Monday, October 24, 2005

Darkness

The long spans in between my manifolded lives
Casting shadows on my questions
Of that conspicuous ugliness that to death
Most certainly leads
In inability to dream, by unanimity
Presenting itself in colourless sparks
Spilling from the lightbulb in my room
Smelling his death from a far
And a life, such as a lie
I did not deserve to live it
Quite unrighteous to speak it
Swimming in the darkness of those pangs
The hideousness of fear
Of that fear yet long bygone
As those stories ever but untold
The sights of my father, my aunts
The childhood that I lost
Somewhere in a synagogue
In the death of that silence
Or the silence of that death
As I scream from within outwards
And reinvented my story in easiness
The easiness of truth, of justice
Your ticket to life
As if it meant anything at all
Feeling that guilt
All bathed in golden blood
Blamed on a precarious happiness
Well wasted in a grocery store
Or perhaps in a kiosk
To buy a newspaper
In the Middle East
Or paper to write down a story
Never meant to happen
Never meant to end
Perhaps not meant to die
And as clouds hover on my desire
My lust feels to die
While a life hangs from a cord
Such as those blankets in the morning
Hanging in cheap wires
From the window of an Arab woman
Incongruent and noticeable
And yet I keep desiring
Those demeaneours, by morning
By night
With the bitter conspicuousness
Of their traumatic foreseen end
On which no plays were written
For being by now
Too assimilated in reality
Perhaps a part of the landscape
Like our dead, like our shame
Desiring the dirt of other ports
And dust pouring from the air
Such as a glass of cognac
In the morning Blues of a German woman
Of a woman I never met
Of a woman with a thousand names
Desiring irrational pleasure
And the warmth of those cold bodies
In the living of a stranger
Placing my endlessness
Hidden well inside
A sofa of multiple colours
Or a glass of orange juice
Lusting for that love
For that warmth
That never wished to be found
Among screens and naked bodies
Among survival kits
And personality specials
Only for a day
Perhaps only for today
I will hover on my own shadow
To cast some down on the mellow
Yet a morrow
With another of those
Body of old, sculpture of guilt
Flesh-riping sweat of desire
Only for a day
Perhaps only today
Shall I want some more of that
Of this
That never filled my hunger
Or satiated my cold
Thwarting beneath my eyes
For a fraction of a second
In the eyes of a stranger
I will never see again
With the knowing conviction
He will find out by himself
Without dissecting any words
As matter ceases to exist
When acceleration
Reaches the speed of light
Thus I cease to exist every morning
Prisoner of the smoke
Prisoner of chemical reactions
Victim of earthly justice
I cease to exist every morning
In the eyes of a stranger
I wish I never touched
As I embrace myself
To keep from the cold
In the summer days
In the stagnation of some novel
Perhaps a romance even
Nothing to recall
And on Wednesday mornings
I wake up to some coffee
A bit resentless
With less regret
A walk to work
Perhaps a dog
Even a tie, all the more
I hearken not
I stumble not
And for a few seconds a day
I do take notice of god
With his multiple mercies
The same that killed my mother
Forming the completeness of a cosmological equation
And shifting the dynamics of the universe
Towards infinity
And behold, there I am
Every morning
Remembering those things I did not know
In a body of stone
That remembers no more
The names of those modern men
To whom I erected graves
That I visit every morning
When I open the eyes
And I plant no flowers
Because I am late for work
Not being completely sureIf I am still ill or not
If this street reminds me
Of Jerusalem or New York
Perhaps not

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Plane

A young writer once spent a short period in jail
For a crime that he didn't commit
And which was not even considered a crime
During that time he didn't write anything
But short pieces of poetry and a mediocre journal
Which in anycase were lost or forgotten somewhere
Yet he promised many a thing to life
Such as not wasting time, a productive life
And back to freedom again there he was
Still writing but nothing at all
In front of a screen, as dead empty the night was
Looking for endeavours, encores and demeaneours
He didn't lust for a night of passion, or a man
Rather for a certain specific night
All too well he remembered that
Yet that night wasn't to be found
Except in memories, or in a blackhole
A night that no one would ever remember
But the four walls of this bedroom
Stagnant with alcohol and smoke
Distractions, aloof, love

The young hormones in his body
Always performed exceedingly their job
Not taking into account
Whatsoever soul or heart
Afterall they were programmed by God
And the intervention of the writer was unnecessary
And disregarded at all
As he scrolled up and down
That night he didn't find
Perhaps an arm looked quite the same
An eye perhaps knowing
And maybe that leg or that sculputured chest
Would resemble someone's death
Or his entanglements
With such other man
But it would never be the same
Their faces would be all the same
Unresponsive to the writer's language
And thoroughly focused on his body though
So young, so kind, unwound

Such would be his days
Completely forgetting themselves
And even that night
While pursuing other things
A life perhaps
A day
With a lover
A book, if not
And the writer was a religious man
Yet unfaithful, treacherous deceiving
Above all to himself
The cosmopolitan liberal
Bastard of the immorality
Dweller of sin
And knowingly so
But out of contempt
He embraced the cult
To make himself feel better
And even at times
Somebody else
Unentangled with those men
Turbulent past, with brilliance
With poise
Deinfatuated
Self-obsessed
Right before each of these pursuances
He would remind himself
What the Bible tells
Not in regard to men laying with men
For he would practice sex standing up
Being as law-abiding as he was
Even sitting
What would mistake?
He was rather concerned with the self
That had been forsaken at night
Or actually that night
And although he would have by now
Entangled at least a dozen of those
The young writer didn't think
He had to behave all the same
Even when he didn't find the behaviour regretful
Yet admirable
For someone who is in love
For someone in need of comfort

He would recite to himself poems
And dream about those days of old
Even perhaps cry
When no one was around
That included the wind
And also God
And would sink in prayers
And other mused mumblings
As to keep himself uptight
Honoured
Devoid of filth
Uncircunvented by sores
Sweating at night
Almost bleeding
That innermost zeal of desire

That same day
The other young man would pick up the phone
And except a religious man in the other end
Someone who would understand
Who could relate
To the cages they would both build
Who would compromise to suffer
But together
The mercilessness of the God
That they themselves chose
And the writer was in need of companion
Or perhaps just physical warmth
A conversation
Anything
A new role
Other than vindication
Other than incredulity
Lack of conviction
Something superficial
Something to flash down the toilet

Both would be disappointed
And soon the conversation
Would turn into a monologue
In which nothing would seize
And no one would redeem
No one would gain anything
As the writer kept talking
The religious man paid attention
Trying to locate his God
Among the blissful speeches of the intellectual
And the writer on his part
Would listen to his silences
Trying to locate in their wounds
An arm or perhaps an elbow of his friend
The one to whom that night belonged
The night he was looking for

"I had different expectations"
They mumbled almost in choir
And decided to end the call
Without knowing their names
Or figuring out their face
Their frustration wasn't only nameless
But also faceless as justice
Or perhaps God
One sank in frustration
Caused more by his inner desire
To possess a body
And the other would claim satisfaction
Because now there were no excuses to sin
Nothing the heart would crave for
The writer had always fantasized about black and white
And those predictable innocent men
With their thighs and their curves
Untouched by fashion or steel
Infatuated in their oblivion of the facts
And the religious man dreamt of that cosmopolitan
Not afraid of sin or love
Defiant and overtly brave
Carressing and strong

How ironic
They thought
Such a moron!
And in oblivion
Once again
Their conversations flank

But twentythree days later
They would sit on a plane
Almost next to each other
Chasing their own eyes
From behind their newspapers
And the nun that stood in between them
And their curiosity would lead them to the toilets
Where the religious man would crave
And the writer would turn him down

Each one had a different version
For the writer it was not only a plane
It was the end of a struggle
And time to unwind, to reveal
For he would retrieve that night
That one he had forgotten
In veils of mystery
The one that would bring him to his destination
And the one that took him out of Jerusalem
Boarding an EL AL plane
For the religious man
It was his only chance
Right before seeing again mom and dad
And meeting his future bride
And mother of kids
And although this man
No longer remembered that call
He hated the young writer
And wept in silence the deceit
Deceive
And his abettor
Returned to his seat
And drowned in sleep
The frustrated man swore hate
But it was his fault after all
Why did he hang up the phone?
The streets of New York City
Would obliterate the story
And no one recalled it no more
It wasn't even a story
But more like a curiosity
Only a writer could benefit from

Twenty years later
The religious man boarded a plane
That would take him back to Jerusalem
And accidentally
He would make love to a man in the toilet
And it wasn't because of newspapers
But because of his daughter
Who made him notice the strange looks of that man
And following the conversation
Both of them entangled their go

The other man turned out to be a Russian doctor
Who was travelling to Jerusalem
To join a mourner's remeberance
Conemorating the five years
Ever since the writer would commit suicide
From a low building in Jerusalem
And the woman sitting in between them
Wouldn't be now a nun
But his own wife
The one that watched the lawyer jumping off from the building
And lost on her way to Staten Island
But the Russian doctor and the wife
Wouldn't remember the phone call.

Leave

In my tower of guilt
Deepends the northernmost black forest
Covered with sand, unravelled by time
Bathes in sweat
Of formerly unknown guilt
Reveals smooth secrets
With parafine eyes
Retrieves those mornings
Of pink-fingered lust
Of avowed heathenism
The pleasure of hearths
Drunken from their souls
Embracing their death
Treating her to sweets
Smoothing themselves
In urban ponderings
In resentless infatuations
Motionless procrastinations
As morning hovers on
With mellowing smiles
Product of older sorrows
From far off removed lands
From younger hearts
Pointing in their direction
A fountain of love
Vitaly, imagination
Smelling that maze of momenta
Thwarting beneath glasses of vodka
Sweeping through my veins
Making me feel somehow else
Somebody else
As if telephones wouldn't falter
As if my words would matter
Prisoner in my tower of guilt
I long without belonging
I long for my very own skin
For my filth
For my self-centered obsession
In the eyes of the stranger
In the eyes of those mornings
Embracing myself
Caressing my childhood
Bales of hay
Brooks
As his arms struck by
With some hesitation
Journeying through my pasts
Peacefully tearing apart
Forgetting my name
Forgetting myself
Wound up
In my roads
Yet unwilling to give up
Daydreaming by night
Clinging onto him
Logically excluded
Self-vindicated
It matters no more
Say
When will you smile?
Are the rains over?
I ain't sad
Acheing, it's just that.

Zelda, comrade

I´m the silver candlestick, the candle, the void in the empty dark(*)
Without the light I seemed to resemble
The winds fetch me waters in the roads
Beneath a sickly bulb, flooding in sad light
Mellowing these words that are feeble
Watering sorrow and disgrace
Watering childhood, even doubt
Falling on my own flesh
Disgrace
Looking outside
Recreating those pasts I never told
Not even to myself
Not even to my soul
In those letters you never sent me
But that I remember as well
Not for their precision of words I longed
But for those gray and mellow papers
Dust-smelling envelopes, souvenirs
My lust, my love, a silent light in the void
In the empty dark
In those eyes of mine that aren´t younger
In those eyes of mine that weren´t happier
Blurred as dew that hinders on the fog
Calm breathless Jewish eyes
Perhaps such as the sight of God
Deaf in their numbness, deliberately
Allegedly
Echoeing in timeless tawdriness
In bitter glasses of history
Drunken from their contempt
Driven out of their lives
Constantly hanging in space
Perhaps it still sparks, too
With a glass of schnapps
And I´m the silver candlestick, the candle and the voidin the empty dark
My dying light is outside
Craving in outrage
In the streets, past an alley
Somewhere in New York, perhaps still in Jerusalem.

(*) Thanks to Amos Oz for his book "A tale of love and darkness" that contains a chapter about the poetess Zelda Shneerson, and to Vitaly Usherenko for the inspiration on this poem.

Vitaly

בימים ההם
ברחובות של ירושלים
הוא לא נשאר
ואף פעם, אותו
הירח לא
אינו זוכר אותו
אף מילה, לא אפילו
אף פעם
למרות זיו פניו
כאילו הציונות
הוא נדחף מכאן
כבלילה הזה
הקיר בוכה
בוכים ההרים לידיו
בליעדיו
נשמתו השטופה
חיוכו המסקרן
דבריו, המעורבים
רובם, נדחפו מכאן
יצאו הימה
בדידותו, המזמרת
המשוררת
אל תוך הלילה ברחה
כעסה עליו
מהחוף קפצה
אפ מילה, אינה אמרה
דפים שקטים מתחת השמים
עמוקים כאילו ידיו
נכתבו את עצמם ללא מילה
בוכים הקירות, אפילו מחר
פחדני, האור אפילו
בעניו, מעבר הימה
במדינה זרה, מסתור
לבדו עם עצמו
בלילה בוכה, מבלי לבכות
יושן, מבלי לישון
המתבגר
על עצמו לספר ידע
Written on the Swiss National Day. August 1st 2005. Jerusalem.

untitled

האם אראה אותך שוב
איני יודע
אבל אולי כדאי לנו יותר
בדרך זו
למרות עצמנו
ואיך הימים מתגלגלים
ע"י אלהים
אני סלה בהאמתינה
עם החיים
מחכה למכתביך
כאילו פעם הראשונה
אני מתיישב
ומתפלא על עצמי
בעניים קטנות
אל תוך פניך
המדורבות
השתיקה, למרות
מנסה להתמודד עם המרחק
ועדיין איני רואה את יום הבא
שבו אני אתיישב לידך
בחושך אורי
המספר סיפורי חסידים
מתחת עורך
והאם אין מחר
זה לנו לא ידוע
אל תהיה עצוב בכל מצב
אפילו פעם אחד
אני תמיד אכתוב לך
על המקומות הנהדרים
שבהם לא בלנו אף פעם
ואתה בעצמך
תזכור בחיוחך
כל אשר לא היה
המדבר, הירח, צפת
אשר אניך ראית
על פני הקרבים
מלאים חוסר מילים
חוסר אחריות
על חיים
עלינו
תחשוב על זה, ילד
שיהיה טוב כבר
שתעלה עם המצב
באמונתך
המזמרת
הימה
הימה
עוד פעם
תגיע כבר
ונזכר אז כאלה ימים
שבהם על עמתך לספר ידעת
השטוף באור, תמיד אתה
מעל החושך
אני אתעלם מבלי לדעת
האם פעם תראה את הכוכבים
ברחובות של צפת
ואל תשכח
בדיוק כדאמרת פעם
"זכור"
ואף פעם לא להתראות

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

One shall not stumble

I thoroughly live your death
Relive your death
Not the death itself
But those pangs
Of fright
That silently hunt you
Your words I remember
As I find encore in your death
Or your fear of it
Thus the city night empty
As when you took leave of it
Leaving her with her own fears
With all those faces
Well-known as of old
With their entanglements
And their wasteful warmth
As temporary as life
Wiped out by dust
In this world
For life
Were this life at all

Their bodies seem to be very old
As if carved in the stone
One and manifold times
Perhaps just thrice
The body of one man
Always the very same
From distant lands
Recreates your smells
And those clouds of filth
Set beforehand in between
As those bottles yet undrunk
And those ashes of selves
Unfinished conversations
That were never prone to start
Set away with your contempt
With my regret
Deceit
Everything that was in store
I will kill those men one day
Slaughter them on your name
They will be all the same
Names in a memorial
Or perhaps not even names
But lamentations of that life you feared
Even without knowing whether it was all
Life or not
How many names we could count
I no longer recall
Unnamed graved
Turbulent pasts
Those you precisely wanted to hide
The hindering ones
In your lips when wet
In a story, just perhaps
I wish I had different stories
I wish you would not fear
I wish I weren't to die
No longer you will fear
When memory shall wipe it all out
Even my sights
The demeaneouring ones
The object of your content
More like contempt
Product of your passions
A childish endeavour
Not such as a book
Embroidered with faith
Bleedings the signs of your mistakes
Perhaps I may better hush
As I share but the same sins
And procrastinate in my innermost fires
That zeal
Of which you became thief
You make the chains all yours
It's tied to your toe
I am part of your foes
My warfare companion
My nightly comfort
The redeeming one
That I shall never forget
Were I not to see you again
In which case
You should turn the lights on
Before setting on your journey alone
Another strange might steal my vows
My woes
My wooes
That whimsical bastard
May he lead you towards death
In purgatories of different colds
In bodies such as those of old
The faceless and imagined
Such as my thorns
I can feel you unwept tonight
Entangled
Embraced in a stranger
Yearning for those hollows
For those comedies
Whimsies of the young
That you whispered to my delight
Or perhaps even more to your own
As you are still waiting
And some forlon lover in a synagogue prays
While you sleep alone
Or perhaps with a stranger
That will not take you back home
You will find your way in the darkness
Although morning has sprung
Devoid of comfort
And no letters will have been sent
But you will remember alone
Things that resemble no words
That mean a whole world
And while he prays
In uttered mumbles
"Blessed Are Thou King of the Universe,
That has in his universe such"
You remain wet
Unwept
Actively unhappy
With that extraordinary life you yearned for
In those novels that on your behalf he wrote
With the help of his God
One shall not stumble
The Bible says
One shall not stumble
I know
But yet I take pain your youth
And we both stumble
One shall not stumble
Yet one does
Alone

(*) Jewish blessing recited aloud after having seen an outstandingly beautiful person or tree.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Strange, Strangers

Introductory note: The first version of this sketch was lost two minutes ago because of a "server failure".


Two strangers share lunch in a cafe
And drink their wine
Sleep away their miseries
And celebrate with a toast
While fifteen minutes away an Arab woman is beaten up by a soldier
While a Russian boy gets up for work
While a Dutch mother yearns for her son
Or perhaps she only yearned for herself while she had a son
Yet they soak their blood in the wine
As the time goes by
They celebrate with wine

Two strangers share lunch in Jerusalem
One remembers the other
And the other does not
For who can a remember a friend?
Not even his name
And one rejoices in the other
One stranger, another stranger
Two good friends
One from Nebraska
The second, a loather of Zion
They celebrate miseries
Contempt of other men
Wise the man who rejoices in misery
Such as the painter
Who refused to draw the naked woman
And insisted on the fly
Hovering on her brest

The bread also shares some contempt
Soaking itself in vinager
To make the mesmer bitter
To utter it sweeter
To remember the table
To dance with the wine
Across the table
Two young men
One man from Nebraska
And a loather of Zion

Conversation:

- "Are you done with it?"
- "Sure we're"
- "But you barely touched them! Oh please forgive me, I'm acting like such a Jewish mother, but you barely touched your food"
- "I think we had enough"
- "But you're so skinny"
- "And you're so Polish"
- "I can't help it, it's in my blood"

The two young men drink their coffee
Or one drinks, and the other imagines coffee
As they leave the cafe, one forgets
One does not
One remembers the place
One does not
And down the streets walking
They're lost among the crowd
They're not part of the stone
One remembers the table
The other remembers the stone
Jerusalem is made of stones
And graves of stones are made
But then again
It's Jerusalem after all
So why couldn't I remember tables
If one does remember temples that he never saw
And remembers suicide attempts
And attempts suicide

Her wrinkles grew older
And she bore too many a son
Who never called her Polish
Who never ate their food
Who never came back home
And she forgot even the stone
Living far from the dead
Anxiously waiting for a son to return
Such as that Dutch woman
That blonde
Perhaps they were friends even
Perhaps not
She no longer remember the two young men
At all
She only remember
The birthday of their friend
On the 9th of Av!
How paradoxical
No?
She never thought about the man from Nebraska
Perhaps her son?
She never thought about her sons

As the two young men walked down the streets
One resembled the other
And rejoiced in one another
The younger man
Would live for a year in Nebraska
And would write a novel about Nebraska
And the man from Nebraska would commit suicide from the top of a high roof
And during her visit to New York she saw him jumping off the building
And she thought about her son
Did he eat enough?
She mumbled to herself as she rode on a bus
And once again helplessly she thought
Wheter than young man had eaten enough
A lawyer from Nebraska
A girl screamed in the dark
And the woman didn't think about Nebraska
But on whether he had eaten enough
And the poetry he read
If at all
He didn't look like a lawyer
When he jumped off that building
He looked more like anyone's son
Was that a metaphysical death?
She thought
Her son
Oh! her country
Beloved Zion
So unlike New York
Where people needed to kill themselves
How boring!
In Zion
You receive your sentence at birth
And no one worries no more

As she rode on the bus
She didn't know where to go
But she remember then
That there's no nothingness
And that there's no nowhere
Or so Parmenides said
And as they approached the ocean
She felt a void of lust
And dropped off
How strange, she thought
This reminds of some other place
And she started to walk
She walked down a street
She picked on a street
Not a beautiful street
But a boring one
Whereby everything looked the same
A street that could be anywhere

She took a glance on the sky
And then she thought
How strange,
The sky is the same everywhere
As she walked
And then once again she said
How strange, this place reminds me
Of some other place
Of a place I don't know
It's strange to think
We can even remember
Things we didn't know

Somewhere down an alley
Just next to a meat shop
Next to a bench
In front of a synagogue
But that wasn't important

On the bench is sitting a Russian man
A drunk Russian man
How strange,
She thought
He reminds me of a man I didn't know
She thought about his life
And imagined her own
In vanity
Tautological
While a Dutch woman mourned her friend
Whose death she was never informed of
And a Dutch mother no longer misses her son
While a writer prays in the synagogue

And she saw the Russian man fall
Not from the chair
But apart
And still he fell not
But in his eyes
She saw it all
A writer?
No, perhaps a waiter
Never a lawyer
No, that no
Lawyers reminded her of people jumping off buildings
A waiter, oh yes
How she lived her past thoroughly in him

Thereby she sat
And shared his pain
And played herself the Russian man
She thought about Jerusalem
For once at all
How strange,
She thought
He reminds me of somebody else's suffering
Until the Russian man disappeared
And she no longer thought about him
But looked into the synagogue
And into the meat shop

Then she ran after the Russian man
But he also disappeared among the crowd
Such as those two young men
Young and skinny
Twenty years back
Although in that street
There was no crowd

He had forgotten a novel
That was dedicated in a language she didn't understand
And then she thought,
How strange
This novel reminds of somebody's death
And she started reading the novel where the Russian man had stopped
A novel about Nebraska
A novel written in Nebraska
She had never been there
But it reminded her of Jerusalem

On the way back to Israel
While in the plane
She suddenly thought:
Now I understand
The Russian man is a mourner
The lawyer suffered a metaphysical death
And the author of the novel is as yet unknown
And in her bed,
At nights
She dreamed about Nebraska
Because she didn't plan to visit New York
And Nebraska reminded her of Jerusalem

Her sister sent her a postcard twelve months later
With a picture of that street
With the meat shop and the synagogue
But she couldn't recognize it
Because she only remembered the bench
And the postcard said:

"It's a pity that you didn't find us in New York
Our house right in front of a synagogue and a meat shop
In a place near the ocean. But it isn't a good time to come.
People are committing suicide in other places too. Etty is in
Wyoming now. Her sons eat well "

Rivka
16th August
Staten Island, NY

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Lolitta, and I remember. Wyoming yesterday, Beit Shemesh tomorrow.

Well time for kitschy note. The sleeplessness and the tiredness make you think interesting thoughts and are particularly useful for the long forgotten memory; or so it was two days ago when my whole reverie paid a visit and I lived through chapters of my childhood and my adolescence in the foreig country, in "that" foreign country. After all at this point all the countries are foreign. I remembered not just school days and wonderful momenta, but rather painful and distracting, disturbing motifs, I remembered how little value is at this point attached to those people, to those days and years, to that life. I disregard myself entirely, if not out of contempt probably out of unknowing wit. It's hard to explain how I felt that early morning as the Jerusalemite breeze kissed my cold chest with its breathe, walking partly naked and partly undressed in the corridor next to my room watching those Orthodox woman walking towards the Wall for the first prayers at 4 a.m.; for an hour or probably even more I lived all through my childhood and my adolesncence, that made me thought the thought of having lived a good life, accidented, wounded, impertinent, irrational, but certainly well lived, wasted even, well. I thought about Lolitta, that volputuous Italian chicksa, and the woman I would have probably married had she been better educated. I thought about her with despise and contempt (not the contempt of familiarity Vitaly, the contempt of heaviness) but looking back I can see in her probably the only honest friendship I had, or one of the only. A friendship built on dreams, built on ideologies, built on anarchism, built on existentialist novels and Chassidic tales. I admired Lolitta's strength to fight against life and to lead her own life, qualities I would love in somebody else but again, God always gives bread only to the teethless. She admired my Jewish outlook, she loved my face, envied my lips and above all we shared a dreadful sense of fatality, a "fatus categoricus" that made of that friendship something so valuable and memorable. The day when I left her I didn't say good bye and I didn't call on the phone, the day I left the country she didn't come to the airport, she cried in the line, I smoked a cigarette, hung the phone.

I've thought about Lolitta and Edgar for the last years of my life much more than I thought for example of Ari and Yuval or whoever else it was. I thought about the poetic elements of their failure and all the beauty of their violence; unfortunately I'm unable to see this through the prism of dogma, product of my uncurable moral relativism which I have to accept is rather deadening and pathetic. And it's another form of kitsch. I still think about them, how they tried to make me so happy, how they tried to make me feel more Jewish than I did, how they tried to make me feel more drunk than I was. Eyal Golan, ha! Nothing could be more kitsch than that. Edgar tried to make me happy by letting me listen to Eyal Golan while we drank the cheap wine. We stared at the mountains. That's probably why once in Israel I thoroughly hated Eyal Golan. Because I loved the mountains, and perhaps also because of kitsch.

I kept loving the mountains, there I was born. I'm living in a country where I had to build my own mountains to feel like home, I built them in my room and also in my bookshelves. You wonder how could I build my own mountains. Well, this is a strange country. If you can create a god every other millenium, why couldn't you build your own mountains? The only mountain that there was ever in this country remains only as a memory, a memory is all what remains. The mountain no longer exists, only the Prophets do. And they know where the mountain was. I doubt whether I'll ever see mountains again. New York is not that close to be the mountains where I used to live, and Vermont... oh well I've got some disappointments with Frost, worthwhile mentioning. By the way, New York is a synonym of "suicide attempt". Ask Yehuda Amichai, I think he's one of the illuminati of this generation, isn't there an opposite word for illuminati? Like "oscurati"? Well, if there's, that's what he is. Lolitta, I wouldn't forget you, I wouldn't forget your cynical beauty, your poorly fluent English, your gitano gipsy tales and the drug trafficker of your father.

I wish I had the inner-power to write down everything I felt and everything I saw. Cafeteria at the Sociology Faculty with the Marxist Jews and the Nazi gays, being lost in the charm of the night, driving to the airport with three drunk women, making love to the night without closing your eyes, my black maid at the cheap hostel, Jewish New Year with Uncle Pavlos and Auntie Miriam, the magic of La Candelaria with those tales of Giorgia Kaltsidou, Alex's house and mine, Angela, the little French movies (how could you call a movie "little"?), that handsome and decent policeman laying asleep in my bed while I write in a diary about my utter desires to die. Me lusting for that sickly bastard, marlboro light, L&M sometimes, the pizza-making neighbours and their esmerald dealings. The nausea. Somehow it seems as if that was part of a life I already lived before, a life that before me is not. Yet I'm happy to realize it's actually the same life, I haven't betrayed myself, I haven't forgotten anything. Lolitta, I remember. I know you remember more than I do, but should it suffice to say I've been around the fountain for a while. It smells like your voluptuous beauty, it smells like your sensitive fascination with death, your schizophrenia.

Last time I thought about her, the kitsch was gone. I remember the 20 dollars she never paid me, and the birthday present she never gave me, she didn't even call. Bitch.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile making a list of all these people I thought of and overtime start writing about them. One day I'll turn them into stories, I'll pickpocket them like Amos Oz said, I'll hijack them in the middle of the night, abuse them, rape them. They will struggle, but none of us will live enough as to avenge enough. And it's all meaningless anyway (well not all). My new neighbour in Jerusalem was a most pleasant surprise, so pleasant that I forgave him for his rudeness (I obviously meant somebody else) and bought him a birthday present he will never forget (and about which he will never forgive me). My neighbours knows the mountain sister too, brought up in Wyoming. A German brought up in Wyoming! That's like bringing up a Norwegian in Thailand. The results weren't so terrible after all. Yesterday we spent most of the day touring the Jerusalem only Zelda and me know. The Jerusalem of Shatz St. hidden beneath the water level and even beneath the corposes level. The Jerusalem of the books, probably the real Jerusalem. A note: Jerusalem is also synonym of suicide. Look up Yehuda Amichai for references. Thank goodness my neighbour isn't American, he doesn't have any nationality. He ain't no Zionist. The real Zion is still in our minds, still in the Psalms, still in Bialik and yet so still in Russia. Not in the State of Israel, the only place we ever had to steal from, even the non-Jews. I don't even know why I mentioned this awful topic, perhaps I'm hurting? Oh no! God forbids. Enough people is hurting in the world today and I refuse to become a stat. I refuse to become a story, to be so much into kitsch of life that someone would like to write stories about me. God, I'm afraid. God save the Queen. Even if a size queen.

It's a terrible day. My books selling out, Arabs praying in the mosques for our deaths, thank goodness our god hears not even their prayers. The hangover of beer and vodka, a smokeless day, less money for rides. Beautiful memories and pangs of kitsch. On top of everything I remember how my last story started: He wrote "Cum in my mouth" as his epiteth, the other replied "I want to fuck your mouth like a whore". And there their love started, and they still hate each other to this very day. Life with its strange ways. They just didn't get used to the hatred, but most people do. Actually most love stories never start with kitsch, for which we should thank the Almighty; but kitsch develops overtime as a natural tendence to obscure the facts of reality. It's an utter need, like governments. I like anarchy no more, to whom would we complain? To god?

If you would like to have a taste of the place from where I write these lines, please read what my friend Jan said [Jan is a German media-sort-something guy who came to Israel to play being Japanese, isn't it ironic? He stayed in my house the very same night a Russian guy fell in love with me, and the three of us slept in the same bed. The Russian used to stink to alcohol, Jan didn't talk to me, I sleep didn't. But he stayed in my house and brought me expensive books which I sold. That must mean we're friends] about Jerusalem.

"When I think about Jerusalem I can't even imagine living a normal life there! The buses from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea went via Jerusalem and I remember thinking: Whan an ancient town! (Hello, Jan!) Not only the Orthodox Jews with their hats and the women with the scarves but all the sand and the dust and these rough houses. To me it seems as if it was 2000 years ago and the origin of many things. It wasn't tangible, that feeling... the atmosphere. Fun is the last thing I could have there. But it's good to hear your completely different view. I don't want to draw a picture of my world from images I get from bus windows after all :-) Am I Japanese, or what"

To this letter, I still didn't reply. I wonder how people can live in this city. And this cafe is just so filthy, it makes you think there's something private in the internet you would like to see. No one can live in Jerusalem, actually no one lives there. I saw the last breezes returning home near the Dead Sea. Only people live there, but then again we don't count them. The concept of time in Jerusalem is abstract and so is the number for bus lines, and that again makes me think of kitsch, sex and love. Think about it, most of us say that the average for a New Yorker or Tel Avivian to find sex on the internet is the clichish "5 minutes" but it usually takes two hours or three, to find love it takes you an instant. There's a downside though. After the three hours the sex is usually good but you're not entirely satisfied plus you've got some pangs of consciousness, of awareness of your situation and you know it. The love is much more complex, you get it in a second, the sex is usually always good but it takes you years to kick him out of your bed, and sometimes of your bank account and most important, of your life. That's how it works.

I feel like a victim of all this sometimes, and I cry out and proclaim my martyrdom to the world. An Antigone of the 21st century, but then when I come to think about it I say, "Well, I love reality, I love it so much that I will always struggle to live in truth" and yet in awareness of my sick condition I don't achieve my goal at times and most likely live in lies, delicious lies. But I never stop running from them and never stop trying to live in truth. It doesn't make me better than anyone, see... I was looking at "meeting site" while writing this note. Not because I need porn to survive, just to make sure beautiful men and women didn't disappear from this world. Vitaly and Lolitta have something in common, they've never lived in Wyoming. Ha! how easy to find how similar people are, no? Just like New York and Jerusalem. Both of them are cities of kitsch, cities where it's hardly possible to live in truth, and where nobody lives, save people. Seriousness please. Vitaly & Lolitta? Oh yeah! Volulptuous exaggerate beauty. That's they share, besides kitsch and me.

Funny, the roles people have in somebody else's life. Maybe I'm moving to New York only in order to host a guy from Wyoming who lives in Jerusalem and has no chemistry with a Dutch girl who comes from a town caused my mom dread. All those hairy, ugly and unprovoking men and women approaching me on the net. I think their role in my life is to remind me that I've spent 24 shekels already and that there's voluptuous exaggerate beauty you can love from one second to the other.

Dictionary of Misunderstandings:

Vitaly & Lolitta: Voluptuous and exaggerate beauty.

Jerusalem & New York: suicide, ghost town. v. Yehuda Amichai.

Tel Aviv: Biblical town located in Manhattan.

Israel: A country that existed in the 2 BCE and still survives as a main theme and drive force for western poetry.

The State of Israel: A place where Lolitta never lived, a place where Vitaly visited. A place whereby Ari was buried. Remember that in Jerusalem the level of water is beneath the level of the corpses.

Time: 3-hours to find sex and 1-second to find love. 1 minute to get rid of the sex and only 1 life to get rid of the lover.





Good afternoon gentlemen.


Ari

PS: Yeah I know, I promised the poems 2 weeks ago. Tomorrow perhaps

Friday, August 05, 2005

Ideological Note

I think it's a paradox, an ironic paradox. It came to my mind that the response to Postmodernism, and the demystified version of Existentialism can be somewhere around the corner. Incidentally I laugh because it was Communist painture what made me think about this idea. I thought endlessly about the concept of minimalism, which I inherited not from philosophy or 20th century painting but from linguistics, mathematics and theory of chaos in particular. There are people out there doing some sort of minimalist (existentialist sort of) poetry but it doesn't come out too well, the message seems cut off. Probably Nietzsche was right, we're not ready for it. The world is still too civilized for minimalism. At least in poetry. My answer to Postmodernisn is by no means non-perennial rational philosophy and late Aristotelianism. My response to Postmodernism is ANTI-KITSCH. A new kind of realism or modernism. A non-kitsch realism. A non-French realism. Perhaps an American realist school. A non-pragmatic American realist school. Funny, Communism, love (for a guy) and kitsch made me think about it. Thanks Stalin, Thanks Vitaly, Thanks Sabina, Thanks Jabotinsky.

Addendum (5 minutes later): Perhaps I'm wrong. Ever read Eccclesiastes? A movement, like any other movement will disappear. Only one thing shall remain out of all this: our natural tendence for kitsch, which is even more powerful than reality itself. That's why I'm in love, that's why I can't tolerate this country, that's why I can't tolerate any country. That's why I'm an invisible man. But belief and hope is something you can't steal from man. Ask Anna Frank for particulars.

"You're the eternal leit-motif and raison-d'etre behind my paintings. Is there anything nobler than that? I doubt whether Wilde could have figured it out himself back then. The leit-motif behind my artistic betrayals, the portrait of your frustrations and of self-destruction. You're the eternal leit-motif and raison-d'etre of behind my paintings. Is there anything nobler than that? Yes. Only the kitsch we share. Otherwise, you're the eternal leit-motif behind my paintings".

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Fear, laughter, lightness.

I think I should start my note with a big laughter, with some painful, cynical and deceiving laughter; but it's pretty hard when you're sitting before a screen. But I wish.

Today could be one of those happy days of my life, one of those days of finding myself, or rather losing myself. Nietzsche challenged most of the western philosophers of the last two centuries with the idea of the eternal return, which was wonderfully surveyed by Heidegger and Sartre, two of my favourites. I believe the poetry of Holderin came much closer to understand the idea behind the eternal return, although it was written during the German Romanticism. Right before the Sturm and Drang, right before the word kitsch came into being. Right before German pathos would reach its highest peak, right before people like Nietzsche would be no more than heretic dreams. I wonder what people like Kant would have thought about it in their own times, "What's the Enlightenment?" is a question just as metaphysically dense and meaningless as the question of the eternal return. To some extent I hesitate on whether it is the same question. Similar questions were posed by Parmenides and by many others even behind parmenides. The question itself was posed by man himself after having eaten from the tree of knowledge that brought him to spiritual death. The Jewish god questioned it himself. Heraclited said once "If you haven't heard me but the Logos it is wise to ascertain by means of the senses that all the things are but one very same thing". Until this very day I didn't stop from running away from the Logos, yet I didn't stop from hearing in each and every instance of my life. Those are my memories, my memories of Giorgia Kaltsidou. That Pontiac, told and caring woman who loved me as only a philosopher can love, who loved each and every part of my brain and who yielded it for so many years.

Georgia reminds me of the poetess Zelda, and somehow everyday I remember her. I remember her when I look at myself in the mirror, when I speak and even when I cry and dream. I remember her when I kiss him, I remember her when I crave for him. Years have passed since I last heard her voice, like coming from a far, from within the womb of an Arcadian hill. I can still remember that voice such as a swift touch beneath the skin. Does Georgia know herself how much of the architect of my life she was? I doubt it. She will die one day, maybe she's dead now and all this will become kitsch, how much we abhorred it! And then years later I will become kitsch myself, ugh! and I know I will become big kitsch. Ha!

Now I've broken my last tie to the past. I turned my back on the State of Israel, in full awareness of my betrayal. I rejected my career with a non-return point breakthrough, took each and every one of my house belongings and placed them in the streets saving only my clothes, my music and my books. My books are going to be sold within a week, except for those I would be unable to acquire once again. I avenged to myself to most of my past, including Auschwitz. I am a free man today and more willing than ever for the eternal return. I'm not afraid, ironically enough thanks to a little man who is more afraid of himself than anything else. He set me free, with more kitsch that his communist upbringing and his massive body can contain. His awful lot.

It wasn't very difficult to trace him, the internet does wonders. I hesitate know whether to send flowers for his birthday. No, that's too conventional. Interesting books I sent already twice so it doesn't make sense no more, too early for a surprise. Hummmm.... poetry of Zelda? He hasn't been in Israel enough as to understand it. I don't know for how long I'll be able to endure the silence diet, probably next week I'll call. Postcards I sent already and I actually showed my contemptuous lack of originality, so should I falter at this point? My fidelity to his soul (not to him, to his soul) is still unmovable, such as is my self-loathing. I'll think about something, that's way too far into the future as to worry with that right now. Eternal return, once again. No fear, whatsoever. It's interesting to discover that the highest level of freedom man can acquire is the realization that he hasn't got any.

A little disappointment though (but just a little). It was too simple to trace his steps. I think there should be in the world more people like Sabina and me. People that never existed anywhere but in the memories and diaries of other people. People who never left traces anywhere, who no one knows where they live or how they go through the day. Invisible so to speak, most likely. But then again I wouldn't fall in love with invisible people, our secret brotherhood. Invisible people cause me aversion. There's a mad fascination about them. They come, steal your life and then fade away, just like Georgia. My master. Invisible yet living in the same house and sitting in the same old armchair for over thrity years, invisible yet. I think there's something invisible about every person and every eye, something invisible about everyone of us just like there's eternal return for everyone, such as there's faith, such as there's love. Such as there're several shadows. There's something invisible about the heart. About poetry, about art, and even about communism and homosexuals, in spite of the anachronism. The universe is invisible itself, read about steady-wave theory?. Universe, unity, invisibility, return, unicity. It starts to make sense. I loosen.

No fear.
Just laughter and lightness.

Alanis released a new version of "Ironic". Now it goes like "Meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his beautiful husband". How pathetically ironic and full of kitsch.. This world is definitely going nowhere, and we know it and we stumble, then die. Not so easy though. Eyes watching me, thousands of eyes. The eyes of Georgia, my father, my aunt, Asher, Yuval, Oren, Ofer, even Vitaly watching me. I owe to behave.

No fear tonight.
Just laughter and lightness.
And insofar as you're concerned, don't worry. Bitterness and heaviness until you'll understand. Then after the heavy weight of lightness you'll desperate crave for vertigo as you craved for a desire to wail and you'll fall. In laughter and lightness.

Ari

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

More of the same

Well, how naive of me. When I come to think about it many times I held myself from saying things I wholeheartedly wanted to express in my blog fearing that some of the people concerned with my words would be ever able to read them and find themselves portrayed, I was always afraid of embarrassing them, of betraying me. That's one of the reasons why I haven't written anything about Vitaly to be honest, I can justify myself on account that the feeling of emptiness and estrangement plus strangeness that stems from the whole idyll precludes me from the natural ability of writing. I was naive enough to think that people would be ever interesting in reading the dreams and fables of a 21 years old idiot, but maybe I'm wrong. Who is to know these things? If most of these people have actually read it I think I should start feeling naked, woed and exposed to their imaginary eyes, that follow me all through my life as an endless sequence of betrayals.

But there're a few things I can say, despite myself. I definitely love this guy, not with a desperate love that breaks all the rules of cognition and understanding, but rather full with a void of understanding. Sure. I know it doesn't make sense at all. He achieved quite a few purposes in my life, unknowingly. It's funny to think the role other peoples play in our lives, it's almost uncanny. Through Vitaly I avenged my honour for once at all, I avenged myself and destroyed that irrational myth the journalist and me built together with his crueltly on my very own pain for all this time. He's hurting now and I know it, and I wonder if he'll ever address me again because I know I've broken a chain of events that led us through it, a broken of events that exposed my weaknesses in their highest pathos and portrayed me as a 21st century Antigone. In the other hand it's funny because V. loves me too, but his problem is that he doesn't want to, me in the other want so desperately want to love him, oh well! It's so pathetic for someone like me writing this shit. But after all I still go to meetings of Zionist political groups, engage myself in philosophical conversations lasting for hours and hours with my grandma Chaya and send used books with long dedicatory explanations to someone who despite himself refuses to address me. But I no longer care, I'm contemptuously loyal, my fidelity to him is unmovable, and it is not the kind of fidelity between husband and wife or between boyfriend and boyfriend, because I can feel him and I feel him fall too, I feel him guilty too. He is just too young to understand that fidelity isn't counted by the number of erotic endeavour that postmodern men engage themselves with anonymous men. The flesh and the soul have different needs, and I just don't need to know more about this. He's beautiful, young, appealing. I'm in the other hand no less beautiful, yet dark and sometimes irreversibly dreadful, and I ain't no longer young at least in that respect. I'm not the kind of look-for-a-type-of-man-your-dreams-told-you-about. But then again I'm an intellectual, one of those already forlorn and forgotten intellectuals of Jerusalem. He could never understand that, yet it doesn't help my feeling for wanting him even when knowing he already might want others, simpler ones, heavier ones... to inflate his ego and his self-loathing pity. As if I weren't there ever. The pain doesn't subdue these days but I find ways around it, around his silence, around my own silence. My soul-to-soul fidelity is still unmovable.

He can hide in the other end of the screen, but he can't hide from my soul. That poisonous bitch that has damaged so many unknowledgeable souls in her endeavours. After all there's nothing I have to fear. I betrayed my country several times, my parents and my wealth. Betrayed the academy and turned my back on those friends I had for a lifetime. Each and every one of them remembers me possibly quite often, and they remember those books and those poems, those place and those careers I pushed them into. The unbearable ode. Perhaps suffering is the real nature of men. It's his fault after all, he causes himself to suffer, and makes me suffer too. And the world is content. In any case it's irrelevant at this very point, how long does it take to forget a friend? To really forget? Maybe three or four lives, the mind is a strange apparatus. I read in the news last week a guy age 18 and another guy age 19 were hung publicly in Iran, after being held in prison for a year and having been given 228 whippings. That shouldn't surprise a western reader. The only difference is that they were killed for being homosexuals, for loving each other and for letting it continue up to the point of sexual intercourse. Yet here we're, V. in America, A. in Israel. Busy with metaphysical issues to be or not to be. Ha! In someway I wish many people would die, so we could learn a lesson. But as history takes its course our memory grows shorter and shorter. No one cares about anything but himself, and that includes god. Funny, I avenged myself to one of the persons I love the most with a person who loves me but doesn't want to, therefore prefers to ignore me because it's easier yet being unsmart enough to leave traces of his steps as for me to realize the sad state of affairs. Well, one thing is clear. I won't sit home and wait for a lifetime, no one will. And no one dies of love, except in Russian novels.

Who will regret all this? NO ONE.

My sleeping pills are working just fine, sleeping at least twelve hours a day, but my mind doesn't sleep, my cravings never stop and my desires just grow stronger. Coward, that's the word. Coward. I know this is an electronic blog, but it's MY electronic blog, and I'm constitutionally entitled to write anything I want, you like it or not. Coward.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Better now

Well.... a mood swing for a change. I'm just too lazy to sit and write a journal and I always feel more comfortable with typing, after all it's easier to remember those thoughts I've been thinking even in those days when I'm not thinking any thoughts. Last evening and this morning I awoke to those horrible pangs of pain, of deep emotional pain, irrational and irreversible. Those feelings that make you regret being alive at all, being yourself at all.

Things turn out exactly the way you didn't expect, and that's one of the greatest highlights of human lives, you can't plan anything in advance, you can't promise a good deal of things and whenever you've got the chance to make an "educated" decision on whether to go on this trip or to buy that present for such-and-such there's no way to establish comparisons, because you live only one life, and as such there's no way how you can know whether such is right or wrong. Yesterday it all seemed like a beautiful day, didn't write any letters and didn't hold any thoughts in my mind, basically concerned about nothing.

I heard the following story from my adoptive grandmother, Chaya Liberman. Her father was born in a shteytl in Russia, I can't remember exactly where, but it was some god forsaken place that started with an "O". Her mother was born in Russia too and thanks to her provincial life she didn't speak a word of Russian, but rather a broken Slavic Yiddisch and then a broken Yiddisch German. They were raised up in a generation about a hundred years ago and because they were poorer than a rat, their only motivation in life was their ideologies, Zionism and Bundism after all. Mr.Such-and-Such was a Jewish atheist communist. With the turmoils of early 20th century Russia he and his wife immigrated to the Argentine where they settled in a small village even smaller and more pathetic than their shteytl in Russia. My grandmother grew up there, in the Argentinean countryside, she attended catholic schools like most of her fellow correligionaries and although there was not any attempt to teach them about the Jewish religion she knew from the earliest childhood that she was a Jew, that it was a bad thing and that her father hated contemptuously the religiously-observant Jew who lived next door. The story is beyond all mermerizing fascination but I'm unable to make of it a literary piece at this very moment.

Then we had a conversation about how people lived and loved before the IT era, before television and the internet. For a state-of-the-art sucker like me it is impossible to think about a world without television, airplanes and internet. Then she told me a beautiful story, that reminds me of all those small and meaningless deeds that bring people together in this world, you can call it god (and if so he's a real fuck up) or coincidences, or faith or anything you want. When she was a little girl in that god-forsaken village there was nothing to do, basically other than working in the fields in order to send their children to the "big city" to become doctors and lawyers, from what she tells all the doctors and lawyers in the village were Jewish. But she was a woman, her duties were to graduate from school (whenever they had the means to pay for it) and then later on find a "fine" husband (preferably one who owns a store, for doctors and lawyers were out of the questions, they were to marry off women from the aristocracy, not miserable girls from villages that couldn't afford long stockings in the winter) and bring offspring, someone's got to get the work done.

It took my grandmother at least forty years to realize what she wanted to do in her life, and me her adoptive grandson here in the Land of Israel feel as someone entitled the honor to continue her pursuances. She became a poet, although she wrote only in Spanish as she never really learnt any other language, and spite of more than half a century in the land of Israel her Hebrew can hardly compete with mine, and same goes for her yiddisch. Well, that's another story. She published a few books of poetry with her own money, books that I've been translating into English and Hebrew over the last twelve months, together we founded a literary group based in Tel Aviv whose members were never more than a bunch of frustrated intellectuals and dilettantes, but it's still running. It's been two years. I'm leaving them in two months, she's decided to finish with it for good. It's my fault, I'm the one to blame. I don't care. My grandmother is a poet, and me? I'm just a shadow of one of the greatest women that saw and lived the birth of the State of Israel.

When she was a teenager the Jewish community in the country had a pen-pal club founded by the Youth League of the Zionist Movement in Buenos Aires. There boys and girls from all over the country exchanged letters and built friendships, it was a different world. No one had any money, no one had any education, any aspiration. But nevertheless they all yearned for that "higher something" that couldn't be found anywhere, life was just too real and cold as to be taken as it was. The only thing they had were ideologies, dreams and more dreams. My grandma joined this club and for a couple of years she exchanged letters with a boy from Buenos Aires, the big city, almost twelve hours ride from her village in the valleys. Years went by until she was able to travel to Buenos Aires with her father and there finally she met this boy in a meeting of the Zionist Youth League. They had a community in which they trained (mostly ideologically) a large group of boys and girls that were to be sent to Eretz Yisrael to settle down in the land and join the recently formed (and even not as yet formed) kibbutzim. Chaya at the time was too young to be accepted in the group and she had to return to her village and at age sixteen left her parents (and knowing the conditions of the time it was very unlikely they would see each other ever again) to join the Zionist League. Back then there were two big Zionist movements, Shomer HaTzair and Dror. In other fronts in Europe the Revisionism of Jabotinsky and the movement Chivat Tzion were growing stronger and stronger. Chaya was a member of Dror (the movement disappeared many many years ago and the only remnant of those glorious days are a few settlements of the Shomer HaTzair movement). And because of this boy and those letters anxiously sent and received over the years she became a Zionist herself and during this time she met Shimon, her husband for more than five decades.

They embarked to Eretz Yisrael shortly after the establishment of the State, boarding a ship filled with poor Italian immigrants and a bunch of Jewish youngsters whose only desire was to return to that Land of the Ancestors. She came to Israel and witnessed the growth of the state as a founding member of a kibbutz located in the Negev. Years later she returned to the Argentine, resided in Buenos Aires and her children were born and raised up between Israel and Argentine. Today she's a mother of five children, grandmother of some fourteen children, greatgrandmother of one and adoptive grandmother of a gay kid. Me. One day I need to write this story down, to remember who we are, not to forget ever, all those chapters of history that have been deleted by the internet, by casual sex, by infatuations and mobile phones. Of those days that will never be again. Of those days that no one remembers.

All that made me think of how Vitaly and me met, and how we forget each about, how we forgive each other. Life is made up by an endless number of meaningless events that determine the course of our lives and there's not much freedom of choice. Not even in the United States of America, and certainly not in the Middle East. It seems we're condemned to live our lives, and there's nothing you can do other than gathering little details just in the case that we may be right one day, perhaps after we will day. Yesterday I wrote a poem with the title Vitaly, ironically the poem is in Hebrew, I thought about publishing it here but I don't know if it makes sense at all because maybe sometimes he might be popping up here reading my stuff, seeing my naked. Perhaps it's just my ego that makes me think that he thinks about me sometimes and this interests him at all, but it's always healthy to keep some hope. Hope is the only thing that separated the skeptical and the disbeliever from death. It was a while since I last managed to write anything in Hebrew at all, although I must confessed my poem wasn't influenced only by that dreadful memory of him and those pangs of emptiness that stem from sleeping alone without his snoring and his arms around my delicate body as if it were a protective endeavour. It was also influenced by Chaya's story and by a poem of Rachel. I feel a bit unworthy today, but it all will pass as that will pass.

I will take my unhappiness and my sadness anywhere I go, but so do the rest of the humans. I've got nothing to worry about. I've got other worries in anycase, my health deteriorating over time and my willingness to feed myself, questioning by the police because of old and forgotten debts, relatives dying, a frustrated father, a contemptuousness for my very own god and a desperate hate for my very own country, for my hometown. A thousand regrets and those faces I wish I never had to see again. But his memory lingers... and doesn't seem to fade, makes me feel somebody else, somebody special, important. Just like I felt as Chaya made of me a continuation of her 100-years-long story, of her poetry, of her dying Zionism, of her liberalism almost edging on hedonism. I state at his picture sometimes, out of stupidness and it makes me feel loving and loved. It really makes me feel something else beyond the cold minded intellectual, the cruel and cynical survivors that lives within me, makes me feel human and innocent and that feeling is priceless. I have my regrets and my dreams also in regard to him, I'm not a pessimist and maybe I'm more romantic and dreaming than most people, in my very own way. I yearn for his smile, yet I'm feeling just fine. Musical almost.

The day before yesterday I found myself back home, in good old Tel Aviv. I despised it. I found myself being "that" I can no longer be, "that" for whom death is a secure road, wasted way behind his time. But I learnt a lesson from Eyal, my journalist friend who desperately wanted me sexually for such a long time. He told me, "You're too precious to waste yourself with a guy like me, you need someone that will love you like children do, someone who cries, who walks off in the middle of the night and who knows how to say I'm sorry". I don't think I'm "that" worthy and life has proven it so, but worthier now more than ever. I love Chaya, that woman I'll never forget, that woman who taught me the value of ideologies, of beliefs, of creating an image of yourself as chief ruler of your own world, who taught me the meaning of art. I doubt whether she'll live much longer after I'll leave and I wonder if I'll ever remember it as my unhappiness and my sadness will be walking with me past my shadow in the streets of New York.

I'm wondering.... "someone who will make me feel as if I'm living an extraordinary life". Oh hell, my life is just too extraordinary at times. They say alcohol is just like life, it must be drunk in small sips. But I'm stubborn. Life and alcohol altogether I drink in long and deep sips, and my drunkenness never leaves me, fortunately. This autumn will come, next will too. Life's gotta be extraordinary after all. Don't you think? (That's not something I'm asking myself, rather....). I've got to finish a book today, find some park (got enough cigarettes) and a bottle of cola maybe. Then I gotta mail the book to America tomorrow. Maybe it'll get estranged on the way, someone will steal it, he'll never read it, maybe the neighbor will or the garbage man. It's interesting to think about it without being able to answer at all. I wish you would realize how extraordinary it is.

A.

Silence

No poetry today
Perhaps not ever again
Wasteful
Wasted
On sleeping pills
These summer days
Dreaming of that autumn
That will never come
Crying deep inside
But never shed a tear
He writes me no longer
A vacuum
An emptiness
That is most certainly physical
A clouded sight
I miss him
But who seems to care?
Not even me
Punishment
Punishment
And more punishment
A physical pain that precludes sleep
That is all what is left
No memories
No hopes in store
Nothing can change this
My prison
This city
My penalty
These people
And my silences
No sleep at night
Even with sleeping pills
Maybe they will kill me one day
Despite themselves
Despite myself
And no one will have missed out
My fault
After all
Who am I to judge?
God up in heavens
All alone
Unlike him
Alone but with himself
Riding in the train
Looking out the window
Choosing to ignore
Choosing to blind
Choosing to deflect
I remain unchanged
I remain in pain
I yearn for silence
I yield some silences
And from death
I feel close
Not such death of the body
When the soul is then bygone
A death that is human
That is kind
A death that is endless
In its very own time
And he is the murderer
His silence is
Again
It's all overemphasized
I have other troubles
Other sorrows
I can barely stand myself
Devoid of anything
No guilt for today
More sleeping pills maybe
Till this all will end
My prison
Down here
My head
My thoughts
A chain
A mistake
That's what it is
More sleeping pills
And procrastinations
Adieu

Sunday, June 12, 2005

Juliana

12.06.05
Kfar Masaryk
Israel

I do no longer remember the last time when I heard you, or when I stopped hearing you... and the same goes for David.. such intense friendships, a young endeavour lost in time as if it did no longer matter. I guess it should have been some time near the beginning of the century, as meaningless as it should sound. The trees were standing anew in the courtyard of your house and we used to wander beneath their cold shade in those procrastinating days of April not having any other concerns; we were both in the middle of our teens and back then it seemed as if time was never going to run away, as if time was never going to escape from our hands and sew itself in an endless thread that would conduct us exactly to the same places where we're standing upon right now, to our current beings.

I wonder endlessly if you will ever read these lines and whether it has any meaning at all, whether it matters at all or it just does not. As meaningful as those clear days and their skies seemed to us back then nowadays they tell me how worth it was living them back then, and how precious of a memory they constitute in these darkening times, although summer sprang and the shades of melancholly and sweet divagation have abandoned us already in a bygone murmur. Those days tell me nowadays how afraid we were and how happy we were, how innocent were our lies and how careful were our attempts to make our lives better, to make of our world a better place and how well-constructed we were, such radicals! It also seems as if of today those odes would be long bygone, and lost in the precarious senses of adulthood that have stolen from us the light we struggled for in those precious days that back then seemed to have been in store for ever, waiting to be taken over for a million years, daring to be taken and yet waiting.

It was your birthday and we were both nervous, I arrived to your house as we had agreed and the portico welcomed us with a river of smiles and contemptuous faces that would lead us into impersonal conversations, that kind of conversations you can hold only with those long forgotten buddies that have been in the most recondit and hidden thorough places of your mind, of your soulless thinking, of your radicalism, of your existentialist constructs. No more philosophies were needed and we escaped the noise produced by the social conventions and the friendly conversations of your friends and relatives. The sweet smiles of your girlfriends avoided us and led us altogether into that long and cold conversation beneath the tree, we both had just started smoking and the filthy smell of the wet wood combined with our breath and those clouds of smoke seemed to become one with ourselves and give place to the most intimate conversation we could have ever had. A conversation about nothing, a conversation without meaning. A conversation that was rather a dual monolog, each one of us seemed to have learned his lines thoroughly.

Until then we had been separated by screens of purples and greens, by a superimposed modernism and a sad teenage longing for a more interesting life, for some lost meaning, for some never found meaning. The streets always seemed familiar to me ever since although I was never to return and lay in the darkness beneath the trees, whose species I no longer remember. I do remember your mother and your father though, even though I cannot tell what they looked like, probably it's only your mother's voice on the phone calling you to the line what I remember. It was late already and we burnt the pop corn trying to avoid the radiation of the microwave before that movie we never watched, before that intimate conversation we simply never had. Your were slightly taller than I was, and back then much more prettier... and I doubt if nowadays you're still as happy and insecure as you were in those days. I'm myself pretty different so that you know, more beautiful and less happy, more tranquil and less idealistic, devoid of constructs.

With difficulty I remember the country itself, although the road to your house and the adjacent streets are clear to me as if I had seen them yesterday. They were of some candid ochre and the walls of the golf court surrounded the opposite side... all the houses in the neighborhood were of some refined country antique and we could barely see the cars passing by. After all I was a man, a grown up man for my age and hence I was allowed to cross roads and avenues until I made it to the pharmacy so as to buy cigarettes as I had promised you. We returned to the trees and smoked beneath'em. One day many months later I returned there with my aunt, I believe there was some famous patisserie, to which I do not wish I had invited you once... it seemed not as the most appropriate place for a un unkindred heart like yours and mine. We preferred to stand up smoking and dressed in leather beneath bridges or in noisy shopping centres where our intelligence would enable us to criticize the provincial manners of our country, after all we both belonged to a different social class, in despite of your having a problem to accept it. Oh! the home country, I wish I could remember it any longer.

Not remembering how or when I am simply somewhere else, somehow else... and paradoxically beneath the hideous summers I remember those streets, I hear the rain as it falls in my cap, as it pours some sense of intellectual burgueois on my sights; you know... I used to be always dreaming, now I'm trying very hard, very hard... to dream, to fall asleep and to daydream. It doesn't mean I'm bitter, I'm just different, I'm just someone else. In the middle of the most meaningful of lives, in the most interesting of lifes, in the most paradoxical and anacronistic chapters of history; amidst all of those I can think of those days, can't I? It isn't precisely longing, but more of a sweet memory. One of those meaningless moments of your childhood suddenly turned into precious chapters of memory when you're far away, when you're cold inside, when you're in need of some justification, of some redemption. Specially when you're done, when you've grown.

The TV is on tonight, American series, endless glasses of waters and nicotinamide, I'm not particularly depressed, nor thoughtful you could say, this isn't what once was, this is not. It's just me trying to find a way not to forget that there were some days, when we were happier than today, that there were some days, when the sun shone, when the night ended, when the Aurora came. Unlike these days, mid the summer, in the Land of Israel, as yet we haven't seen the sun, not even in the Galilee, have we as yet seen the sun. I wonder if you've ever been to a place like the Galilee, like the Land of Israel. I wonder if it even interests you or if you're really a student of history as you promised. Maybe you just became a businesswoman, like your mother, like all of them, like those "them" of your stories.

I did keep my promises though, and strived barely as to live a reckless life, like those Tolstoian lives that made up the whole range of intellectual aspirations springing from the frustration of our upper-middle class sense of boredom. I became a philologist or rather never stopped being one, until I became postmodern, awfully. Then became a linguist and on my own right a writer, being more of a writer than anything else, a writer that barely writed but undoubtedly a writer. I wasn't so happy though, hope you were, I so much do. It's not a big concern, for we're still as young as time, but unfortunately not younger than we were, back then, oh no. It's all beautiful here though, just strange, I wouldn't even want to discuss it. I guess it's my private secret, a secret I kept even from those days, an unfaulty companion, a default companion. I wish I had written these lines before, but oh well you know what it boils down to, guilt. Your favourite word.

I haven't forgotten myself these days, quite the opposite. Home is still far, and late is tonight. The endless lines that were written between those days and now form an invisible thread that only my suitcases can see, for thus I left, so henceforth I came. A certain winter day, I denied those pasts, I denied those presents, I denied everything. In a bag I packed my sort of memories, and those letters you never wrote me, for after all we had never been in love and letters you had never written me, or I think once you did, but it was stranged on the way. I remember how it happened and I'm not going to tell it to you now for it's not pertinent, my life hangs on a wire and how unsorted I am, oh girl! You go and get yourself some benzedrine tonight.

I never called you again, I never wrote you a line because I didn't remember your address, because I never remembered you up to this very day. Back then everything was forbidden, feelings were forbidden, the world of existence within itself contained in itself. It was all so poetic and philosophical, so well-mannered and idealistic, so well constructed. I don't know about you, but at this side of the ocean it doesn't exist no more, and even with the clear blue sky we still yearn for some light, we look forward to a day, when it'll be indeed day. I don't want to attack you with questions from those days, for silence was beautiful and was sacred, such as those faces we no longer remember, you obviously shouldn't remember me at all.

But I do have something to say, how are you? And I'm sorry I hung the phone on you that day. You could never imagine it would be the last time, not at age fifteen. Could you?

Saturday, May 14, 2005

12 minutes

As if 12 minutes would matter
No difference does it make
The thin line between soul and thought
That makes us different
From our deadly counterparts
Our consciences
And those hails, to other odes
To forsaken lords
To those ties I've worn
To those ties I've formed
As if it would make no difference no more
We no longer count the minutes
For our roads are largely exposed
And its end biffucates no more
In those colours
That smelt like lust
That smelt like dust
From a youthful idealization
That he no longer enthralls
But those minutes did make a difference
Between the East and my soul
Between colours of other peoples
Between their faces and thier sores
Making one very picture
A vane piece of thought
Those minutes did matter
And separated us from death
Separated us from life
For death is only a spiritual toll
Those minutes did make a difference
For all what it counts
If at all
My dreams kept me alive
And my life surrounded their voice
As to hear a little murmur
That would encourage us to carry on
To live through a next day
Where watches would not run
Where needles would not knock
And our roads would end
In electronic procrastinations
And in deserts he longer himself saw
Those minutes did count
My dreams did count
My last spark of life
My last drops of blood
My last drops of soul
A solider stopped on the way
And questions asked not
For in my eyes he saw
We were drowning all the same
In the same sand
Such as water
That contained many souls
With his dreams and theirs
Also mine, not as yet forlorn
He also dreamt those dreams that I had dreamt
When I was awake
When I breathe
When I lived
It was the pull of life
What no one could take away from us
It will never drift
It will never weaken
Even in the Middle East
Our dreams will never be like sand
And the minutes actually did count
For love they counted
For life they counted
For lies they counted
And the dreamer is alone
But nevertheless a song
And the minutes always counted
For the needles to clock
For the death to partake
In this lively carnival of souls

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Asaf

... And that morning, God didn't knock on your door nor the newspaper came, and you hadn't realized it wasn't morning as yet in spite of those long blue lines that were making up the manifold faces of heavens, giving you an intoxating and banal impression that morning had strucken with a swift smell of aether, such as there was in the days of the creation; even before men knew sorrow or pain of any kind. You again didn't pray, for it was just too late, and unresoluted in regard to your faith, you were resoluted to follow your fate, so the many-coloured home of your father you left, and even wanted to forsake. Your last cigarette poisoned you enough, nevertheless too late. You had made the decision, a child you would become, and you would do any of those things that he would love.

The streets were deserted, but far from being a desert... and the large streets of town seemed to shorten themselves and form threads in front of you as if they were complices of your sinful deeds, of your history; and aiding your escape, your way out of reality, your dream-for-a-day. Different machines of the modern western world were resoluted to halt your march but the leather-coated paviments of the earliest of mornings prevented them from wrongdoing, henceforth as once was, before the creation and recreation of men you were the only living creature on earth and the chemically knot-tight structures of the urban metropolis joined forces together so that you would reach your destination, a first-class flight, well-booked in advance. Maybe some god in heavens was your ally, or probably the dew was coming late that day and didn't notice the beats of your heart. No automobiles halted your way, no second thoughts diverted you, no remebrances would haunt you, not now.

The particularly vertical lines that joined the urban milieu in an instant decomposed themselves to form a thin and well-iluminated highway for which your instincts would make the only passenger, such as a lonely book waiting for the tram, trying to catch a writer in the station or some love story in a bar, as its pages were empty and its heart thirsty of savage lust. There you were, in the middle of the street, whereby your phone would never ring and being far from your home, then no letters would come, no lovers of the past would address you and no intimate momenta would be there in store. Had you not remembered that song you heard last, you could have gone astray and perished; for that's how afraid you were, you are. At that very moment history you didn't have, you were perhaps a little story, a song is all what you had. You were a Schliemann in Troja, or maybe like one of those gods of the Genesis; a word would be your guide through life, you would be a word yourself.

Then the creation spotaneously took place, giving birth to the urbis of the 21st century; machines started to awake as morning approached and other human beings joined your demeanour, unconsciously, probably just running patiently to some unskilled job or returning from a licentious night with a whore. Everything had changed by now, save Selene, who kept watching you in her mortal motherly pain that would condemn her to disappear in the streams of light as her husband would approach, and him Helios, you were unwilling to face; for the Aurora would flow in between his fingers and since early morning play the lyre without a cord with the simple intention of shaping human fate, in musical conspirations of duration, connotation and augment. Only her sounds you wouldn't hear. You were an Argive on caffeine, or maybe just on adrenaline.

But treacherous Selene was to ail your sores, having worked a business deal with Cronos, the ruler of time, so that the watch would halt its march for a little while, and her husband would delay some more. The march of the needles would seemingly stop for a while, at least until you would be on your way in a cab, and although the first rays of the sun filtered through the carbon prismas of your glasses, you were assured... there you would be before sunrise. Not that we know what Cronos would get in exchange for the treachery before the sun, maybe a good set of selected bonds and stocks. The kind of things that are planned before the average man wakes up, just perhaps.

The driver in the cab couldn't notice your Eastern nervosity, as you were closing a promise with the help of treacherous gods and their deals in stocks; for why would you, young handsome man, want to drive to the sea just a few minutes before the morning broke? You certainly didn't look like one of those overromanticized Eastern European ladies who would undoubtedly commit suicide, what would be then? You had to invent a story, one of those stories that only a cab driver would be prone to believe. The truth should be withheld, as a maximum security diplomatic affair, poorly diplomatic but certainly an affair. Your thoughts were fixed in long series of letters exchanged over a couple of years, letters that didn't come handwritten by some old lover, or by some one-time friend left once in a little and meaningless Scandinavian town; but were letters written by a man you didn't know, never more than a few lines, never nothing you would recall in your books, or in your lectures. Nothing sympathetically meaningful, screens of mist, undecipherable scripts in the overcomplicated semiotics of an Oxford classicist, or was it Cambridge? I didn't mean to offend, that in the case I mistook by chance.

And there you are, closing what was probably the only gap left in between from your St. Anne's days to the wunthering echoes of the Middle East. The sun still didn't trace your steps and Selene expired slowly into the Mediterranean, you were still free. The beautiful and mortal lapislazuli of Helice was still visible as the night covered herself in those white shawls that uncovered the sun, ruler of men. Aurora Borealis kissed you good-bye, and asked you for coffee, of course some other time, when you would borne again.

Yes, there you were and a gentlemen handshake would be followed by a meaningless conversation, as those of old pals who have been to the navy together; there's no corner in their souls they hadn't crossed together manifold times, nevertheless adding a real face, wearing a skin of silk showing the first traces of adulthood, skin such as that that only young gentleman can wear. Slightly toasted by the inclement sun of the East, who must be a different deity though, for in the plains of Kent and Canterburry our young men look significantly different, with that touch of pale mellancholy and mischief, that anyone who has been a reader in St. Anne's could distinguish perfectly.

The conversation still revolved about nothingness, and it's not clear whether had you remembered Parmenides statement that "there's no nothing" it would have been so different. Helios decided to take revenge on your insignificant human condition, so that the light would blind your sights, and the Boreal winds wouldn't reach your forehead, not to mention that the needles would now knock faster, leaving you in your helplessness as your mother Selene, your protector, was drowning in her sleep. Your time was over, and your coffee still undrunk, you owed to return.

Your tie was waiting for you, and also was your mobile phone and your portable computer, everything remained immobile until your well foreseen return, for it wasn't your day to reach Aurora. You had certainly closed a chapter, of an unwritten book and you were so glad you did, I know it since I saw your reflections and the traces of your steps in the sand, for no other young men would wear English shoes before morning, just to wander about in the sand. The ritual was complete, but now all the gods had noticed your games; now it isn't up to you to decide, although many of them did take pity on you and invested you with that permanent feeling of glory and supreme joy that man experienced after he reached the moon, or in simple words after a 45-minutes sand affair, next to the Mediterranean at 5 am and just right before Aurora, in between blues and greens of jaded tones.

The newfound Phoebus remains as yet a mystery, or perhaps a simple childish idealization, you don't know and probably don't think about it much. You obeyed the laws above the laws, such as an Antigone of the 21st century, an Antigone post-Auschwitz, an unconventional man, a fatalist. The next morning you woke up, swallowed your coffee and daydreamt for a while. The joy of the morning didn't return, neither did the Phoebus and no longer wrote you long letters, it doesn't matter no more. She turns about in the same spot and watches for Orion(*)... and yes, you! you were there, you saw her and she bid you good night, even in the morning, even before your coffee. You didn't see Orion though, but it doesn't matter, next time perhaps, just perhaps.

Ari

(*) Homer, Od. 5.274

נגב - נגד

הגעת, אבל איחרת קצת
אני כבר לא הייתי שם
ולעולם לא ישבתי כאן
אותי, לא ראית אף פעם
ביכית, מעבר לקיר
מעבר לנשמה
ולא שמעתי אותך
הרי ברחתי ממך
מצאתי ירח אי-שם
בליעדיו
בליעדיך
בעולם
אין לי הסבר מסובך
עברו ימים
גם אחרת שנים
ולא הרגשתי קוליך אף פעם
לא היינו בן אדם אחד
שניים גם לא, אף פעם
אמא שלך מספרת
שאני לא אהבתי אותך, אבל
איך הייתי יודע?
לא אמרת לי שום מילה
אפילו לו מול הים
וגם כוכבים עדים
שלא היה בינינו דבר
ומה תגיד מחר?
אולי כל אשר אמרת היום?
כמה שאני אוהב אותך?
כבר לא רלוונטי
כבר לא מעשי
כבר לא אתה, עדיין לא אני
ספר שלא נכתב
סיפור לא מסופר
אירחת קצת, אדוני
ביכית כבר,
התעלבת פעם
למה זה עזר אבל?
אני כבר לא אצלך
גם לא חלק ממך
והאם קר לך בלילה
הייתי רוצה לדעת
לפחות בישיל לחשוב
לא בדיוק עליך
אלא על מחר
ההוא שלנו לא היה
הרי ברחתי ממך
אבל עצוב לא כדאי לך
אהבתי אותך נורא
ואני הבחור של העצב
לא אתה
אני המחכה
הנודד
המדבר
הבן אדם קטן, חלש
תהיה חזק גם היום
הרי אני לא אהיה כאן
דבר אם אלוקיך
אולי הוא יידע
למה מתישהו זרמו
חיים למוות
לפנות בוקר לערב
ים כחול לאדמה
לעולם ועד
נגדך
עם ירח מלא
כבגולן
כיום הזה
כיום ההוא
שלא אמרת לי מילה
עזוב כבר
הקפה נהיה קר
תשתה ילד
תשתה כבר
במקום לבכות
שממש לא יפה לך
בן אדם גברי
חייל
תקרא
תקרא אולי עיתונים
כדי שתדע לך
הסיפור הזה
קרה להרבה אחרים
וגם הם לא היבינו
מה אל רצה
ואם הוא רצה
אולי יווני אחד
הוא השולט של העולם
ואתה פשוט יהודי אחד
לא כדאי לך לבכות אבל
תמיד במדבר אני נמנצא
כשנהיה קר
כדי לחבק אותך
הרי...
she turns about in the same spot
and watched for Orion

Monday, April 25, 2005

Orion dies in the Ocean

The many lives that I've lived
And their manifold faces
The lives I've left behind
The lies I've told, still unkind
The children
That child that I was
Or that maybe never was
That child who I am
That pain I bear
No longer in still
Silenced, still
Even in those days
Ever like today
When it rains
As it thwarts
Only in your mind
A piece of demeanour
An endeavour
For human redemption
For procrastination
For a new TV set
And I wished that he would love me
Like I loved yesterday
Before my eyes went pale
Before we were too jaded
Before this morning stroke
As if it left my life
Without knowing where to go
Hovering on my foes
Wound in the road
Such as the winds
Helice, Orion
The Pleiades
Zephyrus
Eternum
And as if we didn't know
How the world came to unrest
How the word came to undress
Those minimalist odes
Should you be a mariner
Could you understand this song
Which is more of a sorrow
But it will be mellow tomorrow
In a coffee shop smile
In some forlorn morrow
Such as human-like
Unsaid, nonetheless
Those many lives that I've lived
The ones that are haunting me
And they haunt you as well
A heirloom of fools
A thought
An ode
How odd
It's to wake up tomorrow
If we're living just today
As my suitcase is unready
And not willing to go
Such as my hands
Naked in the flow of stories
Coated in the fire
A soul that doens't cloud
Sometimes
When I'm to uphold
When the child is to claim
When the day is to live
And the moon is meant to die
Release this woe sometimes
Drink your coffee in the morning
The Ocean can now die
As you watch for Orion
As the Pleiades say your pledge
One day when you'll rise
The day when he'll smile
A perfect day for a ride
And then hide
The Ocean can now die