Losing All…

There is a wall behind that keeps on pushing me forward. Even if I stand still, it pushes me, and in front of me I see an edge which promises oblivion.

Every word I utter is hopelessly splashed on the moving wall. I cannot stop it, and neither can you.

The first thing I lost when the wall started pushing me and shoving me towards that edge was my sense of smell. I did not realize how much a nose can be vital and imperative to my daily life. But soon life held up a whole new meaning for me. I’m not a dog, how much of life could change if I lose my nose?

Speaking from daily routine, I lost my appetite almost immediately. What I could not smell, I could not eat, and when I forced myself to eat, I found no pleasure at all. The wall gave me its first push and woke me to my ephemeral nature of my existence and my experiences. My girl, that sweet little girl who I love so much, suffered so haplessly because of my damaged, slowly dsyfunctioning brain. No smell of hers I could ever praise, and no smell of mine I could ever sense. No fine smell of spices or other cookery I could enjoy, and consequently I could not please her. I missed her cigarette fuming hair, the odour of her body as we devoured each other like two maniacs in a Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel. My failing nose disappointed her and marked our home with a sensory bleakness so alien to us, yet so daunting in its unwanted presence.

It seems the more the wall advanced and progresses, the more I regress. Towards that edge that promises a truth I do not want to know I am forced to go, but aren’t we all heading towards the truth beyond the horizon, which we first only slightly graze with the deaths of a mother, a second mother? A father? An aunt? The truth comes when the real finally becomes banal and superfluous to the extent that we do not miss it anymore; the truth is shown only when we are so familiarized with the real that we see it but do not regard or recognize it. But in such an analysis of truth lies my misery. My sickness forces me to miss what should not be missed. This is the only reason it is called a sickness: it incurs unwanted feelings of deep nostalgia.

I thought it would stop at the sense of smell, but soon, my damaged brain effaced my sense of taste. What little appetite I had left was squandered. In front of me lay a plate-full of penne pasta soaked in tomato sauce. Small chunks of cooked tomato were visible between the pasta fragments, luscious and delicious. A thin layer of cheese melted on top. I took a first bite and could barely stand its uninviting tastelessness. I added salt but to no effect. I added more salt, and yet the pasta tasted of utter drabness. I added ketchup, but still, the taste remained the same, so I tasted the ketchup on its own, and the taste remained the same, the taste of stale nothingness. The sudden realization made me vomit, and the vomit tasted the same. When a moment in life comes when vomit and ketchup taste the same, then something is definitely wrong with your body. Doctors conducted tests; doctors analyzed tests; doctors told, professionally and seriously told me the ill-fated news, and on that night, the home which protected two loving people—my sweet little girl and I— became the ill-fated house of Usher. My wanton presence haunted the house, and she suffered with me, loyal to my state of mind.

I passed restaurants daily, saw the bakery vitrines almost every morning, but I could not smell nothing of what I saw. I tried desperately to remember the smell and the taste of cheesecakes, of layers of chocolate over layers of chocolate topped with vanilla icing; I tried to savour taste and smell through memory, it worked only faintly, but when I took a bite, it all gave way to nothingness. Soon, my memory offered me nothing to savour, none of the food, none of my little girl’s skin, nothing I could enjoy, even retrospectively.

Anosmia. Ageusia. These words the doctors said. But the most important words were: tumour and brain. Cancer. No chance of surgery. Radio – or Chemotherapy. They told me to be prepared for anything, and in line with my previous symptoms they said: be prepared for hypoesthesia, or loss of sense of touch, loss of hot and cold. They told my sweet loving girl to always keep a good watch for me, always keep me eating as required; always keep me warm enough; always keep me in a safe state. They wanted her to be more and less of a mother. They wanted my lover to become my mother. I rejected chemotherapy.

I was morose and melancholic. I had no reason to fight anymore; the push of the wall was too strong for me or anyone to attempt to stop it. My verdict was: Sick For Life. It pushes me. It shoves me to a place I do not want to be. Unrelenting, unforgiving, inexorable.

I Am Cancer.

I stopped eating; no love of mine could convince me to do that again.
I started vomiting air so powerfully, without any prior warning from that old friend, nausea. While vomiting I became air hungry; I suffocated on the emptiness within me.

I became frail and weak. The wall was sweeping me towards the edge like a particle of dust on the road to awe, a speck of dust without will, without force, without life. The house of Usher became empty, that sweet loving girl of mine left me, but it was I who left her, to talk of “truth.” That storm of death camping within the house made it an unbearable place to be in. I cheated on the now-odourless, now-tasteless little girl with my sickness. Sick until Death. Sickness married me.

The wall is pushing me over the edge now and I’m not trying to hold on because I see the truth, and the real does not exist anymore.

In that final moment I have, I think: I lost all to gain an unsatisfactory truth and an awful awe.

Invective, In Vain…

Spoken verbiage of promises and paeans, have become only erstwhile abstractions upon a reprobated mind. I find that I have been worshipping a God Almighty who offered seasoned wine and endless ceremonies of intoxication. All to no avail.

Insidious were his sweet hymns which lured me into the dark woods. Plump tree trunks condensed and cluttered together; the rich branches grandiloquently absorbed all light and sound. Her darkness is vacuum, and his voice comes from within me for he is the illusory dagger which leads me to such dissolute actions. I made my way through the immutable path which was paved for me between the staunch trunks of the trees. The lit path I saw, but my destination was unknown; that is the order of life, a broken horizon holding nothing but a vicious languid freefall-freedom. Such is the path people who are without inhibitions walk.

I followed the voice of my inner acolyte until I found myself upon a spacious greensward. I found it to be a theatre mimicking my incomprehensible rage for I saw nothing with meaning, nothing with reason; only the sedge and rush and grass, vehemently wavering back and forth, no progress nor growth, contrasted the stillness of the dark woods behind me. I walked through the greensward, but now the voice of my acolyte went mute. I looked askance at the red sky and cursed a God who had failed me, a God I now had trouble believing in. I closed my eyes and fell on the ground: freefall, no inhibitions, nothing at all: no promises or paeans were left for me.

My eyes opened to see a vast greenery spread upon the sides of a valley which was separated by a still black river. A sheath of mist covered the waters like a translucent piece of white cloth, seducing me to dive in it like the deep black abysmal eyes of an enchanted worshiper. So I leaped into the river like an amphibian predator; I dived deep into the eyes of the seductive enchantress; I marauded deep into the abyss until I saw the light of the surface no more. I attempted to rise again, but sea weeds wrapped around me and pulled me down. Darkness reigned from within and without. I closed my eyes and saw the reflection of the blank outside world…   

…I opened my eyes and found myself surrounded by a matrix of white shining numbers. A high piercing sound ran right through me like an arrow. I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, so I closed hoping to attain a sort of relief, but the darkness within could not hold off the light without. I shouted and pleaded for the sound to stop or for my ears to go numb, but no ministrations would comfort me, so I walked on, hands on ears and eyes closed, through the labyrinth of white glaring numbers. As I walked through the field of numbers I realized that there is no salvation promised for me. Atonement is impossible and deliverance is unattainable. Numbers I could not understand and nature I was not part of anymore. I am alone, alienated, put aside. I am human and no longer known. I am estranged.

I see the end: I will be drained in and out; i will disintegrate and dissolve into emptiness; i will crumble like an old jug; i will break into sixteen million little particles of unknown, unfelt dust. This is a narration of imminent and inevitable forgetfulness.

No verbiage of promises or paeans I sung will ever be heard or heeded. I will not be forgotten, for I shall not be remembered. I never existed as soul, as flesh, as mind, as thought, as action. I am not and will never be real in falsity, for I am not found in a world of truth, but in a world of emptiness.

The Last Locus of the Real

Prepare for corporate Valentine’s Day you whiny maggots.
Prepare for a day of mourning and black clothing. Valentine’s Day. Love commercialized and sold. Love unfelt yet diluting mediums of exchange. Every valentine, more alienation of man from his Self, from the other, from nature, and from love

Valentine’s Day, the multi-million dollar spendfest; the productive business. Gift Shops: readymade “love letters”; readymade “love” gifts: heart-shaped pillows, heart-shaped boxes, love cards, dildos, a pack of condoms and massage oil, heart-shaped everything, chocolate; the consumer conformist way of late capitalism.

Valentine’s Day, the day of mourning. Black clothes: a moment in time belonging to the past to which they cling to so very tightly, afraid it’ll slip away, leaving them without glory, without a fight, without a story.

Valentine’s Day: No Love. No Glory.

Do you sit on the hood of a car and map the stars and make out in Dbayyeh? Or is that too cheap for you? Are you too chic for it? Would you prefer the white teddy bear, the love sonnet, the red rose, the scented candle, the seductive, eye-popping underwear, the book, the notebook with first-draft of previous love letters; the archive of your SMS messages; a painting; a stereo; a TV; a couch; a baby?

Do you sit at home, trying to figure out a way for your Self and for you community, your society, at least only your own social circle to be better? Do you think of improvement? Of how the other side thinks and acts so you can try to understand where they come from? Or do you just hope that there will be a million people filling the streets, gaining a quantitative majority which amounts to nothing in effect? Do you feel patriotic? Do you feel worthy of living, breathing, of saying that you helped? In what? Did you hold someone between your arms as you shouted in harmony vulgar phrases and dead mottos? Did you remove a brick, a stone, a wall that was burying someone alive beneath the ground? Did you stay up all night, worrying that your effort is not enough? Did you do anything to make your life a tinge better?

Food for thought: for every deliberate death, there are a thousand indeliberate births. You can kill yourself without thinking twice.

You will meet on Valentine’s day in Martyr’s Square (or as you call it: Freedom Square [Sa7at al 7orriya]), you will cry and you will shout, not to express your freedom, but to make your enslavement official. Your faith is your oppressor; your oppressor will lead you to violence.

Love? It has died. Martyrdom? It is not real. Jihad is false, and crusades are false. No one is a martyr and the martyr does not live through you when you chant his name, hurt yourself in his name, or die in his name. Jesus is not in you and nor is any other fucking dead person. And is that love?

The “thoughtful” gift precedes the emotion and the idea. The idea of Valentine’s Day precedes the emotion of love. Do you feel pressured to be with someone? Feel it. Submit it to it blindly, ignorantly. Walk on like the one of many sheep you are; your shepherd is money; your shepherd is consumerism.

The idea of dying precedes the act of martyrdom. The idea of glory precedes the glorious act. Dreams dictate reality. The language of death cults dictate our lives. Left; Right. Heaven; Hell; Lake of Fire; Bottomless Pit; Clouds of Cigarette Smoke. Huh?

The map precedes the territory. The signified precedes the signifier.

Be weird because that is what they expect of you. Kill, be killed, and kill yourself because that is what they expect of you. That is what they sell you: false death, false love; falsity.  We live in a world where we will surely and most definitely feel fucked up, screwed over, fake like an actor, stiff like a hard impotent dick curving downwards in grief, if we open our eyes to the only truth that exists: there is no locus for the real, for authenticity, for originality. Instead, everything is dead, and death is the only reminder of that faded, unseen truth that has sunk beneath the horizon to never come up again. AIDS, Cancer, you name it. Everything is a design made especially for this age of death. Love? Martrydom? Go hide behind your broken cross and dim crescent on Valentine’s Day. Show your love and loyalty. Go spend money you worthless mindless stupid dick-smoking fucks. You will die for a flag (green, white, red, yellow, any colour you like), for a cross, for a crescent, for a six-pointed or five-pointed star, for a red cedar, for a hammer and a sickle, but you do not know that no conscious, evolved being has ever died for a flag. People die for freedom, it is that which you do not have; it is that which you think you have; it is that which you will never have because you are stupid ignorant fucks.

I’ll be waiting for the fucking thumbs of your mind to grow so that you can grasp the concept of freedom.  

Go fuck yourself in that one-day feast of love and mourning you call Valentine’s Day.

Red Rape

I usually escape my house to go to my home: the abounding darkness of the streets. This day was just like any other day, full of frustration and anger. Blue waves of grief come and go, and that little friend called Joy becomes a foe who waltzes around me like the jester of an enemy. But I could not kill that jester, for I would be enticing the wrath of uncontrollable Woe.

The music stopped and it was my sign that I should leave. I packed my bag and left to meet my lover, the darkness; the mystery of gloomy alleys; the stories behind closed doors. All transpired as I walked through the streets, alone and unabated. It was that which I looked forward to so keenly, it was that feeling of uncertainty, of fright—the sort of fright you get when climbing up a staircase in the dark, feeling as if someone is just behind, feeling as if someone or something is waiting for you on the next level, waiting for you as if you were its prey—which kept me going, kept me breathing. This unknown gave me hope.

I took the first taxi I could find—it took me is a better phrasing of it. Silence; Tranquillity; Transcendentalism; Awakening, before the imminent death and the following rebirth. It all happens in a space of seconds, in the transition from light to dark. But the car stopped and I opened my closed eyes to see a road blocked. The taxi could go no further.

The venom of rage spurred from within me, filling my eyes with fierce red blood as I approached the blockade. I tried to pass, but I could not. Soldiers in dark blue uniforms carrying big loaded guns approached me vehemently. Dogs were on the ready, and I heard a rifle being cocked nearby. I want to pass, I said. I want to go that way, I said. Why is this road blocked, I asked.

No answer was given except the staunch orders to back away from the territory. I did as requested but looked forward towards the end of the street where I saw black cars with black tinted windows. Instantly I knew what was going on. Instantly I had an urge to kill who I did not know. Instantly, I held a huge vendetta to the person who sat inside the black tinted, heavily guarded car. Instantly I went from an unsuspected ignorant itinerant to a hateful, maddened, belligerent fucker who wanted to act as vigilante and saviour to his home and kill the faggot pussy attracting thousands of eyes with blackened windows and shiny, cocked machine guns.

The heavily armoured security forces gave me a reason, a need, a deep unwavering urge to kill the protected individual. I stopped in my ground, my feet parallel to each other and I looked the soldier in the eye. Mal intent showed in my eye and he hid behind his cocked gun. I laughed in his face, laughed madly and maniacally.

Excess of security breeds excess violence and crime. Excess protection breeds the need to be protected. The best way to be targeted is to make yourself a hard target. The easiest way to create suspects is to question everyone. The fastest way to be frightened by the people around you is to create a fear which does not exist.

He was afraid of hell, so he made an army of angels, and whence I saw his mighty army, I became HELL. He wanted to be worshiped and idolized, but he summoned his twilight when he showed himself as the light of day. I became the night.

The rage I suffer is my hell, but the hell I dwell in soon becomes a heaven when I voluptuously indulge in the frenzied slaughter.

I laughed at the adversary in front of me, but he took none of it. Non Serviam, I shouted, Non Serviam, as two soldiers held my body and threw me away. I fell on the ground and broke like a statue falling from the sky. I found myself scattered into a million little pieces on the ground. I lost hope of reformation, of peace of mind, of tranquillity, silence and transcendentalism. I bid hope farewell and with hope went fear. I ran into the closed off area, meeting my Fortune in the eye. Fortune I saw as a woman whom you cannot but rape in order to exist! Beautiful Fortune.

She told me to stand down, to cool off, to gather honourable equanimity. But nothing could pacify me. I killed the jester Joy and enticed the wrath of uncontrollable Woe. Fortune always has the upper hand.

The barricade created the criminal. But it was I who was the victim of red rape.

The Voice of Lethe

Come sing to me in a voice that makes me vulnerable. What are you waiting for? Let me here your contralto voice which enters my ears like a silken thread; which leaves me hungry and thirsty ; I cannot move while you sing, cannot survive while I hear your soft piercing voice. My loyalty to you is black and white, unlike your loyalty to me which comes in different shades of grey. My history of you will always be one. You will remember through different filters and lenses, through the discourse of a hero, through the discourse of a criminal, through all discourses known to man.

You keep me prisoner with your enchanting voice which pokes at my past and makes me remember things lost, things regretted and things yearned for. I have seen the bad and the ugly and I have enjoyed it, until I substituted it all with you and your voice. I broke free from one prison to enter another. You are my prison made flesh, and I am held accountable.

I sit on the floor between your legs. My head pressed and held by your legs, and you sing. I can sense your vibrations coming from within you; I can sense your immense breath being released poetically and magically. You close my eyes with your round, black painted fingertips as you make me hear that song you sing. Close your eyes you tell me and my eyes are close. Meet me there, you tell me and I try to go to the other side, to the abstract prison. Remember, remember how I found you, remember how I saved you, remember how much you owe me, you tell me. Remember all the years which you have wasted, know how many years I saved for you. Close your eyes and see your past again, and you sing about my past.

I came in through the door at morning ten
I found you lying in an opium den.
So innocent, rosy and pink were you,
You opened your eyes and I saw right through
Black pupils and a cry for earnest help,
Your hand rested lightly like floating kelp.

I held your bloodless hand so serenely,
Lift’d your body, frail, pale, and heavenly
Held your head, loose, flimsy and deranged,
Brought my mouth to your ear, forever pained,
Whispered a soft song of fortune and fame,
Both of us, dancing round a murky  flame.

My nightingale tune, nev’r busy to sway
Young hearts towards mine; lost ships finding bay.
My nightingale tune, always best to say,
“Thou art my slave, your job is to obey.”

You sang in my ear and I was bound and harnessed forever by your voice. Away from the opium den you took me, towards an open hell, but your song did not encapsulate my past, for it missed details which you did not see nor foresee. Your lyric did not see through my fantasies, it just killed them brutally with an unwarranted wanton reflection. Your voice shakes the details away like filthy debris and stamps my past with your sung lyric. I become only what you sing, enslaved to it. I forget blood-filled needles and purple arms. I forget the smell of shit and the dampness of piss. I forget the uncared for rotting baby corpse. I forget my name, I forgot my face. I forget the taste of love and the joy of remembrance. I forget the feeling of freedom. Your song puts me in a basket, your legs carry me above Lethe like a new-born baby towards a history that does not belong to me, towards a destiny I do not crave. The details of my past life become details placed in parenthesis, skipped, not read; they become nonexistent. I know nothing except your imprisoning mantra of death, hearing it between your legs—thou art my slave, your job is to obey—as you blind me with your fingertips. Pluck out my eyes with your fingertips. Your nightingale tune plucks my kelp hand out of the water, dries it and leaves me impotent.

I forget the meaning of sex between your legs.

I Want From Love Only The Beginning – Mahmoud Darwish

I want from love only the beginning. Doves patch,
over the squares of my Granada, this day’s shirt.
There is wine in our clay jars for the feast after us.
In the songs there are windows: enough for blossoms to explode.

I leave jasmine in the vase; I leave my young heart
in my mother’s cupboard; I leave my dream, laughing, in water;
I leave the dawn in the honey of the figs; I leave my day and my yesterday
in the passage to the Square of the Orange where doves fly.

Did I really descend to your feet so speech could rise,
a white moon in the milk of your nights…pound the air
so I could see the Street of the Flute blue…pound the evening
so I could see how this marble between us suffers?

The windows are empty of the orchards of your shawl. In another time
I knew so much about you. I picked gardenias
from your ten fingers. In another time there were pearls for me
around your neck, and a name on a ring whose gem was darkness, shining.

I want from love only the beginning. Doves flew
in the last sky, they flew and flew in that sky.
There is still wine, after us, in the barrels and jars.
A little land will suffice for us to meet, a little land will be enough for peace.

Scylla and Charybdis

Scylla and Charybdis both stare at me without any trace of mercy. I am in the centre of a raging brutal sea from which I see no escape. I am in the centre of theatre, tragic to some and comic to others. It all depends on your strength of vision. Can you see the humour in my facing of death and doom? In other words, can you see what I see?

I’m wet, from top to bottom, but never touching a frosting state of being. Never loved anyone enough to feel cold. Never been loved enough to feel warm.

At least I cannot remember I ever did.

The only poppy I will ever have is the one laid down by me in this raging sea. I shall throw it off the very end of my vessel and let it decide which to lead. I shall follow it as it goes towards Scylla. I shall follow it as it goes towards Charybdis. Maybe the monsters will pity me; maybe they will respect the poppy and its weight of sacrifice. But what shall I gain with such a heavy freedom? If I live, my liberation will conspire against me. I will remain wet and worn out by circumstances, young but looking so old. A freak like Joseph Merrick, body mutilated by natural forces.

I want one of the ruthless monsters to take me, lay their grip on me, devour me with their saline seize. But where shall my red poppy go? My poppy, which I plucked before venturing on my current journey into death, I have kept in my pocket, dry and safe. Ten years have gone but its rouge still shines as it did off the shore of Heaven. As it was, it is and it will be, just as rivers always reach the sea.

I take the poppy out of my pocket, still so fresh, as if I had just plucked it from its roots which are entrenched within me. But no, my flesh does not feed the roots. In the centre of the vessel, I drop the red poppy on a colossal wave. Follow the passionate inanimate, my heart tells me. But in the centre it stays, diverting neither to Scylla nor Charybdis, calming the sea as it neared them both. I stand confused. But to the centre I go, following the unbelievable.

Yet I tend to forget. Scylla and Charybdis, both once beautiful maidens punished for their beauty, and they shall both ravage me equally.

Any decision is death and there is no redemption. I row my boat without hesitation. I follow the poppy without any expectation.

I slowly go towards the womb of my destruction, following my now-wet but still decisive poppy. I am the martyr of my own will. The poppy replaces my sword which cringes and shrinks in fear of the water monsters awaiting my boat. I do not cry out for life.

The sky becomes bleak and the waters dark. I hear the monsters. Hark! A moan, an eerie whimper, not my own; of two beasts not shown; dark waters rise split by my destiny, nature’s own blasphemy. I blindly apprehend what lightning shows for one second.

Scylla and Charybdis fight over me. They create a gap in the sea, and my poppy floats towards and through the gap, and I follow it. The leviathans busy themselves with each other, while I, greater than Odysseus evade them. But what for? I have no Ithaca, no home to call my own. My Penelope has gone away long ago. Why do the monsters fight over a soul with no abode?

Hark! Monsters! Hark! I am here, betwixt thee and thee! Release me from such misery, from homesick memories and inglorious histories. My poppy I let go, if you take me, I shall hold no scorn, for know that you have released a soul forlorn of love unborn, and from a body long mourned. Your quarrel does not fix this dying soul, but my body can fill your hole.

The bleak roars waned to welcome a thirsty and thunderous silence. The poppy faded from sight and the split sea merged again, hopeful and violent.

Beneath The Mire

Burning eyes smoulder the world. Everything arises beautifully in flames, like a moving ancient pyre, resurrected.

Saturday mornings, all the same since 1982, 1989, 2000, 2006, 2011. The morning dew felt the same, the morning chill felt the same, and I was still the same, unchanged, unaltered by the several exploding sounds and the burning yet dormant fire within me.

I saw an old lady on the street who called me an animal and shouted with a shocking look on her old wrinkly face. I was walking to see my earthly heaven which has been enough for me across three decades, but that woman ruined it. I walked on though, the fire still burning to no avail. I went in circles above a green clearing, listening to the profound echo of my heart. Then I saw a man upon a hill, wearing a shirt and a vest and cowboy boots. He saw me and told me to breathe so that I can feed what is within me. I breathed in one long doleful breath and suddenly I felt a searing sensation come from my bellybutton. I pulled up my shirt and saw a little trickling flame coming out of it. I looked at the man and he smiled me, nodding his head, congratulating me, but what did that mean?

I walked, still feeling the searing flame coming out of my bellybutton. I took another breath, the flame grew bigger. I took another and the flame exploded and went out of me. A flaming soul went out of me. It floated above me like a cloud, but it lit my way and I walked along the path it lit. I pressed fallen leaves with my foot, I diverted entangled branches with my hands, I burnt down heavy obstacles with my fire. I thrust(ed) through caved woods. I reached my destination, to the goal I aspire, a statue floating above murky mire.

Just then my fire diminished and disappeared, and I thought I should retire from my task, although the statue called to me. Its shining whiteness told to cross the muddy path and claim my prize. But what hefty price should I pay for beauty, a possibility of death. I meditated on my task and closed my eyes, but my eyes could not stay closed when a flash of light came from above me and hit the stone. It painted it pallid with life, and it started moving, aching, screaming, shouting.

It called to me now with its voice and its shine. The statue, a girl, she called to me. Her voice made me focus on my task again. I stood up on my feet and pressed on foot in the mire. It drowned slowly. I put my other foot in front and pushed and pulled myself forward. The statue’s scream became louder, piercing the woods, destroying the most staunch roots and stiff trunks. I breathed and went on. All my body became submerged in the mire, only my head was left to be drowned in the murky slimy swamp. The mire of my will was getting the best of me. I desperately tried to hold on to anything beneath the mire to pull myself to, but I found nothing. The distance to the statue did not even seem to diminish, but her screams sounded like a great Wagner symphony, they rumbled and raged and roared, but I was impotent, and weak, and powerless. My head went down beneath the mire where no fire can exist, where no sound can pass through its dense medium. I closed my eyes and trapped my breath as long as I can. The time came to pass by, to move on, to cross to the other side and I opened my eyes. I saw nothing but black, nothing but darkness. I opened my mouth and inhaled a deep breath, and I couldn’t stop. I inhaled and inhaled until I felt my lungs explode; I exhaled.

An orange ray came out of me, the fire resurrected. It cleared the line of vision and I saw the base of the statue, a cage. I saw the wailing girl entrapped in its bars; I saw the statue made flesh, an even better sculpture than the statue itself. I saw her grand in her helplessness, I saw her beautiful in her surrender, I saw her luscious in her nakedness.  Her wet body smoothed my way to her and on I went. The mire had parted like the red sea as Moses stabbed it with his staff, and I the same, made my way between two parted mire falls, towards salvation. The path was easy, the path was clear. I made my way towards her voice which I could now hear. Life within me rushed as I came near, the world with-out me stood in fear. She saw me coming and braced herself, I was so close to finish the cross to the other side. She reached out for me and I extended my arm to her. Our extended limbs touched each other and she spoke.

“Fortune is a woman,” she said, “please her and you will reach the highest mountaintops and the deepest oceans. Release me, and I’ll show you all that you can ever be. I’ll show you the way.”

I pulled her body towards mine and pushed us up above the surface. We rose. My salvation and her salvation; we liberated each other from the shackles of Heaven and other celestial bodies. My Virtue and her Fortune arose.

Burning eyes smoulder the world. Everything arises beautifully in flames, like a moving ancient pyre, resurrected.

The High Note

The high note, sharp and alarming. You instantly know that something is wrong. It comes again, it moves in circles around your head. It’s coming and going. That same high note, sharp and alarming. Something is definitely wrong.

I have become finally free to die today. Think of me like you think of a table which is not there.

The high note comes from her open mouth and the audience gives her a standing ovation. Everything went perfectly and her closing note was impeccable, so clean, so clear, so well tuned. It’s that note everyone has been waiting for since the beginning; that note which they knew would come, but never knew when. This time it came at the end. Previous times, it came in the middle. Smack. A standing ovation in the middle of a performance seemed a bit queer, a bit strange, a bit off. To end with a high note is always the best option.

I am tired of listening to the ventriloquist voice of my soul and ignoring it. I’m tired of climbing the steep mountain that is life with a dwarf on my back heralding my incompetency, my impotency.

He presses the right hand keys of the piano, three dim and distant high notes follow each other. The piece has ended. He has played the catalogue of every great composer: Bach, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Schumann, etc. However, he never composed music of his own. His only contribution to the musical canon which he performed was the three dim and distant high notes, which sometimes broke the whole harmony of the composition, but it was his signature gesture. It marked his end.

It is too bad I have been an experienced simpleton; it is too bad I am not an emasculated, infantile complainer. The excitement is gone. There is no rush of blood anymore. I’m going mad again. My head is in the oven, the stones are in my coat, the shotgun is facing my belly. Cesspool of human waste. When the lamps of my consciousness expire, there will be no place for me on the pyre. I have none of the passion I had before. I’m burning out. It’s my decision. All the clouds of pink have turned to grey.

High notes come from all around us, every second of the day, every moment of a second. The tolling of a bell, the breaking glass, the ringing of metals, the clanging of keys, the ballad solos, the jazzy saxophone,  the orgasmic girlfriend, the tea pot.

I cannot recover anymore. I am standing so high above the ground and yet I feel that I’m looked down upon my earthly worms. I can feel it now before I commit to my decision, before you try and save me. I can hear the high note now, that dreadful alarming sound from which there is no coming back. The sadness will last forever. Excuse all the blood. At least I did not fire the weapon outdoors. It is not your fault. I am ending forever.

The sound of a shotgun from the roof of your building is not a high note. The silence after it is not a high note. Your heartbeat as you rush up, as everyone else is rushing up, as the feet bang on the ground like a platoon’s final march to victory, as the door of the roof breaks open and you see the blood splattered and the body on the ground with a bloody hole in it. Even the sound of the ambulance’s sirens as it comes is no longer a high note. You wait outside the ER, sitting frantically. Everything is low now. Everything is low. Suicide minimizes the movement and importance of everything that surrounds it. Your sigh is the lowest of them all as it fades so slowly, and it ends and you hear it. That high note which you were pushing away the minute you heard the banging shotgun blast. That high note of the electrocardiograph machine tells you she is over. She is a marble statue now, cold and heavy and white.

End of the Naughties

“Unspoiled. Ripe. Just Perfect.” Remember these words that I told you? I said them right before I gave you my body and surrendered on the floor to you.

Right Ziad?

I said them before you fell down in silence to everything I said and before you gave me lame excuses. I said them before you grazed me with the rough surface of your dry cold skin.

You’re unspoiled but you’re the meanest person I’ve ever met.

You’re ripe but poisonous to eat.

You’re perfect but unwilling to act perfectly.

Did you like kissing me while I moved my hands through your hair?

Did you like me whispering sensually in your ear telling you that I want you? That you’re orgasmic?

Did you Ziad?

What did you think of me when you had me moist and wet under your crushing body, weighing me down like gravity? Did you like playing me like a puppet?

Did you Ziad?

Did you like grazing the scars on my back with your hard fingertips? Did you like sucking on my nipple; closing my eyes as you did, letting me enjoy every moment of it in utter bliss?

Did you Ziad?

Did you enjoy me coming?

…And I thought you’re weird and someone special…and I thought that maybe you wouldn’t mind my past and who I was…and I thought you could see who I am without all the shit that covers me from top to bottom. How gullible I was. I even thought that you may give me some ease of mind.

They call you Jesus? You’re not. You are the antichrist.

You’re a liar and a hypocrite and a user. You’re weak and afraid and trembling. I trusted you. The ability to trust people again elevated me. But then you let me fall. You dragged me down from my center. And down I went. You told me I was one step away from the grave and you pushed me. And down I went.

Did I make you uncomfortable? Did you want to go but felt obliged and burdened by my pathetic misery?

Did you Ziad?

You condemned my past and shackled me with your unfaltering, somewhat pure vision and apparent innocence. You shoved my life right up in my face again. I guess I was the one with smudged eyes and a blurred vision for not seeing you as you really are; for letting you humble my presence and considering you the greatest adventure of my life yet.

Did you get disgusted when I told you who I was? Did satisfaction come and go so quickly like a message from God? Did you think twice about me when I opened the door of my house and let you in? Did I threaten your secure and rooted life? Did you get scared?

Did you Ziad?

You killed me in our eleventh hour. And maybe you’ll remember me as the gullible or obscure stranded queen. Maybe you’ve forgotten me already. But I’ll never forget. I’ll always remember you as the person who was not afraid to talk to me, who then fell in a dark silence that enraptured me under a black veil of self-destruction.

Me, I’m going to forget you instantly. You, you are going to remember me indefinitely, up until you can come to terms with what you have done, up until you confess and tell the world what you did. But even then you would not be pardoned, even then your memory will be plagued with the bitter residue of my smile, my moan, my purr, my sadness, my tears. But maybe you would be able to move on, enjoy a smile or two, meet a girl or two, learn from what you did to me, speak of what you did to me, and try to gain at-onement with whoever comes after me. I will still come to you, uninvited and undeclared, so suddenly and unexpected, in artificial light from which you will crave a dark solitude.

No one knows this more than me because I needed you and you left me. I needed you before I knew you existed, before I knew that I wanted you. I needed you to be able to come clean. I needed you to purge myself.

…and you will remember me as if I am in front of you, as if it is the first time you meet me, and for a moment, you will crave me once again, and you will want to know me better, but I will not be there. Did you know eternities are made up of moments?

Did you Ziad?

You did not even accept to hold me as I died.

You are the one who is twisted.

You are the one who is unstable.

You are the one who is dangerous.

Look at me: Spoiled.

Look at me: overly ripe, sour, seasoned and weathered.

Look at me: so far away from perfection.

…And I can still smell you on me.

Look at me with your burning gaze and unblinking eyes. Can you pierce right through the earth like you pierced me with your love? Can you stab six feet into the earth like you stabbed me with your fear?

Look at me: Dead.

Can you Ziad?