Monday, January 31, 2005

ת"א 01:23

אני יודע אמא,
לא התקשרתי בזמן
גם לא תפסתי אותך
אבל אני כבר גדלתי
ילד רע, נכון
חסר רצון
המסתכל על הירח
לא אכפתניק, לא מעשים
רק מחשבות
וויסקי באחד בלילה
התעייפתי כבר
בגיל עשרים
עצוב, מופרע, אבוד
בדיוק כאבי
אבל ארבעים שנה מראש
מלא גלולות, תוספות, בגדים
איש בתי קפה
תל אביבי רגיל
רחוק מכאן
לא קרוב לשם
עסוק, בריקנות רחבת
שותה אקמול
קם על הבוקר
מתכנן את העתיד כל הזמן
אתמול הייתי אני
היום כמעט את
ללא זכרון
כבר שכחתי על פולין
מה היית אומרת סבתא שלך?
משפט מפורסם שלך
חסר לי זמן לחשוב על החיים
לכבד את אלוהים
אולי אני משקר
אבל, למי זה אכפת בכלל?
תושב ופועל
איש רגיל
לא מדובר
תמיד ועכשיו
מול המחשב
מחפש ילדותיו
מה שאבדתי ברחוב
בפינת הרצל
אי-שם ברמת גן
מתחשב, אומרים חברים
אפילו עדין
כמעט עצוב
שיכור
אותו הכאב
כאתמול
כשילשום
בדידיות שנשארת בפנים
כל חורף
אחרי שהוא הלך
עם חיוכו
עם אהבתו
אבל אני לא לבד
תמיד יש יום הבא
אמא, תנסי להבין כבר
עכשיו אני רק סתם אני
אני לא מתגורר ברמת גן
בתל אביב
איש רגיל
הומו, לא מסודר
אף פעם אכפתניק
לא מאמין בשום דבר
לא מכבד רבנים
מוצא יותר משותף
עם הככבים
תן להיות אני
מה זה חשוב עכשיו?
יש לך אולי סגריה?
אני פה לבד
קם בלילה
הכותב
לתכנן חיים
אבל רק היום קיים
מוזר
אהבתי אותך
אהבתי אותו
והצלחתי לזכור מי אתם
אבל שכחתי על עצמי
נשארתי פה ושם
חסר זהות
הייתי חושב על מחר
אבל היה כבר מאוחר
ומחר
סתם מחר
הכל תלוי בך
אל תרקאי חדשות
ראוי לשמע שירים
כדי להבין על מה ישראלים מדברים
אפילו הקטנים
מחר נשתה קפה
רחוב בזל, מול הים
אל תדאגי על הרע
אהבה
החוצה
הבורח
אי-אפשרי
אליי
סוף-סוף
אחרי מאת שנים
אני לא דואג על היהודים
בבית, תמיד לשמחה
תמיד, ואולי אף פעם
בתים קטנים
אנשים מסוימים
חיוכים, צערות
קפה, אלכוהול
פוליטיקה, כלכלה
יצאתי כבר
אני בן עשרים
מתלבש בגדים
לא מתבייש
לא מתחשב
על הבוקר
נשתה קפה
לא נדבר על שום דבר מיוחד
לא עיתונים, לא משפחה
יותר כדאי
לבזבז את הזמן
עד שמישהו יזיז אותנו
אבא שאל אותי
איפה אלוהים כשנלדתי
ואין לנו תשובה
הוא לא תל אביבי בכלל
אבל מי דואג על זה עכשיו?
אנו כבר לבד
ואין לא פלפון גם
אז נזעב את זה כבר
היום, יש מסיבה בפלורנטין
the sky is the limit
and the limit is just the first step
אז אני הולך
ונמות יום אחר
תחכו לי אבל,
לא נעים לכם
גם לא לי
בכל זאת
תתנו לי דקה
לחשוב עוד פעם
על מה שלא נשאר
עליו
נודד,
יש לך מטרה?
תגיד לי מתי
נשפגים עוד פעם
אהבתי אותך, אפילו נורא
אל תשכח מזה
בעולם הבאה
ואם ת"א לא קיימת
תזכור איפה מצאתי אותך
ילדות לנו לא היה
אבל זה לא חשוב
גם לאום לא היה
אז קפה בבזל זה מספיק להזכיר
מי אני
מי אתה
לא אח, חבר אבל
נדבר מחר
על הבוקר
קפה לבד
סיגריה גם
דיבורים
אהובים
בדרך צפונה
פיניתי אליך
נרדמתי כבר
שים זין
שום אדם עליון
לא אני, לא אתה
אולי מחר
נקום בכלל

Thursday, January 27, 2005

13:54

לבדו
ובסופו של דבר
בןי אדם, תושבים, בסופם
מתחשב, כך הוא אומר
מדבר על עצמו, או אולי רק עם עצמו
מחכה, על הבוקר, שותה קפה, עדיין לבד
והוא שואל, שאלות של ילדים
ואביו לא עונה בתלפון
רשימה ארוכה, אבל עדיין מוקדם מדי
ועוד קפה, סיגריה, חמש דקות
מסתכל על הרחוב
מסתכל על עצמו
בחור חכם, אפילו מפורסם, יפה
ומה זה אכפת לא?
הוא רק מחכב למה שלא יקרה
ליום אחד שלא יבאו אף פעם
אבל מחכים
אולי מישהו מחליט לזוז אותנו
אולי מחר הוא יקום איתו
לצערו, לשמחתו
אי אפשר לדעת
מה זה חשוב אבל?

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Europa, Europa

Europa, Europa
Such is my pledge
Born in the Alps
Near Winterthur
Lost in my mind
An old sentence
Or that's what they say
Drunk in the morning
Hungover from thoughts
Smoked in a wall
Writing in my hand
Lost the fatherland
The quest of man
Europa, Europa
The mellow greens
Yellowing sorrows
A Celtic melody
In a glass of rye
Watering the evening
Dry before twilight
Drowning in a bottle
Clinging onto it
Silenting the echos
The skin, and the man
Living next to a mobile phone
Thinking of other odes

Still drinks coffee in the morning
He's always alone
He's always undone
Europa, Europa
Sankt Gallen is Rome
The Emperor is dead
And also the Gods
Avenues took over
So did modern things
Except men
Busy in their idleness
All alone
But fully furnished

I left Rome as a child
I left myself for a while
I'm still in the Alps
Even while I drive
Even with my ties
Europe has never been a place
I heard from my father
She was a woman in Greece
Probably another Helen of Troy
But today it doesn't matter
Vienna is just too close
And your hands are so sad
Nonetheless, you smile
As if you didn't care
But neither would I
It's the end of Rome
Once again
We'll take over
Mind you I smoke
But if it doesn't bother
We can travel together
The sky is the limit
And the limit is just the first step
Or maybe the Sea
I used to like music
That made me feel alive
Made me feel dry
Careless, unimportant, beautiful
I don't think all this matters now
You're driving away
But I'm staying home
And that, my sweet
Is a place in my mind
But I remember the Alps
Even what I didn't see
I still remember
A powerful endeavour
My childhood in a can
A grown up man
An educated idiot
Literate dilettante
A little brook
I'm maybe a book

When you leave
Please shut the door
It's just too late for regrets
I won't join you this time
I'll stay next to God
Although we haven't talked for a while
I might have heard once he was a Jew
And I don't really trust family
Write me sometime
I'd love to hear stories about mom
About Zurich, Christine, and the wall
I don't think I have to run this time
I'm fine, yes, I'm happy
Maybe it's not my best
But my choice it was not
You'll see it one day
I'll explain you everything
When you'll grow to understand
The Alps are not a place
At least not for a Jew.



Morning

Morning dreams
After years of sleep
Contemptuous choices
A ballet of thoughts

Unfound, too unkind
Humanity in the sky
Upheaval, martini for one
Morning, no caffeine

Soul conversations
Only dreamt of
A stone wall, red tables
The magic, other days

Memories drowning in a bottle
Perennial thoughts, hopes
Another childhood, a new world for one
My love in a cradle

Unanswered phone calls,
Is such the freedom of modern man
He's chosen a tie, he's chosen rye
Ultimate secret of success

Aren't I happy?
Maybe just used to
A struggle of nature
My own well known evil

Time doesn't fly
For once in a lifetime
Life is waiting for direction
And less caffeine

Flying away for a while
Nothing particular
Just living
Living down

Welcome to my underground
My silence
I'll take over
I'll be one


Tuesday, January 25, 2005

A time to rend, a time to sew [Growing Up]

This is a terrible statement these days, "When you grow up...." and despite the lack of cohesion of these words in our times that is constantly said aloud as a maxima, even among people of my own generation. Those words don't strike me anymore these days, I don't even consider them. It's not that I'm believing myself grown up, unless it's a comparative perspective to the time I was 16 or 18; I'm not talking about the sorrowfulness of the lost childhood and the first love, those things cloud me no more... and the truth is they don't really cloud the modern man, unless he didn't succeed in a career and didn't make enough money as to inject a higher degree of ambition to his competitive nature. Otherwise these regrets don't seem to haunt him at night. I personally feel sorry about myself when telling people it'll be clear when you grow up; actually when you reach age 20 in this generation is never clear anymore, why should it be? Life sounds like more fun this way; and those that are kids today probably will face those very challenges, in another degree, in another world probably. I think their life will be interesting, nonetheless quite an endurance.

I remember myself at age 14, knowing everything there's to know about the world and with an acute certainty about a future, profession, household, basically taking life for the granted whilst living beautifully painful years, the sensual and emotional discovery of other selves, the adventures, the cohersion, the madness, and the roads in which life led as apart as much as it brings us together.

A time to rend, a time to sew

Well after a few months not in the permanent habit of writing serious stuff I make an improvised effort to retrieve to the good old times, when I had all the time, desperation and will in the world as to sit in front of the screen through the night and let myself poured out in short poems, half-fictious and half-real stories, and every once in a while a real letter, a real something. I don't know how all this will turn out, for it's firstly improvised, my discman has run out of battery and not many cigarettes left in my box, plus I'm steadily worn out from the tiredness of the previous day, and specially from the quiet storms that have shaken my already complicated life for a while.

Several times I had a chance to sit in front of the screen with the purpose of writing something that would satisfy my inexistant readers after such long and unexpected silence, it didn't happen though. I preferred to waste my time in sweet and slow sensual procrastinations and not to pay much attention to my feelings, as much as I can describe myself as a terrible dramatic and oversensitive guy, still loaded with heavy suitcases of teenage bullshit and all the rest. The bottom line, somehow I might eventually turn out to be cold like ice, and manage my life exactly as it is learnt in the most prestigious books of international business management, through improvised strategies in order to maximize temporarily the degree of profitability and trying to minimize the potential loss by legal and accountable strategies; it's quite bursatile. After all life is an intrincated conflict of interests, and as a proud representative of my generation I've managed so far very well with those conflicts, thinking as the most qualified of statists, a regime I imposed to myself. And behind the tissue of complexities and knit bonds that make up my life, with all its pink and yellow flavoured dots, sleeps some kind of strategic interest and an utter desire to survive and to succeed; for not even the smartest Jewish kid around can actually succeed in deflecting and denying all those beautiful social-democratic precepts of the Protestant philosophy, without needing much philosophy to understand the axes of evil that rule our timed existence and as the Presocratic philosophers said, turn kings into slaves and slaves into kings.

I've lived a pretty weird life, that's for sure; and moreover I've made an awful writer, fact that doesn't surprise me, for being a good rhaetor doesn't really make you a good writer, and honestly I haven't really liked anything of what I've written, for it's bleeding the missing parts of my life in every I. Different stories and characters, peoples, love chapters, family reunions and dreams that never came true, that's the kind of things adolescents usually deal with, and as a pretty intellectual adolescent I always dealt with those things, fabricating theories in biffurcating colours that would add to my bitter realities a bit of common sense, a bit of logic and a bit of imagination, a bit of sentimentalism. Even the postmodern man relies on sentimentalism probably to justify himself, to feel that he's unique and that nothing in the world can actually prove his own life anything but outright good. True, I pretty much lost the dimension of the whole thing and can hardly say I've seen light ever since; it might have happened anytime during my early teen years, or it might have just happened a few years ago. Does it matter, anyway?

No, it really doesn't. Life is not actually based on those complex theories I've built over so many years, life is not based on the moral issues I've raised to myself and in the episthematic thoughts that have made me an excelled representative of the western society. Probably not exactly a Roman or a Greek, but more like a resident of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is not the West you'd tell me, plus it's probably the largest Jewish settlement in the world, what could be so western about it? Well, I came down here a few years ago to find out, and actually it took me those few years to realize that maybe there's some kind of objective truth, that there's a dilettante reality and that there's people and feelings, that everything is a huge super structure that holds people living under terribly great amounts of anger, denial, disatisfaction and other little souvenirs. Tel Aviv is a western city, even more than that.. a western country by definition and by extension. I actually drowned into it and let it embrace me with those sweet powers that young beauty, money and subjective morality can give you; a new perspective on right and wrong, probably based not on universal standards or in Kantian principles, but more on struggles to survive and to survive sufficiently immaculate in the flesh as to take pride on it.

My aim isn't to complain or to clarify anything, to provide human kind with axiologic values or to tell stories about a Middle Eastern undeclared and constitutional safari; I think the only object of this letter is my own person, the person of Ari, with less fundamental issues, and more language economy. I gave up on my philosophies and strayed from the most beautifying thoughts, just to glare at reality for a while and see if it is actually out there or not; and how complicated it can be to actually live a life outside the world of books and the internet era, to live without a buzzling mobile phone and without the mortifying thought of your unused beauty, or of your extremely overused beauty too. How did that happen? Oh hell, who are you asking? I don't remember the fundamental reasoning over any of the deeds and seeds of my life, other than an animal instinct that pulled me through the most sensational and the most terrifying life stages. I don't remember when exactly my old odes of Greece and Rome fell, when was the end of the Roman Empire, and when was the end of my own Roman Empire.

I didn't have the answers for that, and not even the questions... by the time all this started, and I don't have them now either, moreover the questions are not even questions anymore, but simple divagations of a 21st century man in between taxes, cigarettes and casual sex. It's beautiful material for thought but doesn't seem to conciliate with reality at all, and I don't seem either; I don't deflect the blame and rely on blind faith or in logic, which is a more sophisticated approach to faith, which doesn't make it less blind. That was the only reason why I stopped studying Classical Greek, why I stopped trying to coin accurate definitions of Israeli mentality juxtaposed to Jewish mentality, why I stopped writing at all. I wanted to have some time off to think about life for a while, not that I didn't think about it before, but it was different this time. I'd left that life I'd so irresponsibly taken care of, leaving empty spaces and unclosed chapters; I actually left it in one go, before it'd just swallow me down, I wouldn't let it happen and I didn't want to keep on escaping and building up the next lie that would bring me some contemptuous and immaculate intellectual comfort, the comfort of not leading a normal life out of being an infatuated intellectual, a writer, therefore my life was seen as an independent chapter of world history by itself, I didn't really care about how wrong it could have ever been. I knew it was meant to be different, and so it was. In the other hand I was an unofficial Jew, so it couldn't really get worse; you just get used to what you've got and that's basically it. I didn't really want to change that but maybe thought if there was a chance to look beyond, I'd actually try it for a while, just like you try out a new diet that you know you'd never fulfill but you start with the knowing conviction the world will grant you some kind of glorifying pity for the effort.

I took enough things as to be able to remind myself all the time what I used to be, and until today I haven't forgotten the whole plot not even for one second. I'm an intellectual, a bright guy, a handsome and superficial gay man, and next to that a Jew, because there're Jews and there're Jews. Then I went to journey for a while, "Iterum". To tell the truth, I didn't really like it, and depossesed of my daily dose of denial life just looked too ugly and well thought out as to give it any serious concern, anyhow it wouldn't depend on you. I thought maybe an answer would come out of it, yes it did. I didn't like it. I resigned. Things looked pretty distorted and awfully heavy, hardly dealt with, untouched. I can't say I've got anything straighted out, for I've actually chosen to choose the life I had, with no repair. This doesn't really make sense until here, does it? Well, you'll see it actually befits somewhere and somehow. The show goes on.