At the delta which is resplendent, to her coming light as the breeze
And my seer taught me to stare at her, and disrobe my lust and lurid gaze
We will search her in the ribs of you all, we will unlock you with our secret keys

I’m a condemned man with my eyes dazzled by Jean-Luc Godard’s replete screens
Cohen’s drones in my ears, Baudelaire in my blighted lips
Receiving dart-stings in my office, young ones’ affections down the streets
Afflictions in my calcium, my head always in Paris
With our spleen and with our bile, with murder rolling in our fists
Sleepwalking shadows in the daytime, at night beautiful and beast

We who are forgiving all those ills, we who are always unjustly cursed
We in our silhouetted pride, with our bloodsoaked pens and verse
Walking in all sorts of wrongly places, the wrong years being my motherland
To station myself in your cross, I always stumble, I always stand
We with our tunes and slides and words, with our tongues locked in wars
Want to lie with you unreal ladies; that’s the lot, irredeemable, worse…

I have realized that I am far from writing something like that Cohen-song I have linked to. I have nothing of his sublime humility. The ‘lie’ in the last line of my poem has double-edges obviously and I hate to admit that I mean the lesser obvious more…

Murder and hatred rolling in our daytime wrists, bitter desire of wrecking the system we inhabit, simply because it is utterly wrong and as my poet said: “…the naked man and woman are just a shining artifact of the past…” something turned into ugliness by advertisements and porn, something Pier Paolo Pasolini showed blatantly in his unbearably nightmarish Salo (can recall I fell suicidal when the sun flashed in my eyes after I staggered out of the theater watching the film; I watched it again and will never do so in this lifetime).

And how I wish to exorcise my anger, just like this post is desperately trying to mute all those political frustrations and trying to be down on its knees at her delta, the cradle of rivers and the seas…

Feeling closer to those things I have already lost
Burning bridges that I’ve already crossed
Paring fingernails about to report on the war
Gets on my nerves when I start pondering again on love
Ghosts of things to come never leave me…

It’s not love, it is something else
A long-known word has moved in to a  stranger place
In these days when people whisper their secrets to their pockets
Silver circles roll in blind men’s sockets
A touch of soul in my skin never sets me free…

I wash away those angels’ faces each morning on my window-pane
I’m glad I discovered another one in the patches of my walls again
Like a killer who collects eyeballs I have also gathered them
And all those stares askance they still remain
After the faces are gone, my morning replies their questions…

Before I really might wet
With my grateful tears a woman’s grasses and her gate
I might sell my soul to a pimp and ghoul
Therefore I shiver and I fret
I don’t want to curve you into a sausage or a steak
My melancholy’s sister, my gin-voiced siren, my longing’s twin of the moment…

The day I was abandoned I was unfettered
I bartered all my caresses for these unpenned letters
Admitting never cared much for whom they will be addressed
Envelops are like clothes to be peeled off, words to be undressed
The names weigh lesser than the body therefore bared; nevertheless…

It was never love, it was something else
My being exploding in splinters of sentences in the space
In these days when my faceless voice sounds like rattles of freshly-minted coins
I rotate fingered and get un-owned, exchanged; it was a choice
To radiate vaporized pleasures and never to make promises…

I shave away a face each week in my wash-basin
I’m glad I curve a familiar one after what is shed and what remains
Is it a drive to desert before I’m abandoned again
Is it a revenge to keep her waiting, is it a ploy to wear another blame
My evening conjures an answer to shape a midnight’s question…

And you really might taste
My liquid scream, a man’s true fears when he breaks and he melts
In the soapbox between your legs, when he hides his unsheathed face
Therefore I shiver and I fret (and I don’t regret)
I don’t want to unravel my extent of a calf or a wreck
My pride’s examiner, my executioner, my relentless mirror of the moment…

Sorry, Sea of Memories…