sweet things, ferociously far away,

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a hijack. Years lived mute, observing, absorbing, waiting for a time of passion and furious, astonishing life. Then the cracks appear. After a while, everything false falls away or madness comes, This is for all of those un-lived days, a distinct call for justice against paperwork, dead time and dishonesty. An embrace to confusion, the wild days and the dissection of masks & loveless times. Contact can sometimes be found at - Tofeelalive (at) gmail (dot) com / Old words found at stolencompass.livejournal.com

[birdsongsofpersia]

the wooing of the winds,

[Since my house burned down I now have a better view of the rising moon] ― Mizuta Masahide

He was one who you meet and know they will soon disappear.

"I was watching them burn their fingers away / they were so far gone that they didn't even notice the burning / fingers singed / faces stern / cards held like only beasts / can hold on. I watched them / waiting my moment / serving them ever more. Another whiskey on the rocks, Ming Chong?"

He was a forest of tattoos and wore thick rimmed glasses, a large beard and a way of looking at people when they spoke. He made you feel dear and then left you with it hanging in the wind for years to come.

We were inside an old farm house. There were goats bleating and cats slinking. The grass was overgrown, and the stars were out above us. A woman named Nisja had offered us a place to stay out of the blue right there in the street outside of Sofia and fed us yoghurt and cheese from the does, freshly made bread and figs from nearby trees. Nisja had spent ten years in South Africa and spoke like she were a meerkat would if it could speak in human words. She bade us farewell and goodnight, she had work in the morning, and instructed us to wander down the road to get a ride the next morning.

"I would get back and tell my old man these stories and he would just smile, tell me to go slow, be careful, never lose myself too much. I always listened. I would wait till I could see their heads dropping. They were too proud to ever turn me down on a few rounds.  Easiest money I ever made. A drunk always underestimates their mask in poker. And the Chinese, least most I know, need the thrill of the risk, of being at one with those ancient numbers, shapes, signs. It's as close to spirit as exists for the majority, throwing it all into feeling. There's nothing left when they get like this.

"This one night, I'm sitting there. I'd just swooped in. It had been a long night at the takeout - making deliveries all evening. The night hung to bodies, we left a trail of sweat everywhere we made off to. One of those nights where a cold beer had my name on it. I could hear it calling for me even before I entered. But just one. I had to be lucid for them. One that comes from a shock from the milder days - the cicadas put you into a trance - they lull you in and suddenly, just like that, you realise you've become your other self. Something completely separate from the day before. One you haven't known since the last heat came down. The one of the future, in plans, of what to do with the winnings even before you've made it. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth...you get lost, you lose your nerve."

We were finishing our dinner out in the grass. We'd been waiting for a ride so long that time no longer made sense. When had we begun? Regardless, the day had stretched before us...mocking us until Nisja stopped. We were bearded ghosts soliciting the fish motors swimming on past.

"I'm sitting observing them," he continues, "and there's smoke everywhere. They smoke like wild forest fires, you know the kind...which begin to swallow up the small towns and encroach on the cities. I never saw them without a cig in their hands. I'd catch them dozing off and their fingers blackened by the butts. Man, you gotta see it to believe it. Their chef will be dropping ash in the food, washing it out under the sink, repeat. I watch them, blend in around them, they accept me. And thus, I can sit in on their rounds."

He pauses.

"I went in only when they wouldn't notice their losses. I don't take everything. I let them believe they're winning. Some rounds I put in little and fold early to give them the sensation they're winning. By the end they're so drunk they can't count and pay up and collapse. One night I could make hundreds. Sometimes more than I could make in a week. But I had to be careful. Only the nights when they were far already wrecked. Sometimes months would go by…but I had the feeling that there was some approaching doom. I continued, regardless. It’s like death, isn’t it? You know it’s certain, but you keep living, you keep pegging away…”

There's a silence, a reprieve. If a voice could own a room, it would be his. Years will go by and it remains. “I put the money mostly into touring and new tatts. I was away sometimes for months at a time with the band. But I didn’t know what money meant at the time. I didn’t know you could live like this…” he says, as he gestures out towards the land. “Tom Waits crooned that money…” I sigh, “is just something you throw off the back of a train..” He begins to laugh. The next day will show us just how it is so. War and bodyguards and loss would await us. They were the days which were lived in the winds. Out there under that huge sky and the inked lines on his arms are pulsating like octopuses traversing moonlit seas. I watch them. Below him there was a puddle of black ink. When he crawls into bed later that night, I collect it in a small bottle. Something in me knows that one day, all this will be words written to the orchestra of the night rain in France, years and years after. Last I heard he was in Ecuador burning down his house, sleeping in hammocks, strumming blue grass out in the winds. And the wind shall say, are you trying to seduce me? And he shall reply, can I serve you another? And the wind will accept gracefully and blow some more,   Photo - Plaisir d'amour en Iran (The Pleasure of Love in Iran) 1976, dir. Agnès Varda.

[birdsongsofpersia]

afghan scream,

[Wherever you have dreamed of going, I have been camping there, And left firewood for when you arrive.] -Hafez He, more than most, feels it in his bones. He's French-Afghan- eats cheese spiced with cumin and recites poetry, all the while fearfully looking at the cracks in the ground as if he could disappear into them. One day we're walking through vineyards at night drinking wine. It was Kashef's idea. He believed that things give off their powers when consumed in the place of origin. He swears, sometimes, the grapes speak to him when he's sipping on a glass out there. But tonight he can only listen to the dry-rainless earth as a sign of the menace that looms. He tells me that it's not the cracks themselves, it's that nothing is whole, or pure, that everything separates. That there is not one thing that is completely formed. I laugh softly. He has always been dramatic of his life, but I know it often comes with reason. The wine goes down warm in my belly, massaging my kidneys. He could pass for a bandit with his clothes - red handkerchief scarfed tied around his neck, tattoos of teapots and donkeys stretching down his arms, rolling around his back, and those eyes - black sesame and soft channelled intensity. "What's happening in your life for the separation to threaten you so?" "She's really leaving me this time" he murmurs. "We were cycling by the sea. I have six months until my residency would have been granted. It's been almost five years, tu vois? She'll cut it, just like that, and ask for a divorce. I'll be sent back. With what is happening...they will torture me on first sight..." She'd told him that she was leaving him many times now. I knew her, and knew that words can be a weapon, an ambush, a hideout, a dumbara lute to fall asleep to. We'd once spent a long time together camping in the woods, hiking canyons. But there was always something I couldn't place. "I just cycled until I found a way to drop straight into the sea. The waves woke me up. I began to scream with salt water in my throat. She'd disappeared by then. Perhaps I wanted to remember what I meant to her, but with her she just wanted to forget, to erase me, as if I were just a grain of rice thrown into the sea. Perhaps I was. Only I was rice with the tendency to scream. Not even the waves themselves wanted to eat me. Nothing, nobody, could desire me once again.” One night some time ago, we were pasting a stencil out at the top of a tower. Kashef would spend hours sketching out landscapes from his homelands and ask me to write about them - that is, blind, without ever having been there. We'd climb tall hideous blocks and work away real quick. Capucine, his wife, would follow us as a lookout, but this time she wanted to paint. "Va te faire cuire un œuf", she says, with a husky voice. She wears ripped fishnet stockings, a denim skirt, and a red flannel shirt cut at the bottom to rise up to her naval. We wander out over to the edge and look out at the city. Marseille is enormous at the best of times, but tonight it felt like it could go on forever. We smoke artemisia, a dream herb, mixed with another without name that Kashef was cultivating in an abandoned allotment in the city. He got the seeds sent from back home and in return would help out anybody who came his way on the boats. Something about these plants gave the oddest of lucid dreams - every time I'd find myself walking in the desert, slowly, so thirsty that my throat was being ripped open. But I could always navigate myself to water, and then from the water came a language I could not place. But every time, in the dream, I understand more, as if I could train myself to learn it through the desert trips. We turn back after a while. Behind us painted up on the tower, is a woman wearing a burka. Her eyes, though, are what reach out. Eyes that terrified me, but I could not look away, transfixed. Capucine looks on too, and then walks away without a word. Kashef tries to follow her, but comes upon the spray cans she left. On top of one is something dark. He picks it up, observes it, with a frown on his face. It's a ring. Her wedding wing, he realises. Sprayed black. Remember poetry, I urge him, that night as we drank wine together. The following days pass and his unease grows stronger, this fear of the dark matter that has consumed centuries. Under those stones lie memories, and the future unknown. This isn't just a metaphor, I tell myself. One can feel the earth in one's mouth in certain parts of the world. We'd been camping out by a river. One night we had broken into a holiday villa as we had the tendency to do those days, looking for a way to get the heart moving. Kashef had switched on the television, searching for an answer. Cooking shows. Kids shows. Political meetings. A woman speaking of existence. He settled on the news. There was a live shot of the evictions of Kabul. Planes were taking off before the Taliban took over. The newsreader just mumbles, with no human words to utter. The insides were so full that people climbed on top of each other. When they finally took off - full to the brim of spices and photos and a mix of genders long unknown, the camera stretches back- there are people clinging to the bottom of the plane, hanging in mid-air. The camera can't keep still, hands shaking from the unseeable. People start to fall hundreds of metres up in the air. One, the studio moves back to, keeps ice cool and captures the falls in minute detail. The cameraman zooms in on their faces, their last expressions before they hit the ground. They are all chanting, terrified, but chanting before their deaths. "What are they chanting?" I ask, bleakly. "They're passing over everything that has given them life" he says. "Perhaps some recite poetry, too. Words from the Koran. But most settle on poetry, gratitude. What else can one do?" Fuzz. Another camera angle, as Kashef weeps. It takes a close up of a young child falling. "They’ll make grief pornography out of us. We'll only be known for our tears. But puppets cannot cry. We always knew when they came that this would happen. Those stars, they wave while the sky is falling. Cardamom seeds will hail down upon us. An Afghan heart is like a pomegranate, don't they know?" I have no words. I rest my head on his shoulder. Outside there are noises. A car has pulled up. I pull at Kashef, but he refuses to move. The sofa is full of his tears, and he's screaming again. "What now, what now? Do I become one of them?" The front door. A couple. I can smell the perfume and cologne from the living room. They walk in, drop their bags and then their jaws. We had painted the walls with the faces of Afghan women. Poetry scrawled everywhere sent him by his friends. Kashef sees them, and begins to laugh. "Voulez-vous un peu de sésame? Ou un abricot afghan, peut-être ?" They begin to scream. Kashef smiles at last. It's time we left.

Photo, self taken, Graubünden, Switzerland, September 2021.

[birdsongsofpersia]

the wreckage is you / & the jungle chickens,

[When I had journeyed half of our life's way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

that savage forest, dense and difficult,

which even in recall renews my fear:

so bitter-death is hardly more severe!

But to retell the good discovered there,

I'll also tell the other things I saw.

I cannot clearly say how I had entered

the wood; I was so full of sleep just at

the point where I abandoned the true path.]

-Dante, Inferno Canto i,

I told him my secrets. That I missed the feeling of being held. He ran beside me, with his tongue hanging out. It had began to feel like forever, but it was nothing new. I had known many forevers. He told me his secrets in turn. That he would rather be free with the threat of snakes than under lock and key. That all the reptiles in the world didn't scare him one iota.

It was six months after docking on the north east coast of Brazil and the long road down to the very southern tip of the continent – one hundred and twenty days of roads, robberies, mangos and guanacos.

The sun had been an instrument playing upon my skin, walking, walking. Nothing but taxis go by. The jungle grows darker and deeper while the sun remains sewn to the centre point of the sky. And then, from nowhere, there is a gunshot and the sun collapses and it's night just like that.

My friend suddenly veers off into the trees, the sound of a monkey scrambling away after him. Never seen my toes so dark before – of dust and the loss of sun. And then: that feeling that you know so well, turning round, indicating to the road and knowing with guts, with the arms of the world that this particular vehicle will stop. It does, a little ways past me and I approach it cautiously awaiting a price to be yelled – the majority of jungle vehicles transport as a taxi – licensed or not. Nada. Just a silent nod.

Three occupants : two men, and an older woman riding shotgun. We approach corners beeping the horn, climbing up into the clouds. The road is so thin that we could easily crash into another car each time we turn.  The vines that wrap around the trees, the sound of the birds who have throats from another existence. We go higher, higher at a pace that I could walk at. Hairpin turns. This is the main route through the centre of the country and it's no more than a dirt road. Every so often the woman turns around  to stare at me and sneers. “Gringo, gringo, gringo...que sucio son...” She turns to the driver. “Hijo mío, we should have left him rot there with the jaguares. But we don't stoop so low. We still have humility. Unlike him. Look at the way he's staring out the window, like he owns it all. Well I have news for him. The land is free. Nobody ever owns anything in this world. It's all just a loan. We can only own our actions”... ---and on and on of the robbery of the land, the gringo contribution to the economic crisis, my own meddling in politics here.

The man beside me, clad in a suit, shudders and covers his face. He's quiet for hours, until, on one of the more tricky turns where we can see right down into the canyon, he begins to mutter words low. Sounds, if they are coming more from his belly or knees than from his throat. He breaths deep and breathes out sounding like the wind.

“Desaparecido...desaparecido...”, he says, over and over. We drive for hours more and it's all he says. I try to imagine what it is that he's speaking about that has disappeared. He's sobbing, now. A lover. A family member. A pet, even, perhaps.

When we pull up, finally reaching a town, he gets out, throws money at the driver and then runs, turning to gaze over his shoulder at something beyond the car, imminent, gaining ground upon him.

The mother and son get out and approach a fast food stall. On the seat where the man had been sitting is a folder that he'd left behind. Inside are aerial photos of the jungle and mass logging sites. Photos of wildlife washing up from the river, dead. One legged monkeys. Rubber exploitation. He was fleeing from a civilisation that cannot stop filling its belly. He's still running by the time they get their food. I've never seen someone run so fast to nowhere before. As if he were running in two directions at the same time.

“El es un puto”, she mutters under her breath, glaring at me, climbing back in with some giant root covered in salsa. - “He's come to take the rest of our gold. Like the rest of them. Un achorado. And a spy sent to bring the Junkies into power. ¡Que roche! And we're driving him! What is someone like him doing on the road like this, eh hijo? He doesn't have his limousine with him so he's coming with us...”

She begins to cackle. We inch on back up on the mountain, my voyage of doom. She turns back and eyes me angrily.

“¡Por las puras! Eres monse, eh gringo? ¡Un calabaza! Asu!”

Her hatred of me fills the car. Projections. A myriad of lifetimes dragging them along by my side. In relationships, with strangers in the street, with family. To be seen as other than myself. Sometimes I can channel it. Bounce it off me. Other times it sinks deep, I forget myself, become the other. Words that come out of me that aren't mine.

“I once met a Gringo”...she begins again. “He wanted to buy me. I let him. Turns out he was just a crudo, un puta blancón de nuestra país. and didn't have any money anyhow. Those dirty-good-for-nothing-gringos...”

We stop, suddenly. They get out, parking on a turn where there'd be no more room to pass for another vehicle. I get out too. If there's a time for a gun, it'd be now. Wreckages scattered down at the bottom of the cliffs caught by moonlight. The wreckage is you, I breathe to myself. The wreckage is inside you and this is your life awaiting the final drop to the ground.

The son points at a car down there.

“Mi papa”, he says, making the sign of the cross. He points out a pickup truck on its side, burnt to a skeleton. With that we climb back in and continue on the way without skipping a beat though my heart is acting funky. It's been several hours now that we've been inching along the roads. This jungle that goes on infinitely. I fall asleep at some point with exhaustion, but wake every now and then with her words still ringing strong. Sometimes snakes come out of her mouth, sometimes I swear we're riding inside a giant coconut.

“Gringo! ¡Vamos!” she cries, as we pull up to house, lifetimes later. I ask how far we are from the city where the host I'd be staying with lives. 10km, she laughs. It was long past midnight.

“You can sleep at our place”, the woman says. “Like a dog.” She makes a snarling sound, but she sounds more like a jaguar. “With the chickens. Like the filth you are”. She laughs again, that strange laugh of a  frog which has a sugar cane wedged down its throat. She indicates a place in the dirt full of feathers and chicken shit and disappears into the house. I put up my tent and feel the humiliation that she yearned upon me, and feel the comfort of my home which is my tent feeling like a ghost and wonder briefly if I am and this is what the dead do, they continue thinking that they're alive until they realise they're not and then fall back into a slumber of dreams of crimes they didn't commit. I'm before a judge with the dead, beside a large river and I'm being sentenced for an atrocity so obvious that nobody can speak of it. Everyone knows. Everyone but I.

I'm disturbed from my court case by the feeling of my tent beginning to rock back and forth. It's light out. I presume the chickens have come to wake me in force. But no. It's a hand pulling on the tent.

“Gringo. Desayuno. Ahora. Ven.”

I don't understand why she invites me. I enter the house. It has little light inside. Wooden.

They serve me a plate. The breakfasts in Peru are wonderful : maca and different grains, fruits, juices. I sit at a large wooden table. I eat hungrily and the woman and her son peer at me curiously. I thank her. I thank she who had passed the night cursing me till her tongue wore away. She serves me coffee, strong and full bodied.

“Where are you from?”, the son asks, perhaps gazing at me for the first time. I tell him. I tell him of my journey, collecting stories, searching deepenings. He looks at me surprised, his eyes squinting. He looks at me earnessly for a long while, seemingly contemplating on revealing something.

“We've been transporting blanca”, he says. “If the police would have stopped us, or the military, we would have been shot dead”. He gazes at me intently, gauging my expression. “You too”, he grins.

I pause, contemplating my realities. I had thought it was them that were going to be the most likely to execute me last night. That or the fall from the cliff.

“Why do you do this?”

His face becomes serious.

“We're artisans. We  make everything. We built our house. We sell things in the street. But it's not enough to eat. Should we starve?”

He picks out a beautiful knife carved with a snake onto the handle.

“This is what we make. But everything is cheaper now from China. Nobody buys this, or if they do, they pay little. So one day we began transporting. Where we were coming  from yesterday was a red zone. Not even police can enter. They know there'd be bloodshed. If a tourist walked in, or even someone from Lima, bang bang. Nobody unknown can cross that line. The government are scared of us, but it's a different matter outside. They can get us at a any point. Sometimes we transport the leaves. Sometimes la blanca...what would you do, if you couldn't eat?”

I have no words.

“One friend I even saw shot right next to me and I drove on with him on the ground. I never found out what happened to him. Sometimes people just disappear. Sometimes they shoot even before they know."

The woman looks at me and asks of my occupation. She begins to laugh again, but this time it changes. This time the laughter is warmer, the feeling of it ceasing to be something that attacks me.

“We're Charapas”, she says, softly. “We have nothing else. Nada de nada. Just the things we make...and now, this white dust that the gringos desire so much.”

She pauses, clearing up the dishes.

“Who do you write stories about?”

“People that I meet and their lost stories”.

“Tell them this : we don't choose this. Tell them this: this is an act of desperation. And tell them this: one day they will know their slaves by the anger in their eyes.”

She presses a bus ticket into my hands, gives me instructions to the city and pushes me out of the door. I didn't get their names, but there was a fifty percent chance of it being Juan and Maria. For months those chicken feathers will stick to my tent, unable to be set free. Once I was a dog sleeping with chickens. Once I knew the other side,

 Picture - Richard Muller, 1918

[birdsongsofpersia]

a history of sweat and revolt part i,

[I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see...] - James Baldwin At the entrance is a man serving chocolate. He has skin darker than the earth itself and his chain goes from the tray to the staircase. Try explaining this for reason.  The agent at the door barely batters an eyelash and compliments the chocolate. One can really taste the work that’s gone into this production, she says, sighing, exhaling before going up the stairs, her mask hanging from her like a dead flag. She quickly readjusts it once the chocolate melts inside her. I gaze at him before venturing upwards, feeling my stomach contents ready to spread out over the cold tiles we tread. His eyes are downcast, his breaths barely visible, as if death itself. I feel the weight of Africa collapsing upon the kingdom. “You don’t care for sweet things?” the agent calls down the stairs, surprised. I don’t care for sweat things, I mutter under my breath, as I begin to climb, but I swear I see him wink. It’s in the old town of a part of the country I’d never visited before. Circumstances had come together to bring me to consider living in a place that I’d never imagined nor planned to live. It was to be close to someone who would very quickly disappear entirely. They say everything happens for a reason; though war, tragedy, broken shoelaces and the like be damned. You are what you seek, or seeks you, or vanishes without trace. I meet the agent outside, and she is flustered like some kind of creature that lives underground moving back and forth pushing balls of soil into a mound. She has a folder of paperwork that drops to the ground. Illegible documents, scrawls of numbers, accounts, witness to the decomposing economy. “As I understand it”, she says, “you’ll be coming and going from here in order to write. But what exactly are you working on?” she asks. We’re inside the studio. She shows me the little fridge, the shower that one has to bend down into in order to enter, the desk at which to write at, the single bed made for people without company, those waiting to die alone. Something about them makes me shiver. “I’m focusing on the housing market”, I tell her, looking firm into her eyes, telling her what she wants to know and can understand. She registers interest, and then almost immediately, closes up again : “What lives on in the things that people leave behind. I’m investigating the way that people take on the dreams of former tenants. I want to write about how the walls absorb shame. How cups take on people’s desires and if only one would ever drink deep enough the yearning would increase. The non-expression that dogs all of our days, how the floorboards absorb our madnesses. And I write about housing prices and...-” “Housing prices?”, she asks, suddenly paying attention urgently. Up till now she had thought me to be mad, no matter what I would’ve uttered. “And how very soon, none of this will exist any more.” “What do you mean, it won’t exist?” “This money. The people who own things.” “Where will it go?” I take a deep breath. “You think you can take this all when you die?” She eyes me with sudden alarm, registering a threat. She scans my hands for a weapon, for danger.  Her wrists appear to be artificial, the joints of a doll and from this moment I imagine the strings, almost invisible, hanging above her. She reaches for the closest objects she can find, but the strings prevent her from getting much launch or momentum. A lamp. A giant wooden key from a vineyard. She hurls them at my head, but honestly she’s a real bad shot, and they barely get near me even though we’re just a few metres apart. She goes for the pencils. A few hit me in the chest like flying daggers thrown by the wind. I duck a glass. It smashes to the ground. I swear the pieces shimmer and whirl for a few seconds. I had good practice when growing up attending to such events, though once got knocked out by a honey jar. Makes you mature real fast and get agile as a squirrel. She pants. “I’m ready”, she says, pointing out her chest. “For what?” “For you to kill me.” I squint at her as I try to hold back a tremendous laugh. “I’m not going to kill you”, I tell her. “You’re not?” “No.” “So why are you speaking about death?” “I was speaking about its possibility one day” “Oh.” Her entire body appears to sag in disappointment.

/ The landlady makes an appearance. She had ventured up to investigate the crashes, though doesn’t seem particularly surprised. One can suppose that this is a familiar occurrence with the agent. “Why do you only speak French?”, she asks, in thick German. It’s a Germanic way of asking it, as if there are no other languages in the world, just German and the other. I would go on to learn that she’s not from here anyhow. For this is the language of flora, of prunes hanging in the southern sun. Ah, the older woman responds. I did not know of the existence of such a sun. Most of the prunes are rotten, I add. She reveals that she has a dozen or so properties, spoken as if the heaviest work on earth. We the rich suffer like no others on earth... Corn follows me everywhere. I am too exhausted to pick it up from pushing myself to collapse in the barn the last days, but I bend down anyway, obligated by social necessity. That river of kernels is endless. The sea of necessities and polite doings. I’m almost afraid it’ll begin to seed. Could well get me arrested in this country for littering. And there, sweeping up, is the figure I’d met downstairs offering chocolates. He had followed the landlady up the stairs, chain now around his neck. “Arnold be my name, bro, how’s it hanging?” My mouth drops so much my jaw could snap.  “Comrade, hush your surprise, will you? I’ll make this quick for they count money by the second. I want to create an insurrectionary group of dream rebels here – you dig? Join us, if you move in. I just work 9-11. The ol’ lass just want me to dress like this. Gives her nostalgia for the good ol’ times of the colonies and all that jazz. I can deal with the chain a few hours. When people knew what they owned in the world, that gold was endless. When there was order. When things were prim and proper. Irony is that it’s too expensive to pay me for more time without actually enslaving me and there’s too many police wandering around for that to happen. O’ course we’re all wage slaves in the end, but depends on what we do with it. Now stand back up, and we’ll speak later.” Arnold goes back sweeping up the kernels. “Ten years you’ll be here?”, the agent asks.

“Oh yes…” I purr. I’m now ready to put down some roots. “And if and when you die, do you have some insurance to continue paying for this?” “Oh yes…”, I croon. I now have insurance even for the buttons upon my shirt. “Excellent...” she replies, with a certain element of surprise in her voice. I am unsure if she has yet noticed the various holes in my shoes, but takes the six months pre-emptive rent handing me the keys. “Sometimes I dream at night,,,”, she says, heading out the door, “the dreams of the visitors to the properties I show. Their dreams possess me. I don’t dream my own dreams. You ever experience that? Perhaps I don’t even know what I would dream, for I am filled with the dreams of others...”

She leaves, and I lie down, exhausted. It’ll be a while till Arnold comes by again. I begin to work on remembering all that I had forgotten these years – the uplift, the strength, the wonder, the feeling of freedom...for these coming days and weeks and months will be darker than ever before and one has to resist. There are fields waiting to be slept in under clear skies and dreams of revolt and the sea and shining eyes, I swear. I swear. / Painting Roland Topor - (1938-1997)

[birdsongsofpersia]

Another way to build,

[Each mind fabricates itself. We sense its limits, for we have made them.] - Rilke, Book of Hours It was cold and his eyes refused mine. This light could swallow a human being entire and never be seen again. This is where the lost go to – endless night in the reflections of passing vehicles. There was ice on the ground and he had anywhere to be but here. “I'm dying” were his first words as I climbed into his vehicle. “I'm dying, and I don't know what to do. But where are you going?” “Metz,” I replied, very slowly, as if I were learning to speak again,  my hands frost bitten, clasping each other, wondering if this was another of those moments where I'd imagined human words out of the darkness. “Okay”, he says, and drives on in silence. Still, he hasn't looked at me once. His face is torn with worry wrinkles. I touch my own face wondering how deep my own have marked me. I ask him what he's doing tonight. He's travelling to Luxembourg to see a love. Ah. I bow my head. “My wife left me when she found out. And my daughter.” My throat hits an avalanche, buried somewhere. Unutterable words sink down my windpipe. “They left everything in the house. Just one morning... they weren't there any more. I had to take pills for the pain so slept through everything. I woke up to their ghosts. Her smell on the pillow, toothpaste still smeared upon the toothbrushes, breakfast cereal half-eaten. I chewed upon it to see if it would bring them back. I did this every morning... taking one bite at a time. But after some weeks there was almost nothing left and emptiness had its way with me.” I gaze out at the icy road, the endless monotony of motorways. These days I prefer to close my eyes on such journeys to avoid the confrontation with the civilisation that chokes me. All these roads built through forests, natural habitats, rivers, places which people once revered and held dear. And here I am, hurtling along at 130km p/h. If something is already dead, is it okay to use it regardless? Silence floods the car. His breathing is contorted, rising out of him as if ice were wedged through his thorax. “Furniture began to take on an eerie life of its own. I stared at chairs like I had never known them before. Sometimes I would walk into a room and be afraid to sit upon a chair because it seemed like it would disintegrate right in front of me. That or begin a conversation about all of my failures. Everything that I haven't done. I worked until I saw the nights begin to bleed open. Times I worked from dawn to dawn. It was always for them. Then one morning, months after they disappeared, and still I hadn't heard a word from them, I sat down and had a conversation with the chair. It was the guest chair. I never thought I'd be talking to a chair in my life, but I also hadn't anticipated my family disappearing once I began to die. We spoke a long time before I had to get to work. It asked me things I'd never allowed myself to consider like : was I really working for my family, or because it would help me avoid things inside of myself?” He swallows, pausing, as if drinking from nitride acid, grimacing. He looks at me for the first time. “Have you ever had someone disappear on you?”, he asks. There is aggression in his voice and I don't think he really wanted an answer. I take a breath and urge myself towards words that are clear, that can heal, but don't expect time to form them. I know disappearances in every home of every settlement living inside of me. I know how someone can be an entire galaxy and suddenly they vanish, even if they're physically still there. As if one day they decide to cut the connection - a cold snip, and it's over. There are civilisations that just decided that it wasn't working any more. The Mayas. Entire cities and temples abandoned. Just vanished. Perhaps it's like this. People disappear when there's nothing left to build any longer. But I always believed there was another way to build. The civilisations left because civilisation itself was the problem. Only we continue with this particular civilisation, clearly flawed, clearly destructive. I never yearned for civilisation to be my inner world. It never made the disappearances any easier. I found myself talking to them by the river even though there was no one there. It is death in the living, that continues. And I must learn again and again how to let go, how to become unattached. To live the present so fully that nothing else matters. Something more of appreciation and gratitude, perhaps. The road is almost entirely straight. As if it has forced its way through the environment, or was always there. Remember a time without roads. Remember a time without supermarkets even. Without borders. How recent all this is. He continues to speak as if he hadn't asked me anything, his brow twitching, “The bills for medication kept rising. I had to work myself into hell just to pay for them. I would come back with my mouth burning with unsaid words and then the chair had to talk, didn't she?” He pauses, as if expecting any answer, now of all moments. “Yes...” “So you see. I was completely overwhelmed, but for the first time I had a real reason to work myself into dust – if I didn't I would die. 2,000 Euros a month just for them. I did contemplate if they were causing the side effects of furniture speaking but one can't be certain of anything these days. Perhaps it was just getting closer to death. I didn't know what was real any more. I didn't know who to trust. So I finally asked the chair and she told me to contact a woman in Luxembourg. She told me her phone number. Beautiful. Tough. Never speaks. It's where I'm going now.” “She's there for you through this?” I ask. “She's there.” He's biting his fingernails. I'm afraid he'll choke on them. But that's the least of my worries right now. “We sleep together. It's all that I can hope for in these days.” “What do you feel about dying?” I ask him, finally. The Luxembourg turn was coming up in 10km, before my turn. He glances at me. Eyes of a deer facing down a thundering rush hour motorway, stuck in the middle of the lanes. He swerves right, suddenly, brakes and comes to rest at a picnic stop. It's 10pm in winter and not a vehicle to be seen. “You can get out here.” he says. At best I would just lose my toes in this cold, even in the day time few people frequent these stops. A wild, clear instinct overrides my fear. I wait. “I'm dying”, he says, over and over again. “I can't get out here. It'll be me who dies outside before you do,” I say to him, quietly, though I yearn to shout it. I decide not to get out unless he hits me. He stares out in front of us. I'm gripping my hands so hard they could burst. He turns to face me. “You...the living”, he says, finally. “I understand you. I was like you, once. I feel you. I even lived liked you. I travelled.” Outside are a million lonely deaths. I have the arms of a roadkill fox, heavy with ice, awaiting my time. “Sometimes when we go to sleep, I ask myself if I am in the arms of the grim reaper”, he sighs. “But she holds me close, and though I pay her for it, I try to convince myself that she knows and can take it away, all of this.” The times when one is stranded with the fate of another dictating the time. There is nothing I can do but listen, a prisoner to his words. And I am split straight down, one thinking of my own survival, and the other feeling his grief. He reaches into his mouth slowly and pulls something from deep. Blood. Thick, goo-like blood. “It gets more and more intense looking at it, the blood, I mean. I thought it would save me but it shows me how little time I have.” With that, he revs up the car and drives past the turn for Luxembourg and keeps going until the sign for Metz. We reach a McDonalds and stops. “Welcome to the end times”, he says, laughing. I get out, heave my backpack over my shoulders and tell him thanks, wish him well, but he’s already banging his head upon the steering wheel and I can do nothing but walk out into the cold night with a promise of a warm bed and a death that is perhaps not quite so close, Picture - Martin Vlach - Falling

[birdsongsofpersia]

The owl and the humiliation,

[I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealised persona] Richard Rohr

They asked, - and where do you lay your head? - Once, I laid it upon her moon, I replied. They glare, fiercely, their chests bursting with pride. A man in uniform is a walking mine. The night was cold enough to snap thoughts like twigs and when I don’t think - I am clear - and when I am clear... I am whole. The mind is a raging bull equal only to the desperation of mosquitos at the end of summer. A season that has abandoned us for winter, and the peopleless streets. I often think in these times of the falling of the leaves, the crumbling state, the heavy heart - but it is evident that it is all too much mind and a way has to be found back to the feet. They had stopped me just outside the station. I had been on a freight train coming from the east. It was the last stop before the border. I had almost lost all my bones on that trip, trembling the night through. They had an unmarked car but wore their badges and carried truncheons larger than the length of my spine and could break it through and through. They look me up and down, from my worn shoes to my teeth of which have gnawed themselves down to dust within the last weeks. “Why did you do that to yourself?”, one asks, mockingly. “I...lost my way.” “Your way?”, he sneers. “You heard me. What am I doing here? What are we all doing here? I mean, really doing here, beyond these roles. Where am I other than here? Where are you without this power? Somewhere... I’m in the jungle lying listening out for the snake to bring me wisdom. I’m also in the arctic sitting in the freezing snow so as to feel the elements rising up to me, to be whole, to be sacred with that which surrounds us. I’m in deserts wandering at night beneath the stars. I’m in forests living in the trees. But where am I now, in this body? I can barely write out a word. I haven’t spoken to another being in the flesh since I don’t know when. I’m killing time as if it were an affront to my freedom, as if torture awaits just around the corner - so I must surely do anything I can to avoid that turning of time.” I take out my camera and shoot them two, three times. The flash hits them in the face before they can do anything about it. It’s illegal to film them now, a law recently passed. “Your identity card, now,” he demands. The other just watches and repeats “IDENTITÉ, IDENTITÉ”  - dog barks at all that he doesn’t know. “ “I wanted to take a photo of you before the violence comes. And I know that it will. I’ve lived this many times before...” I look down at my hands. They’re shaking. Not from the cold, but from what it is to come. And then, to my astonishment, I swear - I see my skin changing colour. Turning dark. Memories of suffocation, of bullets, of wrong time wrong place. “Putain, que non” he utters, glaring. The other makes his way to the car and takes out their riot gear. “Attende ici”, he commands. I’m impressed. All this for me. The moment they put their arms into the padding, I’m off. My feet are whirling on my pedals faster than I’ve ever known. Tear gas surrounds me. I clench my eyes shut. I wear contact lenses. They will turn my eyes to acid. I crash into a lamp post stronger than my father’s arms. In my pre-death I dream of her. We’re camping beside the canyon again. Only instead, this time, she trusts me absolutely. We can hear the water gurgling below us. There is an owl calling out once more. The owl says, you don’t know how much time you have. She repeats it again and again. All night through. I laugh. An owl hasn’t a watch.

I shake myself off and arrive up at the castle in no time. They’ll still be putting on their gear. I have time. My skin now lighter again. But I’m heavy. As if I could burst from what is inside of me. I stamp the ground. The sheep cry out, beside me in the field, surprised. I stamp until the soles of my feet feel like they will bleed. I have to get this out. I mutter their names. Thousands of them. Millions. Back into the earth. I begin to whirl. It begins to snow. The remaining leaves in the tree rustle and bear witness. Until dawn in movement like this, until the fields freeze and take me under, and I am one with all the deaths, and all the lives, and then I have no name and I am free to become old and broken with dignity once again. When the sun rises, it comes up purple and full of mist. There is no name for this. I wander back home, bicycle rising up against the cobbled streets. I can still feel her hands still gripping my sides, my thighs, holding onto my shoulders. It’s been weeks, perhaps months now. There is no way beyond this, but here. But at last I can sleep. Until they come for the door, a battering pole and the scent of burnt onion and passive aggression in the sound of their boots. I continue to sleep. Nothing will wake me ever again. Not until I listen to the advice of the owl. Picture - The Mosaic from Thysdrus (today El-Djem, Tunisia) “The birds are bursting with envy, but the owl doesn’t care”

[birdsongsofpersia]

lust, leaves, and the calm,

[And this morning, I thought of a place on the ocean where no one is / no boat, no fish jumping /  just sunlight gleaming on the water, humps of water that hardly break. / I have argued bitterly with the man I love, and for two days /  we haven't spoken.  / We argued about one thing, but really it was another.  / I keep finding myself standing by the front windows looking out at the street and the walk that leads to the front door of this building, white, unbroken by footprints. Anything I've ever tried to keep by force I've lost.] Marie Howe - Watching Television, from What the Living Do - You value this entrance more than anything else, she says. - It’s an entrance to life for you. It is not me, but this body that you search for. I give up this entrance. I give up life. In the middle of the night, I wake with a glass to my lips full of blood. It is flowing like the stream I spent winter beside. It’s almost winter again. This is my new stream. It flows from the mountains out down my chin. I’m draining my lips for you, I murmur, before I pass out. I’m cutting off my fingertips so that I cannot feel your skin any longer. Then will you believe my intentions? Silence. Then I realise  I don’t know, weeks later, if you were talking to me or to yourself. I wake from dreams of moons. A cinema, flickering, of all the moons I have ever seen. The window is open. I’m alone, again. It’s still dark. There are leaves blowing in from the chestnut tree outside. Show me your death, she, the tree, says. Am I not astonishing? Am I not sacred? And will I not be murdered like the all the others? And so will you. And so will you unless you find your strength. The colours of the leaves are so vivid that they pass right into me. Into my thorax. It is the first time that leaves are formed a part of me. This autumn is showing me another way. There is a home, inside, that is waiting to be built. I wake again. I’m bathed in rivers of sweat. I feel like I have been at sea, upon a boat, going to nowhere, and the waves they keep coming, relentless. Then spotting land. Sprawling deserts. And then : beings, sitting, gazing at the sky. They appear ready to be like that forever. Their eyes have taken in the stars. I want to be one of them. The boat keeps going. [Image : from The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) [original title: Sayat Nova] dir. Sergei Parajanov. ]

[birdsongsofpersia]

The Pre-Natal Man,

Short story, written august 2020. Yes, these words still exist. Sorry for the abandonment. Everything has been abandoned, these days, not just them.

[birdsongsofpersia]

inside the volcano,

[imprisoned here, my voice will fill the trees] -Ovid, Metamorphoses (tr. by Charles Martin)

You said, write a poem, out here, in front of this ridiculous blue sky. In India. Where you are not. Where instinct cut you off. My chest is of too many murdered trees for palm. Could barely wish the sun well / before it

sank away. You ate my restlessness, I ate great happiness. And one more, of isolation. Then you gnawed on my mother, my brother and all the things we have not said to each other. April 26th. Another year passes : once I climbed trees instead of swallowing them. The moon that night shone nectar orange. In India, we were walking a market together. Spices - Cardimon, cumin, paprika-bad-dream-chili. They say there was a murder close-by. A cow swallowed a huge lucid dream fly. I am always running to witness each crying beggar and each untouchable billionaire and I too am weeping for loss of life. On the way to the temple, I have a fight with a city cleaner because of shining eyes and we call it a stalemate, shake hands, and bow. In bed, my skin is a jungle, a ground alive with creatures that know only pleasure. Shhhh, you say. Shhhh. I have not slept for five days since --- then, I wonder, did I throw it all into the Barren Island volcano? Do I burn everyone I touch --- and great happiness too? Still, I saved a little inside a folded napkin with shiny beads, right here, to chew on...for desperate times, Photo : Steve McCurry, India Photography 15

[birdsongsofpersia]

Sacred Insomnia for the timeless,

                 [They died because in the black substance of someone else’s night all the streets looked the same …] - Anne Carson in Men in the Off Hours                        Time enters, announces its arrival, then disappears to drink in the wardrobe, day after day. I spend months contemplating its arrival and departure, the bleeding in of the days. Coronavirus penetrates every vessel. It’s why I venture here, some nights. They call me in, round back into the shack. They are temporary sloths of all sizes after work, unable to rise to their feet after a long day. Their hands are crude oil black, crusted with their toils. “Come...join us...have a glass o’ poison with us”, they croon out, drinking home-brewed schnapps. They were already merry as beasts as if feasting within the centre of the earth. There are eight or nine of them, or perhaps four. They work as shoe shiners that spread out throughout the city during the day anticipating the move and insecurities of those in transit. This is a land full of important meetings. Everyone has to have immaculate shoes. It was 3am and I had been walking bare foot, feeling rusty. I was sleepless and longing for stormy dreams, the sanctuary. Without it death comes like a thousand mad symphonies. Do I need the rest, or the dreams that take me to wisdom? I long for the return to great knowledge. I have not dreamt for weeks now. I lose it all murmuring poetry at street-lights. In certain states of mind each lamp post contains a floating line beside it. I try to touch it but my hand passes straight through. They have come to show me something that cannot be touched. They have come to show me how to observe, to wait, to greet them with presence. Meanwhile, restless, I build a cathedral of memories. Of childhood. I watch the blossom fall through the cold spring nights. I peel away my mind. I hear the same words, over and over again. As if it is a funeral for the state of creation. All leaves me. I walk the streets and hear soft footsteps behind me. Something tells me they are of the tigers I once had nightmares of for months as a kid. I turn, though, and of course they are not there. Some of the ancients would sit me down in a desert to tell me : they are tracking you to see that you remain on the right path. And which path is this? They disappear off into the sands, laughing to themselves. “We never sleep”, admits one man, darker with shoe polish than the others. “There’s no time to give time away. This is the secret of the success of this little country. You watch the clock. You avoid eye contact. And you get to go where you are going. But we...enjoy the art of watch burning here. Ever done it?” I gaze at him. My mind doesn’t quite work in these times. Nothing adds up. Sleep can take it all away. He extends a grubby hand, mumbling about cleanliness in the world of chaos, and presents himself as Serj, and hands me a watch with a shot of Schnapps. I loathe the drink and switch it for a cup of cacao from my thermos. The watch is a Rolex, evidently worth more than I’ve ever spent in my life. There are those who spend more on a cup of coffee than I spend on food in a year. Who worry only of how to accumulate more. It is soon time for my annual burning of wealth  ceremony. Serj grins. The sleight of hand to take off a wristwatch without the other noticing until they were already halfway across the city. I don’t understand. With how everyone lives in time, how can they be away from it for so long? “We have truckloads of identical replicas...we replace them and their owners know nothing about it until weeks later and then who knows how it happened..” Another stretches her hand towards me. Wagna is her name. She had been strumming a banjo in the corner of the room, eyes like broken glass shining under the moon. “I used to ask people I met : tell me true words. Now I think it’s a little intrusive, and puts people on the spot. You are invited if you wish to share. But today I will show you the truest manifestation I can muster from within me.” She stands up. Stretches high up to the ceiling and begins to hum a song. I watch her, mesmerised. The more I watch her, the more her arms appear to become branches and her feet a tree trunk. “Damnit Wagna”, another says, a small cannonball of a man, “don’t leave your leaves all over the ground again when you do that.” She remains like this for a long time, only the winds outside communicating. She sits, as if falling, hit by lightning, then sits back up and casually begins to strum the banjo. They begin to toss watches into a large still drum. “All this wealth...” Serj laments, “and for what and to which ends?” A tiny woman, no larger than a baby kangaroo hobbles up with a match. She is clearly in great pain with whatever is afflicting her, but smiles broadly, filling her faces, wrinkles spreading like a sun across swamp water. She tosses it in, and the watches begin to hiss, going up in flames. There is the sound of motors dying, civilisation cracking, trembling, falling to a halt. A unseen voice from the darkness : “my truth is that once I dreamt I was a bird, like so many do. But I felt extinction stalking me, stalking...us. And ever since then, I haven’t slept. The terror of truth, and knowing what they know. I feel like I’m going mad, now...my unwillingness to face the end times.” I swallow deep down into my guts. I feel shaky. My body could perhaps give it all in right now. But I stand. I haven’t danced for a long while. Months and years. The cannonball-like man takes out a drum and begins to play along to the banjo. I begin to move to the sounds, urging myself to go into trance, to forget the body, the eyes, and pass into the lands of the groundless. I doubt it all. In the doubt, I throw my body more recklessly. I become a multiple car crash upon a cliff toppling into a vast canyon. Bodies who have lost their songs. Eyes without glimmer. Naked skin that does not reach out. One must live the inner live so absolutely that a path is cleared towards the future days. Return to this frenzy. I am lashing out at the future, at days of paying rent, getting by, becoming forsaken, a beggar, a speck with nothing but hunger. Sacred hunger. Tears leaving me as if trapped by a dam broken by thousands of fish taking back their river, the space where they have always lived and died.  I could sacrifice myself to return. Some hours go by. They had continued drinking, telling stories. But I had to go deep. Then dawn chirps. I collapse to the ground. The tree bends down to kiss me on the forehead, then leaves with the others to earn their daily bread. Just Serj remains. Only now, sitting up, do I see his long white beard that I swear wasn’t there before. I look down, and I too have one, long and straggly like a goat’s, down to my knees. I have become old again. And I will return to youth. The mind and spirit can transform anything. “This...” he murmurs, “is why we don’t sleep. Welcome to the lands of sacred insomnia. We remember why we’re here in these times...and no clock will replace this...” I open the door. Dawn has appeared like a threat, like a mango into my begging bowl, like an unstoppable herd of charging elephants. Days of order, days of workers running to meetings with their chests thundering, days of forgotten dreams. I step outside, and daylight does the rest, Photo - Stanley Kubrick, Story, began in early February, finished in late April, day before the turning of years. Some things must have a completion...

[birdsongsofpersia]

A complaint / for I’m not ready,

[Haven’t you heard of the young lad from Shouling who tried to learn to walk the way people do in Hantan? Before he had acquired this new skill he had forgotten how he used to walk, so all he could do was come crawling home on all fours. If you don’t go away now, sir, you’ll forget what you used to know]. - from the Chuang Tzu, 17. “Autumn Floods“  tr. by Victor H. Mair Sterile office scenery. A huge oak desk. Two figures. Human or inhuman, no matter. “I have come here to lodge a complaint”, says the first voice, exhaust filling every word “Yes. You may proceed” says the second voice, equally tired, but evidently from routine, the hammering of keys, the monotony of everyday life. “I believe I was mistakenly brought for slaughter.” A sigh fills the air like a slow letting of gas. “What makes you consider that it was a mistake?” “For... I’m not ready.” A rustling of paperwork. A clearing of the throat, tired and tedious. “Are you questioning our decision-making abilities?” the voice croaks out. The lights go dim. There is a screaming, a pounding of feet. LIGHTS. Too much. To blind. A shielding of eyes. Another desert. The winds sound out as if communicating from beyond. TO PITCH BLACK once again. Only stars visible. Immaculate. Vast. The sound of a heart beat, like a drum, overwhelming. A voice that has no mouth spreading across the sands begins. “Even your slaughter...is a deepening. A re-becoming. You do not recognise the gifts in your ruin.” The heart calms. Blinding light once more. There is a fire. Dear friends are there to celebrate the life of this soul. They drink tea, in ecstasy, in trance. There are drums, more than the heart can beat, and the winds appears to sing. BLACK. “It is time”, says the voice. The figure walks out into the abyss, all the while dancing, mourning, heavy, light. / Photo from The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman (1957), the death dance..

[birdsongsofpersia]

Desert return,

[I am released from trouble. I thought it meant to die in comfort. It doesn’t. It means that I die.] - Sophocles, tr. by Ezra Pound, from Hercales’ last words to his son; “The Women of Thracis,”

I wake in an unfamiliar place, but more familiar than where I’ve lived for the last two months. Outside it’s raining huge monsoon rains. I dress. I put on my skin again. I brush my teeth. I hear breathing. I check. Nothing. I swear to you. Nothing. Outside, the desert : dry, endless, without mercy. I adore it. And my cracked throat. All night we wake repeatedly with an unknown thirst. The desert winds. The owl swoops low over the bed. Layers, openings, forgotten memories.  It’s been a long while since my skin sang like this. I see abandoned train stations, and the tracks I used to cross with my bicycle on the way out of all that.  Sometimes I would wish for a train to come on past, though it never would, long disused, and there is always one faint memory of wisdom somewhere, there, to move on out of the way just in case. A wild fruit. A closeness. A flicker of eyes. A knowing. I see the horse, too, on the path to the sea. He and I would stand and stare at each other for a long time, thinking of our sacred lives and mourning our fences, our cages, our prisons. I eat a little bread. The bread eats me. My tiredness fills the room. My insomnia pulls my skin back into place. I leave. I pull the castle doors shut. From inside the owls hoots, and it sounds like, why-why-why. We are cycling back together, in the monsoon. I always forget how these rains come back when I can’t make an important decision. I’m not surprised to see him. He came up behind me at an intersection. It had been years since we’d seen each other, and even then we didn’t have much to say to each other. Now he’s cycling without hands beside me, in the tram tracks, as if he has no worry about his safety. Why would he? His face is purple. When we reach traffic lights and stop, he checks out his hair in the reflection of a car. Moistens it down. A worm comes poking through his cheek. “Where did you go?” I ask him. He shrugs. The red in the traffic light turns to fire for an instant, and I look back at him. He’s styling his hair, once again, and pulls out a beer from his jeans pocket. “And where did you go?” he repeats, staring right through me. “You’re still here... but where did you go?” Photo : Solar eclipse, with a view of the pyramids and Great Sphinx, Giza. August 30, 1905.

[birdsongsofpersia]

While we starve,

[Me despierto en el río Con el último aliento Abandono mis lamentos Del Sol me voy a aferrar Busco la huella al camino Que alguien vino a marcar Ya los bueyes han borrado Quién me vendrá a encontrar] Fiebre, History of Colour

I slept under a large roof squeezed between towers of concrete rising high. I thought, what if it were to topple down? So be it. Better than live this day without sleep and full of exhausted regrets. It was 9am. There was snow everywhere. I had passed a policeman on the way and he greeted me. I knew he could be the one throwing the tear gas. I stayed silent. The protest gathering began at midday. It took a long time for him to leave his spot. It’s tough to find a place to sleep in the light of day in -6. I returned to where I met him, gazed up and down the road to find it empty, and crossed into the warehouse. It was a Sunday so no one was around but for office workers out beyond in front of their desks paying off their forevers. Sometimes it’s a surprise not to see people churning their bones away 24/7 in this country. I dream of snow falling into me, right through my heart. I dream it’s the end of the world and there’s nothing left but for snow. Snow and my footprints that I had as a child with those red boots. Then I wake. I dream again, and now it is just a blizzard as the police come marching forward towards to protect the last of the bread, piled high in front of a throne and growing stale while we starve, Photo : Day iii. Almost in Davos for the WEP (World Economic Forum). Large writing in the snow, for the military helicopters passing over us reading We Rise Up.

[birdsongsofpersia]

a stomach is burning,

And even in Atlantis of the legend The night the seas rushed in, The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves, - Bertolt Brecht, A Worker Reads History, 1928.

Approaching the border, some 20km away, we see them. In the mist and plummeting cold, towards zero. Walking towards us. A dozen or so of them. They are dark, desert dark, and have no bags, nothing. In the middle of nowhere. There's not a town's lights in sight. Not even a twinkle of a street light. "Coño", Eko mutters. It was 5 degrees and falling in the thick mist at almost midnight. We'd been driving together for a good two hours. They had stopped at the peage where the priest had dropped me off. We're squeezed in together in the front. They were driving back to Bilbao, and I was tempted to follow them all the way but there are other roads to be taken. They'll drop me off in Zagreb the next day. They're coming from the south of Greece. They speak of desperation out there in those lands, a country without resources. It's one of those nights where my Spanish gets stuck in the roof of my mouth and can't make it out into the air. Truth be, I wasn't countering on finding them here in the middle of Serbia. Suddenly, Xabi hits the brakes. We had only just passed the figures beside the road. There are many words and curses and shock in the air. The feeling that we can't just drive by as if they really were phantoms. I jump out, and beckon to them walking out there behind us. Merhaba. As-Salaam-Alaikum. And they turn, and begin to walk towards us. "Y ahora, que? Que hacemos? Los llevamos a la frontera? Y después que?" I ask my ride. For the first time in two hours there is a silence. The group walks very, very slowly. As if they can hardly pick up their feet. They are holding their stomachs and look like battered wildebeests. All but three of them -  a kid, who smiles broadly at me when she sees me waving. An old man, too, full of life, and a young woman. I don't understand anything. In a dream of a dream. The rest, their lips are hardened, sandpaper-like, holed cheeks. One stops to vomit into the grass. They arrive without any bewilderment. The young woman speaks English and presents herself to me. She tells me she is from Lebanon, and the rest are from Syria and Iraq. "Que hacemos, tios? Por que nos paramos aquí? Como podemos ayudarles?" I ask my drivers. They remain quiet. They stare ahead, into the night. From the corner of my eye I see the old man smiling softly. His cheeks appear to be made from olive branches, tough and sunken and lived. "Hemos estado esperandoles." he says, with lips that don't move. The words come from his chest. And I look in his eyes and I see them walking, walking, walking. Serbia is endless, but what of Bulgaria through the mountains, Turkey, Syria? "No me preguntas más, por favor. Tenemos algo importante para dar a la vida y nos urge compartirlo." They climb into the van. They all take off their shoes with great respect, apart from one who refuses to take off his boots and stamps his feet, froths at the mouth. I understand nothing. We are twenty kilometres from the border of the European Union with twelve or so refugees in the back of our van. "Chai?" Eko asks. Everybody nods. The woman speaking English introduces the group. Three are architects. One is a builder. Another fixes washing machines. One sews and makes clothes. One works in a desert-foods restaurant (a lot of strange desert meat, she explains). She is a translator. Several wince whenever they make a move as if their bodies are fighting against their will. They've been travelling for six months to get here, walking most of the way. The old man learnt Spanish through suffering with the Mexican telenovela his late wife watched every Tuesday. We pass around tiny glasses of steaming mountain herb tea once it's brewed. Xabi begins to prepare rice and beans. - Where were you walking to? Away from the border? The old man smiles and replies in Spanish, and says that they were walking towards us, and we'd taken longer than they expected. Thus they had walked many kilometres more than necessary. Como lo sabías?, Xavi asks the old man. He just moves his hand slowly towards his heart and closes his eyes, keeping his hand clenched there, and rocks back and forth. We serve the rice. Most hands shake when they take a plate. Collectively they slide two thirds of their food onto three plates - that of the small girl, the old man, and the translator. I gaze at this, dumbfounded. The translator explains that they give all they can to the members of the group who need it most, the young, the old, and in this case, herself, in order to translate. The old man, she whispers, so as for him not to hear it and allow it to go to his head, is very wise, and without wisdom, and courage, how can we sustain ourselves? But we haven't eaten in many days. We'd been eating the plants we could identify out here but there is little beside the motorway. Our stomachs are burning. Not just from the food, or lack of it, but what we have seen, what we see when we close our eyes. I gaze at the other members of the group. They all take their time to eat, savouring each grain. They look back at me as if a field of dust blocks our eyes. They peer at me though, as if we have all known each other before. There are points in my life where this keeps happening. It happened a lot this summer. Really a lot. With almost everyone I met. And then, suddenly, it stopped again. I definitely hadn't met the Azerbaijani guys before but who has? The old man still rocks back and forth clutching his heart. The kid suddenly begins to laugh. She's found the photo of the guys skinny dipping somewhere in turquoise waters. A teenage lad slowly puts his hand over her eyes, grinning, and tickles her under her arms gently with his other hand. She's an orphan, the woman explains. We didn't consider taking her. But she followed, no matter where we went. Now she's the one who finds us food. There's something...unbroken about her, and we need this, to keep alive ourselves.

I do not ask of the memories that remain, the ones that keep them up when they desperately need sleep. The ones that pass down and burn the stomach. When I've done this before it is as if to cut the air out of the room. I open up the sliding door, instinctively, and croon out into the night. I don't know what else to do. This is good preparation for the winter that is to come, I tell myself. There is nothing else to do.

Photo - scorched earth by Anthony Fletcher, oil - [Title ‘a stomach is burning’ taken from Melanie De Biasio's album of the same name]

[birdsongsofpersia]

the brothels of the black hole,

So the body wanders. / Sometimes it goes where light does not reach.                    —                Ann Lauterbach, from “Eclipse with Object A familiar conundrum : no matter how much we drive, we go no further. These infinite black holes that can trap a soul for hours, days, or even lifetimes. I have met figures that were once human beings who have come and then never left. One always finds such places, while travelling, but it is odd to come across it as an entire country. They stopped right after the border at 8:30pm. You wonder, for a while, if you are a ghost. Not just now, but for forever. What marks have you left? Who really sees you, in your life? I mean, entirely, actually, for all you are. Then you are seen, at least there, with your thumb outstretched. They exit laughing. Polish plates. Two cars. Belgrade? Yox. Niet. Bulgaria? Sofia ? Bəli. Da, they say, grinning. We’ll be crossing through the whole night. 600km. They are from Azerbeijan and among our nine collected languages, speak but a handful of common words together. There are essences expressed with no words. Like the concept of a brothel. Jorgei is a good actor, or one who mimes, I must say. He makes it very clear there is a selection inside a building. He gets very excited. When we pull into a petrol station he becomes like a cartoon mouse salivating over hanging cheese when a woman arrives with her partner. He is 41 and has six children. One is a baby that he shows me a photo of, naked, looking at the camera. By dawn, we’re not much closer. We pass Belgrade, which takes hours. Perhaps I block out what happens. Maybe I fall asleep. We don’t stop at the house of skin to my recollection. We enter the city and my jaw drops at the size of the buildings. The hustle bustle. The way people stand around with red eyes drinking from bottles and gazing at moving screens. The bridges. The macchinas. There are genderless beings biting the heads off of men with huge muscles and when they chew they express a sound of satisfaction as if at the end of a hard day’s work. There is a statue of Lord Shiva that my eyes are too heavy to take in but instead of his arms, there are snakes and the snakes are writhing in and out of his body. There are limbless beggars with their hands outstretched wailing and limbed non beggars who walk as if they need nothing of the world. They have fixed much of the bombed city that I know of NATO’s ruins. There are monkeys standing and pointing at cowering skinheads. There are the elderly with eyes full of the past stumbling past into another memory.

Beyond Belgrade we pull into a service station. They drink big mugs of coffee and shout into their telephones. I wish I understood. I wish I understood less. A street dog, with silky black fur approaches me as I stand outside with just a shirt at 2am and licks at my shoes. When I lived in this part of the world he could have licked through my shoes themselves for they were hole ridden and I did not care. Apologies, comrade, I tell him. But he doesn’t mind, he keeps licking my shoes, and perhaps there were holes in everything back then and everything of me spilled out and I could never keep anything entire or untouched or preserved and it is hard not to take this street dog with us back into the car and protect him from the world but give him all the freedom he could possibly have by teaching him to be strong and wise and kind. Every time I stroke him he begins to jump up and down like he’d fly off with a few more strokes. We drive on and leave him and freedom behind. Within an hour Jorgei’s eyes begin to water like a rising well and his head nods. There’s almost no one on the motorway at this time so all we can do is crash into the sides. It likely wouldn’t be fatal but would put an end to their 3000km selling macchina idea. We pull into another rest station. This time there are two cars there, one from Austria, another from Germany. He climbs into the back, indicates that I wind my chair back, and begins to snore with the intensity of a huge digger. At this moment two Roma kids come to the car, open up the door and take off my shoes. The dog is with them, 70km further down the road. They take off my socks too. I do not protest. It is a part of my ritual here. The silky dog licks at my toes and his tongue is silky too. Back upon my feet, they replace my shoes with my old ones of eight years ago with the same holes, only now from the damp of the years, large mushrooms grow from them, throbbing white in the night. I laugh, and the Roma kids laugh too and scamper off into the night. Jorgei is dreaming of the brothel I see, his waist moving up and down. Once dawn comes he wakes and makes it clear that the brothel will have to wait until Sofia, till I am safely delivered, and Serbia is a black hole and will not encourage kind intimate affairs. He widens his arms to show the size of the hole, until I am afraid his arms will snap attempting to measure it. I wiggle my toes and see my present day shoes back upon my feet and consider what exactly I am returning to, who I am, what I have been, and what street dogs I have known in these lands. Till Sofia, we still have Niš to pass, another black hole, of Constantine The Great, and we humans are great too, sometimes.

Photo - We lost Jorgei’s friend in the black hole, at one point. This was their reunion,

[birdsongsofpersia]

No memory,

I enter the place of not-thinking, not-remembering, not- wanting. - Mary Oliver, from Six Recognitions Of The Lord in “Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver”

[i]I am drumming as if my body does not hold memory. I am gazing as if I have no eyes, and I am touching as if you were another, far, and these deserts that surround us were full of bones, and that I hold their history, And so these bones become my bones, and I cannot unbecome their skeletons, and all of their living, and all of their dying.

One says to me, one sunken night, Tío, he olvidado como respirar. Yo también, yo también, I tell him.  But here I am, learning to breathe again, on another night Below a mountain, and soon there will be a rockslide. G.G once said, “How can anyone that does not write not go mad?” A boulder said to me, how can you continue on, Without breathing?  I shrug. Since then, I am learning how to breathe again, but often I do not write, and I do go mad. And they enter me deep green, of jungles, go down my throat in vines, the jungle is teaching me how to breathe again, I did not know it then. I am in the back of a pickup truck. It’s the first time of my life. Corn rushes past. An enormous sense of freedom. Then I am breathing.  K yells, from out front, STAND UP, STAND UP. TRY TO FLY. And I do, nervously, I begin to fly. It was far before I learnt how to fly within my dreams. The corn tells secret poems in the lands of the wizard of oz, and I did not know that I would spend the next nine years working with corn every summer back across the ocean, I did not know that this would be my first flight of many, and back in the rolling valley of bones, I say my goodbye to Granada and wish the dead well and decide once and for all - I am not dead. I must give everything to life, once again. I feel the medicine slowly loosening its hold. The mountains sighing. Goodbye, Granada, land of my bones and heavy heart. I will breathe again, and I will fly,

[birdsongsofpersia]

skin flees,

I want to unfold / let no place in me hold itself closed / for where I am closed I am false / I want to stay clear in your sight/ - Rilke

My skin is winter leaves untouched by sun in northern skies for so long and deeper down there are homes where people know my name and smile even when I am intoxicated with forgetting / and say this is what you have lost, here, buried in the gardens of abandoned dances. Am I of the age now where we somewhat... live? I tell you, I am not yet alive the way that I know is true, somewhere inside. But I dance, and I dance into the earth, and I breathe out the weight of the dying and the dead, attempt to let them go, to move on to the next world and they speak of the regrets of those who have too little time, mine would be not reaching down into the depths to drag poetry into a world that has none. For it has so many faces, so many lives, so many deaths. The jungle beckons, but in the concrete seas, why have I turned my back on the words and sights that have given me so much?

Every night I am fleeing something, someone. It has no face. I have decided to name it winter. A winter that comes to my dreams. A winter that I have abandoned in search of warmth. But capi-tan, what about/ fingertips tracing your skin, giving calm to those inner organs on fire and the restless heart ready to leave all comforts and wander the eastern most mass of the Sahara? and when all desert cold disappears into the wagon untouched since he left this world and his cat is old and sick and has teeth hanging out of his mouth. And where do the old and uncared for go? They crawl into shadows and wait to be taken. And wait more, more, the passing of seasons. I swear, as I write this (no poetic coincidence) he comes slowly up to me as if he can hear me writing of him, purring, rubbing against my legs. I still exist, hermano, he says. I still exist. And I have lived a life worth knowing. Memories of moving through the deserts of Morocco, that ancient feeling of the winds howling at night, and the days of sun upon the skin. And how the old congregrate outside beside the road and watch traffic move in and out of the villages, content to see the river of life gurgling, and there was no discontent, just acceptance, and pride, at having lived.

I have moved no closer to accepting my body to how it is, but when I dance, I have learnt to let my mind go, and without the mind, I am all spirit, and it comes and goes like migratory geese. This friday night there are few that I really am drawn to. I am lost in that for a long while. The loneliness of a lifetime accumilated fills me for a while as the songs get real slow. I see Lizzie with her eyes upon the wall most of the night. Pablo with his tattooes stretching around his back the night long sitting amongst it all, and his horses outside the city, and his Patagonia further away still. There is one, from the first moment, that has a line attached to me, and I watch her, and I curse, for there is still a part of me that rejects it. Do not come too close, this part says. And I watch her all night long, and she will dance with me only for a second before moving on, and she has an eyebrow piercing to her right and tape covering tattoos, and I too once had this same piercing till it fell in carribean jungle plants and life said let it go but I will bring it back again soon. T and I got them done together, four years before he disappeared from this jungle garden earth and perhaps if I get it done again he will return and speak to me in dreams of where he is, what he has learnt, and there are two girls that are so joyful that I dance constantly amongst them trying to show them, I am just motion, don't be nervous and for the first time I am smiling broadly almost all night while dancing, and perhaps they can feel it, and one comes up to me and says in Spanish that she adored my energy, and I did hers, her laughter filling the night, and how the moon shines full and and fuller than my belly could ever be. I am experimenting with fasting, what it is not to want, but I cannot put away this feeling of wanting touch and at night, hours later, I do not know what to do with myself while staring up at the attic ceiling to not have another's breath beside me, filling me, to not share these visions, the images beyond eyes and those streets, suddenly alive that were once dormant, how worlds open, how can one be away from that...even for one moment? And so many moments, now, but one must find ways to grow upon different paths, where poetry finds roots and my skin will hold in the sun all dark winter long without fleeing, and touch will return again, a moment or the next, and this dance will be full of footsteps pounding the earth with shimmering eyes, the dead and the living breathing the night air, remembering.

/ Photo - Francesca Woodman, from Space2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976.