Waiting

I’ll come in August,
He declares
Each sound reflected
In a rain pool
Of endless summer

Words get trapped
In maze of thoughts
Blended with dreams
Diluted quickly
By the real

June’s proving busy
She reflects
Trying to mask
The notes of fear that July
Will last forever

Drops of moist
On fingertips
Tension within
Knowing that August ends too soon
And then?

Listening to Pretty Wings by Maxwell

So you think you are free

Lost sense of good
Frocefully taken
From prideless hands
Freedom deprived
Painfully twisted
Drained crisply dry
Of happy claps
They wipe the spill
Buoyancy leakage
Remains of it -
Museum filler
Drenched in the sweat
Convened by truth
It’s black and white
No in between
They touch the real
Try to handle it
Sometimes they do
Sometimes they weep


Wake up, world. Wake up to realize that your freedom dream is nothing but a delusion. I scan morning papers for the obituary of compassion. Survived by whom?

The day after us

Inside the creases of my skin
Mixed with the song of fuzzy rain
The evening’s kindness wearing thin
Your touch – the thought that ripped my brain
I dreamed you up, I told those streets
I knew the night could choose to hear
My heart kept busy counting beats
While raindrops masked the single tear

Currently listening to Malaika (Angel) by Miriam Makeba (RIP, Mama Africa, the world misses you)

Inside an hourglass

This thinking grips my heart
And squeezes it, and bends
I can’t tell you apart
From where my dreaming ends
I might have felt your pride
Elusiveness so tender
Despite this vast divide
Temptation to surrender
You might have dug my mind
From underneath the laughter
So does this world unkind
Allow the ever after?

* * *

I know, they are called the Atlantic… Sometimes fortune cookies really creep me out. But then again, I prefer reading between the lines. I might be on the verge of crossing the great waters in my life, the journey that many won’t understand, especially family. My mind is set however, and I know I can reach the other shore... as I long I remember to breathe.

Currently listening to Erykah Badu & Stephen Marley

Prosaic things

I take a walk with you
To open up a bit
I tell you sky shots are prosaic

You laugh at me
Because I snapped some
The other day

I tell you sometimes
I snap prosaic shots
For lack of any better

The truth is I am telling you
Prosaic things
Because I can’t tell you the truth


The prosaic image is by me

Dream box

"I put my dreams in a box
so they'll never spoil,
hidden from the sunlight,
underneath the soil.
You can never be too
careful with a secret
as someone once said,
but would it be safer to keep
it locked up in my head?"

~ Music & Lyrics

Letting your art roam free?

I am convinced more and more that words have a life of their own. They have alert minds, unique personalities and quite a rebellious nature, always plotting the most intricate ways of surprising their carriers.

The last poem in its final form (never really final through my lenses) contains only about 20 percent of the words or ideas with which I started. They become so independent once I let that first wave hit, that at certain points I feel little control over them. They develop – some to bloom and some to whither – all in their own ways, and I only add a stroke of a pen here and there to guide the lost sheep of the group; to direct them back when they wander too far off the edge of the paper. It’s as if they know what’s on my mind and they know where I’d like them to go, but they choose their distinctive paths toward that destination. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes they grow strong enough to change the destination itself, and I let them.

I have asked a couple of friends who paint about their creative process, and it seems amazingly similar. They start with a basic idea and then they let the art take its own course. I am yet to ask my friends who compose music. You know who you are!

Then again, maybe it is similar precisely because we are friends (or we are friends because we have similar spirits, whichever comes first, you get the point). Maybe other people do it differently. Do you normally know exactly what you are about to create?

Released

I’m floating above what I left on the ground
Two shadows bent over a veil of rage
Deception is sweet, yet in it one is bound
To smile through the bars of a miniature cage
I followed the recipe found in your writing
The passion was simmered, the fury got steamed
The mixture of evils was wrongly exiting
An eye for an eye... Stop. Can I be redeemed?

6 a.m.

I long for other you
Unable to release
This grip
Of fingers turning blue
I act at ease
Then hide to weep
Under my skin
From hand of fate
Its painful scratch
For I have seen
Your falling state
Please stay and catch
Day's quiet cue
Please try to be
For sunrise longer
The other you
Hold on to me
Till I grow stronger
And leave behind
This place
Its dust
My lover’s mind
His fading grace
His lust

Your face
My past

Landless

I breath out the eluded spheres
Crystal balls of the dark remain
I’m surrounded by painless spears
Not a feeling in flesh, no pain
Running low under thickest shadows
Tribes enclose me in trance of motion
I race back through the naked meadows
Leave the firm for the vast of ocean
Rushed attempts to gulp in liberation
Suck me in with the vessel’s rubble
Cleansing dark under light temptation
Limbs are begging for right to struggle
Shiny mermaids forge absolution
Freeness vowed by comforting deep
I escape this reverse evolution
Back to shore with no face to weep...

Stop

Stop chasing your shadow through dreams that are mine
The other you’s pondering crossing the line
Through nothingness rolling uphill in my sleep
The tracks you are leaving are twenty feet deep
I shiver, I stumble, I’m not in that dream
I run to the places that get what I mean
I crash into people that play it just right
I back out, I burn out, I’m dying tonight.

A little lost

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

~ C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

How do people say things as pretty? Can I do that... please? Sometimes I think my words sit under this huge rock in the sea that is my thoughts, ideas, feelings and desires. The category five storm needs to happen for them to be thrown out to the surface, spit out by the waters that are too dark otherwise to tell where the sunshine ends and the abyss begins.

Sometimes I think lack of pain kills inspiration. Sometimes I think pain overdose does it too. I find chapters of comedy and tragedy as I try to frantically skip any prosaic pages in life. Slowing down seems to be a sure motivation killer so I run fast, and bump into walls, and get hurt, and get up again, and keep running, and bump into walls...

I jump between extreme thirst for social life and desperate need for solitude. I think we give up part of our freedom the moment we choose to depend on others, be it for attention, time, means to survive, understanding, kindness, affection... But then, if others choose to depend on us, do we fill that gap with some of their freedom? What right does anyone have for anyone else's freedom? Being part of society automatically means being, in one way or another, unfree. Being absolutely free then... means being unsocial? And then there is solitude, which takes away the freedom to be loved.

The only true way to be free as I found it is to be free within. It is that type of freedom that I seek out and fight for and worship.

* * *

As I get tired of this buzzing world I take a stroll to the land of no emotion, but I get too restless on my way there to ever reach the illusionary destination of absolute personal strength. Few days into my "independence" I feel the prose of reality crawling at me like a giant heat wave, leaving no air to breathe, no shade to escape to on the surface so hot it melts dreams.

That’s when I take a big breath and dive deep into my poetry, finding there the only relief and a place of safety.

Sometimes answers are hidden in words. More often, words bring out more questions. Sometimes I wish I had words when none come out. At other times I wish I could just stay silent for hours... days. I think good words are hard to get and it probably only adds to their beauty. Then there are angry words and words that are empty, and I haven’t decided yet which one is worse.

* * *

"Why don’t you go blog about it?" I heard last weekend, and thrown into the heat of an argument, it was meant to sound offensive. I'm afraid "it" just doesn't do it for me, my dear boy. Hey, look who’s stronger now. I am on one of those freedom strolls and you’d better not get in my way. I don’t mean to sound amazon-ish but then again, I am so tired of fighting you. We’ve been barking at each other for so long, it started taking a shape of some sick entertainment. Another round, and we might as well start taking bets. At times, it boiled blood. At this point, it tires me. I am not meant for hatred, I don’t like harsh words given or taken, even if, especially if, they are empty shells thrown one's way to offend rather than convey meaning. I am no angel but let me dwell on it some other time. How are YOU going to find your way through such darkness into which you let your thinking wander, such anger with which you let it out? You can’t make a real difference, you can’t right the wrong if you fail or refuse (which is it?) to draw the line between passion and fury. You can’t be truly kind nor loving when you let your pride guide you, wherever it is you are heading.

Grey’s the Color of…

Under frowns of clouds
Through the whisper of leaves
I reach out for your mouth
I’m not finding your lips

Knitted sweaters, wet air
Your stretched arms in the rain
You try touching my hair
I fall back through my pain

Words are lost in this weather
Puddles eat your reflection
I feel wind in your blazer
Seeking summer’s affection

Warm time’s over, I hear
Trees are wearing gold
When precisely, my dear
Did our hearts turn so cold?

You look, I die

I can write a pile of sentences, reread them and don’t find myself. They are often not good enough. They lack the strength to dig deep, take it out and spill it on paper. Bleeding heart calls for writing in blood and all I see is black ink on a dull white paper. Nonsense. Friday was good and I even believed I was getting better. And then came Saturday. You looked. I died. Again.

I want to take you off
Like summer hat in fall
Throw off your arms like gloves
That wouldn’t keep me warm
No more
Shake drops of voice
Out of my ears
Soaked in the cold
Of ruthless storms
Your words
Wipe off that touch
Out of the creases
Of my palm
You stick to me
Cling to my thinking
Roll down the spine
With drops of sweat
Making me shiver
In aching dreams
Can’t loving die
So I can live
Instead
Wait not just yet
Resists the heart
In which small room
Is filled with charcoals
Blue and orange
And amber
Like your world
I throw them in the fire
Where your ice
Is melted
Your picture out of the corner
Looks into me
I read a smile
In picture’s eyes
Half-closed
Half-opened
Hate never came
Into this room
It never will
My eyes meet yours
Half-closed
Half-opened
Was ever love
Inside your look
Did I misread it
Did I
Just throw your picture in the fire
My shaking hands
Are burnt
But it won’t burn
I cover it with charcoals
They turn to flowers
You still look
Right back into me
Your eyes
Half-closed
Half-opened
Your soul
Half-naked
Half... I’ll never know
And of that look
I die.

Friends who were

I think sometimes we are too scared to renew old bonds. For one reason or another we lose connection with people whose company we actually used to enjoy some time back then. We lose a common place or institution — a school, a job, a neighborhood or a city… We lose common friends or a hobby. Sometimes we lose people without even getting a chance to know them better, thinking regretfully that we might have actually become friends, if we had just taken a little more time to find a common thread… before we lost each other.

We are so used to losing we don’t give much meaning to it anymore. There is no time in our lives for writing letters or attending reunions. We are too busy seeking for the new in this world to remember and appreciate the old.

The soccer game this weekend is my major attempt to reconnect with those old friends whose company I used to enjoy, but whom I lost to moving, time, work and other excuses — just go through the list of what you say when you don’t keep in touch for too long and you will know exactly what I am talking about.

It wasn’t easy to invite them, it’s never easy to make that first step to reconnect, but now that I did, I am eager to see what comes out of this.

One art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

~ Elizabeth Bishop

Rainy

One thousand falls,

One thousand rains,

You touched my eyes,

Rushed through my veins,

Then left me standing on the slopes,

Touching the leaves,

Counting the drops,

Cold rains and dreams,

And muddled streams,

No sign of hopes.