Overload #31

Strong Slavic Accent

checkmate

for sasa radojcic, sombor, serbia

your lines keep coming back, at dawn, when i close the door of my child’s room and walked quietly to the battlefield at my desk, and when i cross harshly my words with a blunt point pen, one by one, cut their heads with a sharp knife, swirl deep cuts through the heart of the paper, hot and cruel as all my ancestors, raging through the nonsense sketched last night, and then sit tired and sad among the corpses, a girl lost in a death field, with no water in a jar, and with no one to feed, staring at the trashed thesaurus thrown under the chair, and moving the curtains slowly: first light is dancing again in the weeping tree

and this sudden urge to cry, helpless, keeps coming back, for this sleeping world down my window does not know, and will never know how wise and beautiful whispers are coming out of your cyrillic stanzas playing in my mind

at last, there is something this world lacks, thank god, maybe you are saving us all by staying behind the gate in our backyard

if you walked away, the bridges would fall down in the danube anyway, and you would sit throughout the night, somewhere across the oceans, playing chess with your son, in panic, thinking deep, thinking hard: what is the word for this little piece you are moving across the squares, trying to trap and knock down the black king and win the game, what is the word, the bloody word for the thing in your hand?

a crater

for mtc cronin, maleny, queensland

they all read neruda, turning fourteen, rosy and tender, each monday falling in love for ever, still dreaming first kiss, saddest poem was a hit on their sticky lips, i read him too, of course, but how could i possibly love what everyone does, i was on my way, running fast out of dusty ohs and ahs, stubborn and busy looking for the guys unknown to them, always for the guys nobody else would dare to touch, and it was at that age … poetry arrived/ in search of me/ i don’t know, i don’t know where/ it came from, it was pushing me stiffly to the hidden shelves, i couldn’t fly, so what, i climbed to the top slopes, nobody ever borrowed this tome? i will, and i will fall in love with these oddballs and dudes, a moment i turned to my side of a bed, my russian lovers were shooting themselves in the head, quiet french men, holding me like a champagne glass and sucking my tongue, gazed at the time past behind my neck, my old and newborn german blokes taught me to think, think, think while laying on my back, all shady souls were watching me undressing bit by bit at the front of a window in my free lines, and penciling my first curse, and running away along breathless running lines, loony mates recorded the speed and time, the world was down there to stick a tongue out at it, nothing to rhyme or write an ode about, not a sonnet of a birdie, but a wild manifest of a roaring cat, left, but marching left, sometimes slipping down the crack on the right, between the shelves

turning fourteen for ever, here i am, racing in a late hour after songs of despairs, left on the shelf, leafing through the pages, as they are life – whisper the ladies grey and harsh, hush, life is whatever hits a soft surface of my chest, the meteorites, men and other particles, dreamed or touched, written or read, they all jab and hollow up a mine of me, a crater

i would still prefer he is a star and lights up a lamp when we circle around babies or cure our scares, but i signed it anyway, margie, the petition for a crater on mercury to be named after neruda, go there and check the link i am attaching, what do you think?

First published in Prague Literary Review, February 2004

will you understand?

squeezed into my patter
as an embryo in the womb’s water
i curl muscles and pucker up lips:
my name is
beg your pardon
thank you

it is easier to read the winds around me
than pronounce these chits

i can flee all the rages of the seas
but the cloud of my mother tongue
that follows my boat, a greedy sea-gull
will it ever leave me alone?

the only one i have, a bad penny
the alphabet stiff as a birthmark
once shiny, dainty and rich, now
a weary rug stuck to my skin, just
a puff, groan, a shivering heave
i can’t strip off my flesh

and if i could, while the storm is throwing me
to a strange strand, what else to dress in?

a moan i gasp to the wind
does not make any sense,
who will ever grasp what is behind
my silence once i reach this land?

oh mein gott! mio dio!
boze moj! my god!
will you hear me better
when i touch the furthest shore

and understand me
with no translator
when i sigh
my lord?

Overload #31

Movies from the Tampa Slums

MOVIE SCRIPT 26

A man stands on a clump of lumped snows
Scattered in tatters along the hard stone path.
His heaviness presses his footprints into the cold earth.

He hears muffled sounds, not from a voice,
But from echoes, but now he is secure enough
In this cold to believe the sounds never had a source.

It was his absolute loneliness in empty rooms
That created a companion composed of sounds.
It was observing that the mirror would not reflect his image.

When he closed his eyes, this companion made of sounds
Became covered with a woman’s flesh and he touched
This image of sounds, and it was solid with ribs.

He had lived in this closet of cold he build for himself,
But he met her with the dark hair and azure eyes,
So he left the imagined cold to walk in real cold.

This new climate of cold still had the echoes,
The sounds of even a greater cold that he created,
And worn for years as an overcoat that froze the flesh.

It when she was in his arms by the door that the cold
Changed. It was the kiss that took him from a closet
To stand without the motherhood of walls on an island.

This new loneliness was like thawed sea water,
Its icy fingers warmed with their inner fires.
Now, no echoes, but a real voice and its silence.

MOVIE SCRIPT 27

[In this movie people will have x-ray skin.
What is happening inside can be seen and photographed.
What is happening outside
Too elusive and obscure
Ever to be captured permanently,
Only an illusion can be rendered.
The actions, the gesture, the speech of people
Are untruths and myths,
And their only reality is what can be seen through x-ray skin.]

At first, the skull bone blocks a view of the inner brain,
But
The bone dissolves, changing a pure white blankness
Into a white mist.
In this mist whose immaculate whiteness
Is changing to a smoke with gray and silver tones,
Two replicas of the man with the brain,
Stand back to back as it lining up for a duel.

The first says, “I am hammering mosaics
Into a kiss from golden lips. My lips of
Flesh will sparkle from the kiss of gold mosaic lips.
The color of my lips
Will congeal into gold coins.
With the coins I will buy smiles and cut-glass wine glasses.
I will listen to the sea in sea shells.”

The second: “I grip the crumbling, surrounding sand to
Pull myself out of this white mud that is words and find
A place where my foot won’t sink through the surface.
I want to walk on the spasms of a ground
That does not collapse and stand by the white gold
Streaks on a river until the streaks become her hair,
And the silvered water her flesh.
Our shadows will embrace and sink
Into the meanings of fused darkness and its sunlight.”

The first: “You will only find something that will die.”

The second: “You will only have something that never existed.”

While this scene is being watched through x-ray skin,
The man
Is sitting alone
With a plate of yellow rice in an imitation Spanish restaurant,
Telling the waiter
That he was brought the wrong dinner.

MOVIE SCRIPT 28

A child smiles.
It is a smile that defies explication,
A profound smile
That quivers with undercurrents.
It is the smile of someone that does not know
At what he is smiling.
It is the smile at the nothingness that precedes knowledge,
And the smile
Of one who sacrificed his life to find knowledge and failed.
It is a smile
Whose sum, whose answer in incorrect
And in not based on mathematical logic.

The smile is a whisper that is asleep and will not awaken.

MOVIE SCRIPT 29

The air is wrinkled where the bird left
A trace of his motion on the wind.

A finger is rubbed around the edges of the trace,
The finger constructs two embracing, immobile silences,

Different silences are heard by each other’s different dreams,
One of the scintillating crimson of the peeled pomegranate.

The other hears her solipsism seeking to find the room is not empty.
He wished his thought had hands to be taken out of his pockets.

She felt they were together because the anguish
Of the abyss was a net woven like a spider web.

He was carrying a dark stone in a cavern
That was a long corridor of rough rock, had no exit.

MOVIE SCRIPT 30

[Once upon a time, movies were the occasions for scandals,
But no more. Scandals are so quotidian in our postmodern
Society that Scandals have become defied as divine
Democratic expression. Once Bruñel and Dalí in a faked
Surrealist movie had a razor blade go through an eyeball
With the hopes it would bring attention to their inadequate
Art. But now such events are so commonplace in our
Low class and upper class neighborhoods that people
Do not need to go to movies, for they can have live shows.
I suppose the only thing would cause a scandal today
Would be the depiction of an honest person or a sincere
Romantic love affair, but even these would have to be faked
Before the public would pay to see them. I have been
Seeking a subject for a movie, although I am told in our
Times, a subject is not needed. I want to make a
Movie that is different, not one that is everyday and
Composed according to the commonplace platitudes
Of postmodernism. You as an audience, know all
Those trite postmodern mechanisms: aporias, the surrender
Of authorial identification, use of the pantoun, the use
Of images from mass media, the apotheosis
Of popular culture, two separate scenes that are supposed
To be seen simultaneously,
Barrio life-styles, scenes that imitate Thelonious Monk’s
Jazz compositions, alternate universes that are as stupid,
Banal and brutal as our quotidian society, the yoking of
Disparate elements, acoustic relationships rather than
Imagistic concretions, everything dissolving into something
Else, the disjunctive, the digressions, the interruptive,
The antiabsorptive.

I want none of these overused, conventional and worn-out
Postmodern clichés in my movie.]

The movie Séneca. (The accent is there because he is
A man living in Spain, and not the Roman philosopher.)

“I cannot do it alone,” Séneca screamed, jerking his hair,
Dislodging his toupee, “but also I cannot do with another.
I cannot do it with a collaborator. Anyway, I don’t know
What I am supposed to do. What can be done. Nothing
Can be done. I’m going to the Iberoamerican Library
On calle de Luis González Obregón and look in the
Collection of my biographies.”

The library was closed, for the national championship
Soccer game was being played. Everybody in town
Was wearing short pants and bouncing soccer balls
Off their heads.

Séneca shoots himself.

The End.

Overload #31

A Productive Phase

Silence

Given moments
When our thoughts oppose our acts
Of fitting in
Of being placid and agreeable
And supporting the conversation flow with ease

No rupture or obstacle
But a mind overflowing with unresolved issues
Of things left unsaid

And brewing beneath the calm exterior
The inner self implodes with passion and longing
For catharsis without recrimination

A wounded heart
With no revelation
No dialogue
Just silence upon silence
Deaf to the expression of the soul
Blind to the panorama of possibilities.

– 20 June, 2003

My Love for You

Meeting you seemed normal then
Your integrity impressed
The haunting memory of your face lingered
and all too frequently surfaced
But our paths differed
And time passed into years of silence

Then my thoughts flowed toward you
As did my actions,
exploring a destiny unknown and untried
boldly transcending all boundaries

As awareness of your qualities evolved
My dependence on you grew
And my affection for you increased
My heart followed, albeit reluctantly at first

Respect for you was grounded in trust
and validated as love
A love with hope
that brought great joy
During the transition from selfishness
to selflessness
But a love that also brought fear

A love so utterly complete within itself
With an exquisite, but painful core
Of sublime passions unspent
And potential yet unrealised
Defined as the truth and essence of my being

Our lives have touched all too briefly,
but profoundly!
I shall never again experience such wholeness
You were my beginning and my end
Leaving me oblivious to the passage of time
And aware of timelessness itself!

And with tears that are dry before they can flow
My love for you remains as immunity enacted
to all other sources of human love

– 8 September, 2003

Salutations based on the story of Adele Hugo

Salutations to the object of my affliction
Of excessive love
Excessive fear
And excessive pain

Residing within a vacuum
Devoid of wisdom
Devoid of self power
A total slave to love
And a victim of fantasy

Many sleepless hours of contemplation
Hesitation
Fearing the worst
Avoiding the best
And not knowing
While existing in tender ignorance
And sublime misery!

Strangely elated in human suffering
With hope and faith as companions
In an aborted journey of non discovery
Paralysed by fear
And constant analysis

Could he possibly love me?
Just a little
Or, not at all!
All expectation suspended
By the certainty
of the uncertainty.

– 5 October, 2003

Words

Linguistic theatrics
Gymnastics
Circumlocution
Interrupted silences
Speaking softer than silence
Speaking louder than thoughts
Verbal creativity enacted
Generated

Exclamation
Demonstration
of intelligent flashes
of inspiration
Irritation
Feeling love
Hate
Profound anger

Mutual exchanges
Communication
Ideas expressed
Validated
or disproved
Finalized
Ended

– 9 November, 2003

Communication Breakdown

Our actions
Our reactions
Our disagreements
Evoked from denials of truth
of love and hate feelings
of built up resentment
of increasing anger perhaps
Constructing the wall of misunderstanding
Compounding the problem of miscommunication

Could we agree
not to agree?
Could we face the isolation
of being right in a wrong situation
of being wrong in a right circumstance?
Does there need to be a right or wrong?
Or a victor and loser?

Many unanswered questions
Which defy explanation
Many answers without questions
Which defy reason

Retreat then into an angry silence
With eyes that speak of pain
and disappointment
With stooped shoulders
expressing defeat
Promises of harmony denied
by excessive pride
and selfish inflexibility

– 9 November, 2003

Imminent Judgement

Anxiously waiting
Debating
Feeling tense
With suspense

Silent breaths
Intermittent
Shallow
Furtively stolen in hasty moments
With a dry throat
And a heavy heart

Emotions heightened
Somewhat frightened
Suspended in the surrealism
Of distorted time
And sounds

Faces blurred
Muffled voices
Visual images
Of black winged shadows
Which appear as
Unnatural
Alien even

All pretence of rationality
Crushed
Fragmented
Dispersed by the force of despair
And diminishing hope

Unprepared for truth
Ill-equipped for reality
Resigned to fate
Disempowered
and silenced

– 19 November, 2003

The Games People Play

The tension increases
As anguish grows
From ignorance of
the machinations of
Life’s Chess Game
Where winners make
Strategic conquests
Outmanoeuvring friends
Outsmarting the opposition
Manipulating words with reason
Tarnishing affection with insincerity
Applied power replacing love

Seasoned actions practised to perfection
The right time to display a smile
And a nod of agreement
Where accepted protocol is reinforced
Where similarities are endorsed
And prejudices applauded
And differences cast out
into the wilderness of social exclusion

Over time the similarities develop a pattern
Saturated with parameters of boredom
Manifested as comforts in life’s rations
Defined as the routine of being
While the essence lies dormant
and stagnates
Imprisoned by intricately spun webs
of criminal neglect

Imagination becomes blurred
Obscured by time and inconvenience
Relegated to the back-burner of adventure
Where even the stars become utilized
as tools of configurations and statistical data
in terms of calculating our insignificance
Instead of being observed in wonderment
for their magical magnificence

Life’s struggles become trivialized
as demonstrated incompetencies
Social injustices hastily adopted
as causes for the socially weary
Who hunger for yet
another battle
another attempt
to provide a balance
And to create a right from a wrong
Or identify what the wrong represents
in their dysfunctional existences

Life’s Chess Game
Tactical diversity of land sharks
Assisted by nocturnal time zones
As dark actions match their skins
In an all-consuming greed
Devouring victims with a ferocious need
of total conquest and dominance.

– 21 February, 2004