The Dance

I have a dress the same color as angels flapping their feathery wings. One yesterday, I slid myself into it and watched as it became my skin. I was too white the sun shied away and never shone when I was there. But if you looked too closely, you would see the devil woven into my fabric.

I twirl in the sand. Eve and Lilith, like the ebb and tide, unravel my labyrinthine heart , then rise and fall into it. I am fading into a mirage. Have I ever been real?

The words frantically dance as they tear my brain apart. The shreds fall out of the window. I jump to collect them and I am all broken. I glue my body together and search for them. I press myself into a insanity and it pushes me into ecstasy and they both throw me, on the shores of nothingness. I remember. My brain. I lost it somewhere along the way. The shreds repulse and break my skull. Craziness is inevitable.

Become me again and I’ll pretend nothing ever happened.

55-The Cage

Fidgeting between

Discordant tones

Lashing me             

With expectations

To be something

And I envy the space

For its inexistence

And I push a thumb

Into my ear

I can’t hear

But that doesn’t make me deaf

I peel the pictures

Off my memory

Incinerated

Before me

Light light

Flying

Within the bars of the cage

Check Out G-Man 

Pendulum

Wise man sits on the top of a tower

Saying tears turn to pearls

Mine came crashing at my feet

And now I’m bleeding

Evil and good

Wrestled tonight on my threshold

I locked the door

Sank under the quilts and pretended

I was deaf

Politicians and Presidents

Movies and celebrities

Jewels and glitter

I just squeeze myself between the cracks

Hanging photos on dusty walls

A girl who wore pink dreams

Torn at the edges

Last seen

Two years ago

I tiptoe so I wouldn’t’ disturb

Extremes fighting within me

On my way to the candy shop

Just around the corner

Of yesterday

At the end

I am only a sack of

Twisted nerves  

The Way Back Home

At the age of eight, there were many things I had yet to learn: Earth is the third planet away from the Sun; salt consists of sodium and chlorine; wrong things  aren’t always wrong; happy endings are of stories that haven’t ended.

 Language was not one of them.

    A heavy cover of fog shrouded the place. When I was young, I had a childish notion that fogs are made when a giant sighs. So in my head, I saw a giant man resting his head against a tree and sighing. He was tired. Giants couldn’t be tired, a voice of thought interrupted. But that was something I couldn’t make sense of. Some way or another , everybody had to be tired. When dad came back home he was tired.  When he hit mom she was tired. And when they told me we would move to another country, I was tired.  

  In the fog,  I could see a faint trail of how every road began, but the ends were still something of an enigma to me. Everybody headed somewhere, that was the only thing I knew. I then looked at mom. Though she was only thirty-two by then, the skin around her eyes sagged. She cried a lot. I thought that tears drag your skin down with them; that’s why I never cried. It was years later, when my skin sagged just like hers, that I learnt, to cry, you don’t really have to shed tears.

   She waved goodbye and started to fade away in the fog. I felt a tingling feeling in my stomach that rose up to my chest adding to every breath a chill. I dragged my legs and entered the school.

   I was at a loss. It seemed to me that the fog was only in my eyes to blind me. I feared that I would stumble if I walked any further. After long minutes that felt like forever,  I summoned my power and asked about my class.

  When I entered, they had already begun. I had a petite figure, so when the teacher didn’t ask me about my name, I just thought she didn’t see me. I noticed how when she shouted, a nerve in her neck shook in a funny way. So I laughed. She then heard me.

 “What are you laughing at?” she said.

  Shivering, I answered, “Nothing.”

“Well then, I want you to write ‘People who laugh at nothing are stupid’ and bring it to my desk tomorrow”

  When the break came, I asked where the roof was and ran all the way up there. I felt mortified and didn’t want anyone to see me.

   I could see the ocean from there. Out of my pockets, I got out a small map and unfolded it. Back home, my friend told me we’d only have the Mediterranean  in our way. I asked how I would cross it. She smiled and said, “You just swim.”
  My eyes fell on the river. Back then when I used to stroll by its side, it'd looked so vast. But now, it ran down the map like a scar. 

 “Hey,” a voice came from beside me.

I didn’t answer.

“You know why Mrs. Peanut Head shouted at you?”

I then looked over my shoulder to find a boy my age. I understood who he was talking about and was interested to hear his explanation.

He sighed and said, “Will you just look at your hair,” he then held it in his hands, “She’s jealous of it.”

I was truly puzzled and had to ask him, “Why would that happen? Her hair is quite good”

“Finally, you’ve talked!” he sighed, “When Mrs. Peanut Head was a young girl, she went to the zoo and stood beside the monkey cage. They all thought she was a huge peanut and wanted to eat her. By the time the security came, all her hair was chewed. What you see is a wig.”

I knew that was intended as a joke, still, to imagine the whole scene in my head, I couldn’t help laughing.

He stretched his hand and smiled. “Mark",  he said.

I stood up and shook hands with him. “Cecil,” I answered.

  Looking at his face, I learnt my first lesson in language; that language hardly spoken by the lips. Beyond every word, there’s always a thousand word that translate according to the listener. So there is not one language, there’s a million that may share the same words.  And those that are never spoken, are the most powerful.

  I wished I could tell mom before she packed her clothes telling me she was going home, and dad when he didn’t come from work and people told me that his soul went home, what I heard in Mark’s smile that day. It whispered to me, “Home is not that far away.”

10th DoM

Shreds

Shreds

Today, on my way to work, I came across an old friend in the street. They always feel awkward, those encounters, with people you cease to know anything about. In your head, their image is drawn the way you last saw them in but then, you discover that they’ve had their own share of  noise in their life. I’d lost all contact with her after leaving the country , so it was quite a good chance for us to catch up on what we’d missed. Our short conversation would have been perfectly normal for two people seeing each other for the first time in years, if not for the remark she made before leaving.

“You look so changed,” she said.

    When you wear eyeglasses that have a mud  stain on one of its lenses, there is not a thing you see that is not colored brown. That was how her words seemed to add shades of feelings to my day.  I wanted to ask her what she’d meant but something hindered me from it; perhaps I was afraid of what the answer might be. And perhaps, I just didn’t want to know.

    My first day in this country, everything was so shiny I had to cover my eyes so they wouldn’t be blinded. But it was never that sort of light the sun emits, it was more like the luster of cold metal. And as I came to know, nothing in here had a hint of life about it. Sometimes, I felt the coldness clambering my bones deep in summer and had to clutch the quilts tightly.

    It took me quite some time to learn their language. Before that, I made a hobby of guessing what people were saying. I made imaginary scenarios that made no sense giving myself a good laugh. But then, it constantly reminded me of how far away from home I was. I’d then throw my head against the wall and look at the moon. It sure was the only thing that still looked the same in my life. Now, I could talk their language but had I lost myself in the process?

   I had not asked  her about home. It slipped out of my mind, I kept on convincing myself. But how could such a thing be so easily forgotten? I rushed to my room rummaging the wardrobe for something, anything, from there. A small mirror fell on the ground and broke in what seemed a dozen pieces.

In all these shreds, I couldn’t see the girl I recognized as myself. 

Color Blind

I drew and you wrote.

   I loved the fluidity of charcoal as it stained the stark white pages with pieces of my mind. Sometimes,  lines would  hug and intertwine forming shapes; quite a lot, they were only shredded pieces of dispersed thoughts. I was more comfortable with the ambiguity  of grey mirroring the mess of me; we both too unruly to be tamed by names  You loved the definitive sense words gave you. In your world, everything had a meaning and whatever had meaning must be a word and what’s not a word is nothing. I was your only exception as you were mine.

   I argued that the first people used pictures and drawings to communicate as scientists found on the walls of caves. You laughed and said that it’s what got them in there in the first place; civilization  began when they started using their tongues in something more useful than making meaningless sounds like animals do. I just shrugged and said that it’s boring to have a word for everything.

Two people couldn’t be more different.

You listened to Debussy and Beethoven and I to KISS and Nirvana.

You wore Armani and I whatever I found not coffee-stained.

You ate at fancy restaurants with a large group of friends and I in the streets observing people from afar.

You planned everything ahead and I just did whatever my twisted brain would suggest.  

You were a day person and I a night person.

You were a communist and I an existentialist; which was, besides shapes and words, one of the things we’d always argue about. You thought that existentialism would mar any human progress because no person could make it as a single entity.  I thought that communism was just another way to cancel individuality using the façade of equality, which, of course applied to everyone but the governor who would suck all the money.  To you, communism was the promised utopia and to me, existentialism was how my life went on.

Two people could not be more different

Yet,  we had one thing in common.

We thought the only reason love made it as far as the twenty-first century is to make millionaires out of movie-makers. We both didn’t believe in love.  Each had a different view . You  couldn’t define it and I’d never seen it lasting. People get married, some get divorced and others stay together for the wrong reasons. Here’s the thing about love, it’s a feeling, and all feelings are like candles. Love being a violent one, the candle melts way  too fast. Soon, you are left with wax without a blaze, but it's enough to remind you that something used to be in there.  So you hold on, wishing for that spark to light you up again. But it rarely ever does.

    We weren’t what you’d call two people in love. To you, I was a special friend because I was different from the other people you knew. To me you were a special friend because I knew no one at all. But, curiously enough, I knew you.

   Many times you suggested to introduce me to the people you knew but I’d always refuse. I didn’t belong to people, or to anything really. I lived in many places, traveled to many countries, inhabited many houses, yet, I could call none home. I was too trapped within myself to ever see anything from the world but a blur of colors. You once joked with me calling me a misanthrope; it was when you saw that I didn’t smile that you realized it was something serious to me. I often thought of it, and came to the conclusion that I didn’t hate people; I just didn’t care for them.

   When I first showed you the stuff  I ‘d drawn, you said I must be color blind. I guess you’d thought I painted with a brush and used an easel. Your statement, though,  had some truth to it; I could see all colors only in shades of grey.

    I was curled up in bed, rather paralyzed in it. It was not tired legs that led me there, it was a heavy heart. I cried. I hadn’t done so in a while. It wasn’t relieving like they say; tears dragged tears and soon, my eyes were too blurred to see the light. I was twenty-five, empty, and alone. I didn’t want to die like this. And I didn’t want to live like this either. I only fitted into my skin, where my grey soul poured, happy for having a cover in the color of glistening masks and thickness of  a shield. It hurt, I won’t deny. Sometimes, the shield was too heavy  and sometimes, it made my lungs close in. Yet, it was the best solution; I was too fragile to last in a world where things didn’t flow the way charcoal  did on paper. I wanted to skip those minutes soaked with sadness to more benign times; and then, all I could see was you. I’d been considering it for quite a while now, calling you. I wanted someone to get me out of here and you happened to be the only someone I knew.

  Half an hour later, at 3:20, you were standing at my doorstep.  

   One of the things I loved about you was how you knew it wasn’t quite easy for me to talk about something painful. So, like what anyone would do, you didn’t just twist your face in pathos, ask about how I felt, and started the whole life-is-good crap. You commented on how my flat should enter the Guinness World’s Records for the most chaotic thing on Earth. I answered that chaos is complex order. You didn’t understand me so I had to explain: Chaos is a word created by us humans as to define things we couldn’t see the pattern of. Everything in life follows an order. Things ‘randomly’ thrown around in my flat were a result of my state of mind. Thus, it was actually mirroring the way I felt in its own complex pattern. When we ‘organize’ something, we are only creating simple patterns for us to be able to follow; and me being the farthest thing from simplicity, it wasn’t strange my flat being like that. You replied that it wasn’t okay for me to live in such a zoo then create a philosophical theory as an excuse for it. You then threw a bag  lying on the ground and said it wasn’t you doing it, just your state of mind. I’d been feeling more like a zombie for the past few hours, but you knew well how to provoke me; mocking my theories was unforgivable. Soon, we were hysterically laughing while throwing everything found on the ground at each other.

I tripped and fell on my head.

    I must’ve blacked out for few seconds. When I opened my eyes, everything was literally a blur. Soon, I could make things out. You were lying right beside me at such a proximity I could see every little detail in your face. We’d never been that close before. And there were your eyes, without the glasses for the first time, looking into mine. I could see you then, clearer than ever and I could tell you saw me too. Your breath brushed against my face speeding  my heartbeats. It was an awkward moment, we weren’t used to feeling like this. But that’s what made it beautiful. I knew that right then we had the same thought buzzing in our heads: we were not just friends. I was the one who spoke it out asking what exactly are we. You answered that it’s boring to have a name for everything.

No two people could be more different.

That was what we’d  thought.

Sorry for slacking off lately!

Nothing Makes Sense

We're heading for that one-way trip paved with our regrets.  Really, it just doesn’t matter….we are somewhere else now. Or does it? Tears carved the shape of your face.

Stranger, before you judge, do you know my name? To you, I am pretty clothes above skin below twisted thoughts imprisoned by cranium beneath a face.  Open your eyes to see, but not too wide; the truth will have you blinded.

Hear beyond the words, reach out a finger and trace the lines twisted into a brain molded into me who is talking to you what falls on ears  blocked by lies.

Curiosity killed the cat and to stop the harm we are now shielded by ignorance disguised in what makes sense but the truth is: Nothing really does. Lose your mind and be free.

The tunnel sinks in darkness and we can’t see through that  thing they call tomorrow . Let them decorate it with their fanciful thoughts that will be pulverized by the sun.

 And we are hanging on a pendulum swinging between hoping and hurting and not hoping at all. It’ll just hurt anyway.